Things That Worked: First Book Proposal (Part 2: Expanded Proposal)

Sample materials to simplify your life

Welcome back for the second installment of ‘Things That Worked’ that focuses on first book proposals! Advising people on their first book proposals is something I’ve been doing for a long time, and I’m glad to be able to share some of that advice here (as well as my own expanded first book proposal further down, accessible to paid subscribers).

If you’d like feedback on a book proposal you’re drafting, get in touch—I’d be happy to give it a glance. And if you’d like more regular feedback on proposals, cover letters, or articles you’re writing, you always have the option of becoming a Founding Member, which gets you feedback on your writing, whenever you like, for only $150 a year!

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So far, I’ve shared two posts related to the business of publishing your first book: one post on how to approach publishers, and one post on preliminary book proposals (which included my own first book proposal!). Now we move on to the next stage of first book publication: the stage where a publisher asks to see some of the actual book.

Like I said: every publisher is different

As I pointed out in my post on preliminary book proposals, each publisher has its own process for assessing book proposals. Some ask for a proposal, chapter outline, and sample materials right away; others don’t. Some ask to see the full manuscript (!); others don’t.

The publisher I worked with on my first book, Boydell & Brewer, requested a preliminary proposal that would enable them to assess the general merits of my proposed book, and a second, expanded proposal that included two sample chapters. I won’t inflict those chapters on you here (though I’m happy to do so on request), but I can tell you that they were not the first two chapters. Instead, I selected the two chapters that I thought were the best, which happened to be Chapter 3 and Chapter 4. Chapter 4 had already been published as a peer-reviewed article, so I felt particularly confident that it was a strong sample of my work. (That article was in fact my first, and I’ll write more about it in a separate post.)

What’s new?

I encourage you to compare the expanded book proposal below with the preliminary book proposal I submitted. The expanded proposal is about six pages longer. It includes more detailed chapter summaries (as well as citations of relevant scholarship) and a more detailed description of what my book would contribute to our knowledge of the fifteenth-century poet I was writing about, John Lydgate. And, of course, it was accompanied by those sample chapters. Comparing the two proposals side by side will also give you a sense of how I responded to feedback I received on my preliminary proposal.