Ho, ho, ho: here's a downloadable template book proposal for all of you (plus a style guide to help you write it good...if you're a paid subscriber).

Our holiday gift to you.

Quick housekeeping note: I’m taking next week off. Neon will likewise be closed; Kent and I need to rest. After this, there won’t be a (new)sletter until the week of the 2nd.

As a goth little holiday treat, I’ve scheduled one of my favorite public-domain poems to run for you a week from today. See you again in two.

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When I started this newsletter, I swore to myself I would never write a post lecturing you all on what you’re doing wrong with grammar, style, usage, formatting, and other granular matters in the pre-submission editorial development process.

I have a deeply ambivalent relationship with the rules of English and their enforcement. Outside of a few narrow professional contexts—contexts into which I will never enter with the vast majority of you—I find pedantry enervating and bogus.

I’m not the fucking Grammar Grinch. What I am, however, is lazy. I spend a lot of time formatting and correcting the same general things in my day-to-day work with authors’ drafts, and—as anyone would—I do find this part of the job rather tedious.

It’s just occurred to me that if I write a newsletter containing a downloadable template proposal and style guide, I can thenceforth send said newsletter to everyone whose drafts I’m about to edit and be like, “here, do all this first and save me some time.”

Maybe this will also be helpful to the six thousand or so of you I won’t ever edit directly! I hope so.

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Part I: The Template Proposal

Here’s my template book proposal doc. Yes, it’s a thinly-veiled advertisement for the “Glow” back catalogue — particularly my explainer posts on how to write various book proposal sections.

Note that this document is most useful for preparing nonfiction book submissions. For fiction, you’re just going to want a clean, proofread full-manuscript Word doc, double spaced and with a non-psychotic font.

This is the general format my submissions follow when they’re going to acquiring editors at big commercial houses. Niche and academic presses often have specific forms they want one to fill out instead.

This is not necessarily a useful template for querying agents. I for one would be delighted to see a query come in with all of these elements polished and in place, but I don’t expect it. When it comes to nonfiction, platform and voice are always going to be the determinative factors for me, not how well an author has followed instructions.

Other agents’ formatting preferences may vary. Yes, and: the proposal elements I highlight in the downloadable template are what all of us are looking for in one form or another.

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Part II: ASL’s Guide to Linguistic Best Practices, or: Avoiding the Red Flags of Mediocrity

There’s a certain category of mistake one really wants to avoid in a book proposal going out on submission, and it’s not the “glaring typo” variety one might think.

I mean, try to minimize glaring typos, sure. Constant typos and missing words might give editors the impression one lacks the neurological capacity to pull off any coherent long-form thinking at all. A typo here and there isn’t going to deter anyone, though; if anything, it might give one an impression you’re a charmingly absent-minded professor.

Here’s what will hurt your chances, though: each and every mistake in a proposal that flies what I like to call the Red Flag of Mediocrity (henceforth “RFM”). Some of what I’m talking about are grammar, spelling, and usage errors. Others aren’t errors at all; they’re merely clichés and the like. They’re all mistakes, however, in the sense that it’s a mistake for one to leave them in a proposal. The more RFMs fly in a proposal, the greater its chances of, well, failure.

RFM mistakes aren’t the sort made by people shut out from media literacy by systemic inequality. They’re not ignorant errors, and most of them are also not stupid. (I’m not about to remind you that “alot” is not a real word, because people who think it is are generally far, far away from being ready for a book deal.)

If anything, RFM errors signify the opposite of ignorance. They’re typical of a person who’s been exposed to enough media to amass an arsenal of fallback clichés and abstractions they can use to sound smart when they’re not in the mood to be really inventive, observant, or careful. They’re symptoms of inattention.

We all use RFMs!! No one can be “on” all the time. But in the finite space of a book proposal, you definitely DO need to be inventive and “on” all the time. Otherwise, editors are just going to be like “blah blah blah, this is about average for the sort of thing that crosses my desk every day, nothing too exciting to see here—NEXT.” Far better to come across as unpolished and original than safe, middling, and dull.

Remember: the goal with a book proposal (and book) isn’t to write toward the hump of the human bell curve—it’s to blow readers’ minds with how fresh, concrete, revelatory, and precise you are. You want to give people the impression that you’re breaking new ground, and RFMs do the opposite.

Here’s a preliminary (but by no means complete) list of common RFMs.

Weed these out before sharing those draft pages, and I promise you your writing will be so much stronger for it. That, and you’ll save yourself and whoever’s editing you a lot of time: