Memoir book proposal sample pdf
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How to write your memoir book proposal
Memoir book proposals differ from book proposals for other types of nonfiction such as a biography, a business leadership book or something else. So if you’re wanting to sell your memoir to a literary agent, publisher or editor, you need to put together a book proposal. But you’ll need to keep a few things in mind with memoir that are different from book proposals for other types of nonfiction.
Namely – the importance of your chapter samples and what, in publishing, is referred to as the ‘Book, the Hook, The Cook’.
But first – do you need a book proposal to sell your nonfiction manuscript?
A book proposal is both a sales document and a chance for you to envision the full scope of the book and outline how you will approach it. The value of writing a book proposal is that it will help you clarify a lot about your book, the way you’ll tell the story and where it sits in the marketplace. You CAN sell a memoir without a book proposal – I did, with my first memoir. But I did have a synopsis, a great que
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How to Write a Knock-out Book Proposal (+ Template & Strategy)
As someone who deals with book proposals day in and day out, I have a lot to say! To help you more easily navigate this very long post, here’s a quick rundown of what I’ll cover:
Start here: Don’t write your book proposal before completing this crucial step.
We’ll get to everything you need to write a kick-ass book proposal, but there’s something you need to do first.
Anyone can hammer out the sections of a proposal (which I’ll get to in the template below), but before we break down what goes into your proposal, we need to talk about your concept or your “hook.”
The biggest mistake I see in book proposals—and self-published nonfiction books for that matter—is a flabby concept.
It’s not enough to write just another book on your topic. No matter how you publish, in order to stand out, you need to understand what has already been published and what makes you and your message special.
When I work with a client on their book proposal, I make sure we both think their concept is fresh and ut
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How to write a book proposal
Introduction
I have always loved books. When I was a child, our big weekly outing was a visit to the library where my sisters and I were allowed three books each. My mother, an avid reader, kept the house stocked with paperbacks sourced from a local thrift store, so growing up we had at our disposal everything from Colleen McCullough’s The Thorn Birds to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins to Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. For fun, my sister Donna and I even wrote back-cover copy for books of our own invention. When we grew up, we planned to team up to write and illustrate books of our own.
Of course, that is not exactly how things worked out. But I did go on to work in the publishing world as a book designer, editor, and publisher. And, I also did end up writing my own back-cover copy, and later, my own books.
I learned to write book proposals directly from the editors to whom I pitched my first ideas. The first proposal I wrote was for a book about my favorite museum in San Francisco, Musée Mechanique, for Chronicle Books. It was not accepted—t
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