Decent proposal
Carl Wilkinson, in a piece on the Guardian site, ponders what he considers to be the most integral part of snagging a good publishing contract for a non-fiction book: the proposal. A good idea and some early research are not enough any more, he writes. With today’s marketing- and publicity-driven book industry, acquiring editors need advance proof of an author’s enthusiasm, and this requires a catchy proposal that “second guesses a whole range of complex questions a publisher may have about your idea.” Wilkinson, currently working on a book-length history of the package-tourism industry, decribes the perfect proposal: “[It] needs to outline everything you know about your chosen subject and then speak with equal confidence of all the things you will find out, all the people you will track down and interview and all the events that you will witness. It needs to be written in such a way as to tickle both the artistic sensibilities of a publisher’s editorial team and the marketing nous of the backroom money men who will stump up the advance.”
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Read Carl Wilkinson’s piece in the Guardian.
