The nonfiction proposal, and why self-publishers should write one
Nonfiction is bought on a proposal. A publisher commissions the book from a document that describes it, usually long before most of it exists. Novels are sold the other way around — finished, then offered — and the difference tells you what nonfiction actually is: a promise, made to a specific reader, that you can be trusted to keep.
A proposal is the argument that a particular book should exist, that particular people will buy it, and that you are the one to write it.
You are not sending yours anywhere. Write it anyway. Every section of it asks a question you will have to answer eventually, and answering them now costs you a week. Answering them halfway through a draft costs you the draft.
The overview: can you say what the book is?
One paragraph. What the book argues, who it is for, and what the reader has at the end that they did not have at the start.
If you cannot write that paragraph, you do not have a book yet — you have a subject. A subject is a shelf of possible books, and starting to draft before you have chosen one is how authors end up 40,000 words into three books at once.
Write it before anything else, and rewrite it whenever the book moves under you.
The audience: who, specifically, and how you reach them
"Anyone interested in productivity" is not an audience. It is a way of avoiding the question.
Name the reader. What they already know, what they have already tried, what they are stuck on, where they currently look for help. Then name where you can find several thousand of them: a professional association, a subreddit, a conference, a newsletter that is not yours, a podcast circuit.
A publisher reads this section to estimate sales. You read it to find out whether the book has a route to a reader at all, and that is better discovered before you write it than after.
The comparable titles
The books yours would sit beside. For each one: what it does, and what yours does that it does not.
Two failure signs are worth knowing. If you cannot find any comps, the usual explanation is not that nobody has thought of this — it is that the category does not buy books like it. And if a comp does exactly what you plan to do, and does it well, your book needs a different angle rather than a better effort.
Comp titles: reading the shelf you want to be on covers how to read that shelf properly.
The author platform: why you, and who already listens
Two separate claims. Authority is why you get to write this — credentials, experience, access, years in the work. Reach is who already hears you: a mailing list, a following, clients, students, a column.
Nobody is turning you down here, so there is no reason to inflate it. The honest version tells you how long your launch runway is, and therefore whether to spend the next six months writing or the next six months building a list. See The newsletter, and what to give people for joining.
The chapter outline: the part that pays for itself
For each chapter, a working title, what it argues, what evidence or material it uses, and roughly how long it runs. A page or two in total.
Then read it straight through as an argument. What you are looking for is the chapter that is a heading with nothing underneath it.
This is the section that earns the whole exercise. Most abandoned nonfiction books are not abandoned because the writing got hard — they are abandoned because chapter seven had nothing in it, and the author found out in month nine. The outline finds the same thing in an afternoon. You will also find the two chapters that are one chapter, and the one chapter that is secretly three.
An outline that collapses is good news, delivered early and cheaply. Outlining a nonfiction book so it holds together covers how to build one that fails in the right places — the one-sentence chapter test, ordering by dependency, and the proportion check.
The sample chapters
One or two, written properly. Their job is to prove you can write the book at the length you claimed.
Do not pick the chapter you have been mentally drafting for a year. Pick a middling one — chapter seven, if it survived — because that is the one that tells you whether the material holds up when you are not excited.
Sample chapters also calibrate the arithmetic. If your chapters run 4,000 words and there are twelve of them, you are writing a 48,000-word book, and you can decide now whether that is the book you meant. How long should a book be? has the lengths readers expect.
In the tools. Bring the outline in as your chapter structure: the Interior Formatter detects chapter starts from a .docx even when the file has no styles, builds the contents from the real chapters, and gives you an EPUB you can read on a phone while the book is still moving. Start your book → · about the tools
What each section becomes when you publish it yourself
Nothing here is wasted on a book nobody is submitting. Every section has a second job.
- The overview becomes your book description. It is already one paragraph explaining what the reader gets. Sharpen it and it is the copy on your listing and your back cover. See How to write a blurb that sells the book.
- The audience section becomes your marketing plan. You wrote down where these readers gather. That list is your launch, and it took no extra work.
- The comps become your cover brief and your category choices. You have already studied the books yours sits beside, which is most of Writing a cover brief, for a designer or for yourself, and most of Categories and keywords, without the folklore.
- The outline becomes the contents page and the running order you write against.
- The platform section becomes the honest version of your launch plan, including the parts you need to start now.
Nonfiction sells on the promise
A reader in a store decides on the cover, the title and a paragraph of description, before a sentence of yours has been read. An editor at a publishing house decides on the overview, the audience and the comps. Those are the same decision, made from the same materials.
So the proposal is not a formality invented by publishers. It is the work of finding out what you are promising and to whom — and that work has to be done by someone. If you are self-publishing, that someone is you, and the cheapest time to do it is before the draft rather than after.
Make your book
The tools are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: The kinds of editing, and which one you need · More: Comp titles: reading the shelf you want to be on · Nonfiction and fiction covers are different jobs · Metadata: the fields that decide who ever sees your book