Some easy ways to tell when your book (probably) isn't ready for submission

It can be agonizingly hard to identify and fix the causes of proposal and/or manuscript unreadiness. At least the symptoms are mercifully easy to spot?

Once an author has secured a decent literary agent, what they need to do in order to get to “yes” with a commercial publisher ain’t all that complicated.

Book deals are pretty straightforward. If we’re talking nonfiction, author and agent must submit a book proposal that demonstrates the following three things:

• One has enough material to write a whole-ass book

• One has thought rigorously about how to structure that material around an original, valuable, marketable argument

• One has the expertise and access to sell this book to the large, finite, book-buying audience that will obviously be interested in this book by this author

Fabulous writing is a big plus, but in most genres, it’s not a requirement.

If we’re talking fiction, author and agent must¹ submit a full manuscript that demonstrates the following:

• Author writes real good

• Pages are gripping (usually thanks to the plot) and emotionally transformative in some way

• There is a large, finite, book-buying audience that just loves books like this

All of that is simple enough, right?

BAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Simple like Antarctica is simple, yes. Not a whole lot of people down there in Antarctica. The landscape aesthetic is pleasingly crisp and clean.

BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN ANTARCTICA IS EASY TO GET TO, DOES IT, MR. SHACKLETON.

The real trick isn’t knowing what Antarctica looks like; it’s figuring out how to get there without dying or resorting to cannibalism. It can take months to years to do this. And in the case of novels vs. polar expeditions, it’s not always a concrete packing list, either.

I imagine it’s not entirely clear to you why your novel’s readers are getting bored or why the argument in your memoir still won’t come together. The fixes you need might be something simple—an editor telling you, “put this scene here”—but they are more likely something horrible and abstract, such as “you need to stop confusing emotional confession with connection.”

Things like this can be quite difficult, traction-less, and painful to work through. I mean, where does one even begin? If the problem is abstract and emotional vs. grammatical and mechanical, where does one start to drill down? Especially if you’d like to get this book deal sooner than the dozens of years in therapy some of these problems will require to process fully?

I can’t spare you the personal responsibility of answering the questions above. Nor can I spare you the pain. But I CAN at least help you figure out where to begin drilling.

Every lobster trap of dysfunction in the ocean of editorial development can be identified by a surface buoy or two. These buoys don’t tell us how to open the trap and get the lobsters out, but they do at least indicate that one exists.

Therefore: please allow me to put on a Fair Isle sweater, captain’s hat, and fake beard. Yar: I am ready. Board me boat and enjoy my tour of the buoys in this trap-filled sea.

Here are some surface-level symptoms of editorial maladjustment in nonfiction.

Lots of asterisked line breaks

Could this be evidence that you are one of the English language’s most formally inventive, impressionistic master craftspeople? Yes!

Is it more likely that these are evidence of a shaky argument, an uncertain grasp of why you’re showing readers what you’re showing them in the order that you’re showing it?

ALSO YES.

Carrie Bradshaw questions

“In this chapter, I get my Johnson and Johnson and wonder: when you’re getting pricked, is it always better with two?”

…I don’t know. Is it?

If you’re writing questions like this in your overview or chapter summaries, you still don’t quite know what you’re arguing. You’re trying to get away with giving ‘em the old razzle-dazzle instead, and while I love you for this, it’s not going to work.

Producing a successful book proposal involves a great deal of uncertainty, vulnerability, and exposure. You can’t escape that, period. You can’t escape it by being charming any more than you can by being arrogant, apologetic, angry, or anxious. Plenty of authors before you have tried all of the above. Never works. Works at cocktail parties! Otherwise no.

Wit, humor, and high rhetoric are by far the most likable ego defense mechanisms out there, but that is what they are. The sooner you lay down all the ego defense mechanisms you can, the sooner your book proposal will be ready.

“In this [book/chapter], we’ll meet [topic/character]” instead of an argument

This gets to what I was saying the other week about the difference between a topic and an argument. Every sentence in your book proposal needs to be doing something for the specific person reading your words. Not affirming the existence of something that is or will be—doing something for your reader.

This is a tough adjustment for journalists and scientists in particular; both of their careers train them to state What Is and go no further. Nevertheless, it’s an adjustment that needs making. Unless they’re buying a reference book, readers expect more than What Is from nonfiction. They expect What Is, Why It Matters, and How I Should Feel About It.

Block quotes and/or lots of quotations from secondary sources

This is a problem I see most frequently with draft proposals from academics, historians, biographers, etc.

I do not want anyone to plagiarize. I support crediting all one’s sources. However: I also know that commercial readers’ eyes glaze over in the presence of large quotations. I also know that they buy nonfiction expecting YOU, the author, to stand firm as the authority, not run around as the neurotic steward of other people’s authority.

Once again, the point of commercial nonfiction is that every sentence does something for your reader.

The point is not to defend the validity of your scholarship: that does something for you, not them. It is not to defend your thesis or plug any hole in the sum total of Human Knowledge, at least not per se.

Priorities like this must come after priority #1: every sentence must do something for your reader.

Worrisome word count math

Remember: the fundamental purpose of a book proposal is to demonstrate that one has enough material to write a whole-ass book and has thought rigorously about how to hang all of that material from an original, marketable argument.

One super basic way in which a proposal makes this case is through word count math. If one includes a sample chapter or chapters in one’s proposal, the word count there times the number of individual chapters in one’s chapter outline should equal a reasonable word count for a book in this genre.

Ideal word counts in nonfiction vary; your agent is the best person to advise you about yours. With most genres of commercial, non-illustrated nonfiction for adults, it’s around 70,000-90,000.

If doing this math makes you realize your sample chapter is too short, you might be able to get away with presenting what you’ve written as a Sample Chapter Excerpt. However, I’d only recommend doing this if you have a very, very meaty chapter outline and overview rounding out your document. Editors want sustained contact with your authorial voice, and they do not want to smell anything resembling a bluff.

Here are some surface-level symptoms of editorial maladjustment in fiction.

If any of the nonfiction things above are applicable, adhere to them. Don’t include a lot of block quotes, e.g., even if your main character is an academic. Don’t hide behind rhetorical cutesies or punts when you feel yourself approaching personal uncertainty or vulnerability.

In addition, look out for these symptoms:

Insistent adherence to details of your own experience

If your response to an edit like “I’d delete and/or change the details in this scene” is “but that’s how it really happened,” your priorities are out of order.

Your editor could be wrong about the specific issue they’re describing or fix they’ve suggested. However, they’re probably not wrong that SOMETHING is off. And if you think they’re wrong only because addressing whatever is off would take your fiction away from your real life experience…you DO know that’s the whole point of fiction, right? Making shit up in order to get at the emotional truths that elude us in everyday life?

Sloppy, shaggy writing from the get-go

“For fiction, it all comes down to the writing,” Kent says. “Almost cliché, I know! But if I’m line editing from the opening sentences, YOU IN DANGER, GIRL.”

White-knuckled infodumping in chapter 1

I can usually tell when I’m encountering the manuscript of a fellow anxious-avoidant. Their first chapters move quite differently from the rest: they’re constipated with context, overwrought description, and explanation.

“Ah,” I say. “I see this is the rubber band ball you have fled the rest of the book to add to every time you felt uncertain or anxious.”

Chapter 1 infodumping tells me that this person will likely have bigger challenges with perfectionism and shame that will come up down the line, e.g. a tendency to fixate on whether or not strangers are liking or praising and a higher-than-average churn level around criticism.

No judgies. It me. Just something we’ll have to work through. And definitely something that’s going to turn off readers without chapter 1 revision.

The point of the above is not to help you avoid pain !!

There is really no way to outsmart the struggle of editorial development. Not only is it an inevitable part of the process—it’s also SO important.

Editorial development is a kind of ego yoga. It’s a practice—a practice for you and your agent and editor.

It’s not a skill to master, but a practice by which we grow and maintain our ego flexibility, our empathy, and our self-understanding.

This practice will help you tremendously when it’s time to sell your book to general audiences—and hello, it will also help you in ALL OF LIFE.

1. “Must” is not technically accurate, but if you have to ask: it’s accurate for you.