Things That Worked: Short Trade Book Proposal

Sample materials to simplify your life

Welcome to the latest installment of ‘Things That Worked’!

This week’s TTW post returns to the subject of books. It’s kind of a theme for this newsletter at the moment!

As you will have gathered from this week’s issue of ‘Chapter 1’, Page by Page will be sponsoring a free online workshop series on ‘How to Write a Book’. The first workshop in the series will focus on ‘Trade Books’—that is, books written for a general readership (rather than, say, for a specialist academic audience).

The workshop will take place on Zoom on Friday 5 May at 4pm CET/3pm GMT and will run for about an hour. The event will be limited to 30 participants, and YOU, you lucky PBP subscriber, get to have first crack at registering for the event!

You, dear subscriber, can register for the workshop on Eventbrite as of right now, and I’ll share the registration link more widely this coming Monday.

Please join me, Professor Carolyne Larrington (St John’s College, University of Oxford), and Professor Anthony Bale (Birkbeck, University of London) for this informal discussion about ‘Trade Books’!

As ever, 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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In keeping with the theme of the upcoming workshop, in this week’s ‘Things That Worked’ I’m sharing the (short) proposal for my very first trade book: a biography titled Geoffrey Chaucer: The Merry Bard (forthcoming in early 2024 with Reaktion Press!).

But first, a brief disclaimer.

The proposal you are about to read was solicited by Reaktion Press. They contacted me a couple of years ago and asked if I’d be interested in writing a book on Chaucer for their new, public-facing ‘Medieval Lives’ series (naturally, my immediate response was OMG YES PLEASE).

So this is not a book proposal that I submitted ‘cold’. It is, nevertheless, a book proposal that I had to write and submit just like any other author before I could be offered a contract.

Putting my first trade book proposal together

By the time Reaktion contacted me, I’d written five book proposals that had been accepted. So this wasn’t my first rodeo.

But those five books had been academic books. And while I’d done quite a bit of short-form writing for the general public, I’d never proposed a book for that audience.

Whenever I’m writing something in a new format or for a new audience, I always try to get my hands on a few examples of that sort of writing so I can get a feel for what I’m supposed to be doing. This time was no different: I immediately asked Reaktion whether they might be willing to share successful proposals for the same series with me (in confidence).

Elements of a trade book proposal

The first thing that struck me when I read through those proposals was how much they had in common with the more academic proposals I’d submitted in the past. The following gives you some idea of what you can expect to be asked for when you’re writing a trade book proposal:

1. Title: This one’s a given, of course, but it only needs to be a working title at the proposal stage. I was later informed that my book should have a subtitle as well, which I added when I submitted the manuscript.

2. Synopsis: What’s this book about? What’s it going to do? In a full-scale trade book proposal (or academic book proposal), this section can be rather meaty. In the case of this proposal, I simply introduced the historical figure at the heart of my book and explained what kinds of questions and angles I wanted to explore.

3. Outline: What’s the structure of the book? How many chapters will there be, and what are their (working) titles? I had to have some ideas about all this, but as you’ll see once the book is actually published, both the chapter titles and the order of chapters changed around as I wrote. Which is pretty normal!

4. Illustrations: I only had to give a few examples of the kind of illustrations I might include at the proposal stage. The full list was submitted alongside my book manuscript. And I am so, so, so grateful to the wonderful assistant I worked with at Reaktion who helped me to source every single one of the twenty or so illustrations that will appear in my book!!!! One usually doesn’t get that kind of help, and I’m going to find it hard to go without it next time!

5. The Author (that’s me): This is where you want to convince the publisher that you’re the right person to write the book you’re proposing. Who are you? What are your qualifications? Have you published any similar books in the past?

6. The Market: Who do you think will read this book? Of course, you hope everyone will want to read it, and more people read trade books than read most academic books. But you still need to convince the publisher that there are readers out there who will want to read this book about this topic.

7. Competition: What other books are out there that look a bit like this one? I know what you’re thinking: isn’t it best to say ‘THERE ARE NO BOOKS LIKE THIS ONE’? The answer: nope! It’s much better if you can show publishers that this book is going to be like Bestselling Book X or Well-Known Book Y! Comparing your book with other, similar books is also a good way of demonstrating that you know what’s out there already and how your book will be different.

8. Date of delivery: I hate asking for extensions, so I always try to give myself lots of leeway here. Don’t make promises that you (really, really) can’t keep! (Quick brag: I ended up submitting this manuscript a month early—woohoo!)

The proposal that follows is maybe one-tenth of what you might be asked to submit for a full-length trade book (this one will be a mere 50,000 words long!). For one thing, you’re usually asked to supply a sample chapter or two! But it will hopefully give you some sense of the style and scope you should be aiming for in your own trade book proposals.