Six Tips for Writing Academic Book Proposals
I recently gave a workshop on writing book proposals as part of the MLA’s “Sit and Write” series. I thought I’d write it up in case anyone finds this useful.
I framed these tips for writers proposing their first academic book, because I wanted to emphasize some of the baggage more junior scholars may be carrying around with them from graduate school. And while midcareer and even senior scholars might still have some of this stuff weighing them down, they are hopefully starting to get a little distance on it.
At early career when we’re talking about the book we’re working on, it’s often at a moment of high-pressure gatekeeping. We perhaps just passed a dissertation defense, or we’re on the job market and we have the strong sense that we’re about to be eliminated—that there can only be one feeling! And so, when we talk about our book, we can feel like it’s a test we’re about to fail. As a result, sometimes the tone we bring to proposals is quite defensive and it can result in writing that’s overly grand or boring or stilted or combative. I have been guilty of all of the above!
But I want to invite us to think that this doesn’t have to be what the book writing or proposing process is like and also that who we’re writing to includes a variety of interested readers who like books. Certainly, not everything is a book, but there's room for more than one book at a press, and acquisitions editors are looking to build lists. They are people devoting careers to making books and who are interested in acquiring in your area, but who aren’t necessarily immersed in your subject area. This is important to remember.
And when you think about the readers at the end, I want to encourage you to acknowledge the peer reviewers, but not get hung up on them. Instead, I think it’s much more useful to think about the tables of books at conferences and the curious person who might be interested in your book because they want to learn more about your topic, the person who is going to encounter it sitting side-by-side next to other similar books.
So, all this to say, we’re making books, not trying to pass exams, and you are empowered to make decisions about the kind of book you want to write as well as decisions about how you are going to talk about it.
Six Tips:
1. Get the furniture in the room
This one I’m stealing from the film critic Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune. By this he meant that you have to name the basic stuff: director, actors, major plot details. (When I initially posted about this, he reminded me that the furniture is best placed in different parts of the review so things don’t become formulaic.)
Before getting too far ahead of yourself, it’s worth backing up and listing the really basic stuff of your book that people who haven’t been living with it a long time are going to need to know about (and thus, that you’re going to need to seed through the project description). For the development editing clients I work with, this might include:
· The kind of texts or authors included
· Literary, artistic, or historical movements
· Research sites
· Major events
· Key words or theoretical concepts
· Significant institutions, laws, publishing houses, etc.
· Anything else about the parameters of the project: where, when, etc.
What we’re really doing here is naming the basic building blocks that readers are going to need to know about in order to get their arms around your argument. And it’s really easy to forget these things when you’ve lived with your project a long time.
For example, I might have a sentence that declares my book is about gender and genre in the English-language novel after 1922. That’s a pretty tight little sentence that’s packed with my particular knowledge as someone who works in literary modernism and knows that 1922 is an important year, but if we think about the various readers of this document, who include not just my peer reviewers, but also an acquisitions editor, who in turn needs to present this to a board at the university press, and maybe eventually to a marketing team who is going to design my cover, you can see this is perhaps too tight, and that it also might turn out to be very surprising that I have, say, a later chapter on the postmodern author Cormac McCarthy and his Westerns.
So, I’d need to be sure that when I say gender, I include that I’m thinking about masculinity. That when I say after 1922, I don’t just mean 1923-1935, and that when I say English-language, that perhaps I’m more particular about the where, or whether this is a comparative project.
2. Bring your readers from confusion to clarity/Bring readers from old to new
This is a strategy for articulating your argument. To do this, I want you to start with where your reader might be.
Here are four little prompts for thinking about this:
a. What are people used to thinking about your “furniture” or broad topic?
b. When people get your argument wrong, what do they take away? Or, when they think your argument is “just” about something, what’s that thing?
c. Are there key terms or topics in your project that will raise commonplaces or connotations that you want to correct?
d. What are the scholarly habits people use to approach your materials or materials like yours?
Given the above, what is it that you hope your book allows readers to see instead?
Sometimes authors are frustrated by these misunderstandings and they think, why would I invite this in to my text…but it’s a way of preempting misunderstandings as well as an intuitive way to address your reader by moving them from old information (the more simple, wrong, etc. old belief) to a new idea (your argument).
3. Adjust your ratios
By this I mean the ratio between abstract claiming and illustrative details.
For many writers, they are at their most abstract and difficult in documents like this. Add “For example,” sentences periodically to help leaven your prose and help readers picture what you’re talking about. this is related to not hoarding materials for later (which I’m going to say more about in a moment).
However, sometimes writers of book proposals have become obsessed with their materials and need to move up a level of argumentation, especially when talking about things like their archives. If you are going on at length describing your treasure trove of understudied materials, add a sentence (beginnings and ends of paragraphs are good places to do this) that clarifies what considering these materials allows readers to understand about your broader topic.
4. Use your good crystal toda
Sometimes as academics we’re afraid of using up our good stuff. Whatever mindset work there is around that is a whole other ball of wax. But I want to say that especially for the book proposal, don’t save your best stuff for later.
Not everyone who reads your proposal is going to read your book and not everyone who reads your book is going to read your proposal. SO, don’t be afraid to spend a good example from Chapter 3 in your proposal if it helps you clarify things. Your eventual readers are never going to know you did that.
Given that proposals don’t accompany finished books out into world, this is a good time to list or ask friends about your best, clearest, most interesting examples, or the most charismatic figures, or the anecdotes that are the easiest shorthand. For folks who are or who have recently been on the job market, what examples do you use to answer interview questions or describe in your job letters? For folks who aren’t, what’s your partner’s, writing group’s, or mom’s favorite story from the book?
5. Describe your reader’s journey
First, is there a way your argument unfolds? Are there steps or stages to your argument that need to be laid out in the proposal and also mirrored in book’s structure? Try laying your argument out in steps: what’s the first premise your book establishes, and how do later premises build from there. If you do this and it feels meaningful, you might want to include it in the argument paragraph of the project description section.
Second, when you get to your chapter descriptions section, I consider offering a paragraph about the overall trajectory. As readers, we know a book is a journey through time; how would you describe this journey? You might have a topic sentence here that sounds something like a filled in version of: “To show my argument, the chapters move the reader from X to Y, a path characterized by Z.” With a sentence like this, you’re showing that there’s an idea ungirding the reader’s temporal experience of the book.
6. Invite in your interlocutors
When naming comparable books in the proposal, a couple things to keep in mind:
First, it’s a good idea to name books in the series or from the press you want to be published by. It shows that you understand what they do and that you could fit there.
Second, this is the place where I’d start thinking about peer reviewers: Who is in the flyer or on the book table who might review your manuscript? These are the folks you’re having a conversation with. Not necessarily the authors of books on your shelves or maybe even those who you are citing the most—these are often theoretical works, and the most of us are not writing theory capital T books.
Instead, I’d think about your book as the beginning of a conversation, so you might imagine other folks you’d want to be on a roundtable with, or people whose books yours could appear alongside in a review essay. In other words, I’d encourage you approaching this section honestly, but generously. What do these folks do and do well and what does your book add to the conversation?
I’m very excited about all the books you’ll be writing. If you’d like help with your proposal, please reach out about my developmental editing services: https://katherinefusco.com/devediting
