You may have been contemplating writing a nonfiction book for years, or perhaps the idea only recently showed up on your dream map. Once you’ve determined that there is a gap in the bookshelf on a particular topic that your knowledge and expertise can fill, your next step is to prepare a book proposal. A proposal is often necessary to present your idea to literary agents and publishers, but in our many years helping authors create their proposals, we have found that the process offers some important side benefits as well.  

1. Organize your thinking

Your idea may be vague, or it may be clear. Either way, a proposal will save you time and frustration by helping you figure out how best to develop and espouse that idea in the most compelling way across eight or more chapters, before you begin writing. Let’s say you are thinking of writing the history of the summer Olympics. Do you want each chapter focused on the evolution of a specific sport? Or will each chapter focus on all the sports within a specific time period? Or perhaps you want each chapter to revolve around one athlete who made a significant impact on the games. Chapter summaries are an essential piece of a book proposal, and they must convey not only a colorful description of content but also a reason for it. Why is it a necessary piece of your narrative plan for the book? If you can’t find the why in a chapter, you might choose to eliminate it entirely or choose another way to frame the material.

2. Clarify your audience

It’s tempting to think your book will appeal to everybody who reads, or, as in our example above, everybody who follows the Olympics. But if you approach the writing of your book from that perspective, you could actually end up reducing your audience. It’s nearly impossible to market a book to such a broad readership. Sure, your writing and topic will be so engaging that many people might like to read an article about it or hear your tales over the dinner table, but who are the people who will actually click Purchase or take your book to the cash register? Are they the avid listeners of particular sports podcasts? Readers of recent popular biographies of athletes? History buffs who might be seeking to broaden their understanding of the evolving impact of sports on society? You’ll need to answer this question in the audience piece of your book proposal. Once you determine your audience, you’ll understand how you need to speak to them which leads to…

3. Find your voice

Maybe you are a regular blogger, or have a job writing promotional copy, or publish academic papers. Or maybe you just feel confident you have all of the tools at the ready in your book-writing toolkit based on educational credential or expertise. But will the voice you are accustomed to using in your other writing be appropriate for your targeted audience? Most of the writers with whom we develop book proposals tell us they want a “conversational style” for their work. But this style can differ based on whom they intend to have a conversation with.  Is the appropriate voice the casual banter of old friends watching a game or the more formal language of a TED talk?  By having your target readers in mind and spending some time drafting the sample chapter or two required for your book proposal, you’ll begin to get a feel for the right style and tone.

4. Get in the mode of striving for precision and perfection

Writing a whole book is like embarking on an Olympic triathlon, but preparing a full book proposal can be painstaking work as well. You’ll go through several, if not dozens, of drafts, as you carefully choose every statement, every adjective, every period and comma. A book proposal must serve as a shining example of your book’s engaging voice, fascinating revelations, and compelling narrative. But it must also serve as a testament to your professionalism. Even a typo or two can send your document sailing to the recycle bin. Applying the necessary level of rigor and perfectionism to your book proposal is great training for the similar demands of writing the book itself, in which any errors will be immortalized in every copy printed.

5. Broaden your thinking about marketing

One of the most important elements of a proposal is the marketing plan, in which you detail how you will use your connections and position to sell copies of your book. You may be the world’s preeminent scholar on the Olympic games and this will surely yield an expertly researched book but are you known for your expertise beyond a tight circle? Have you written articles on the subject for prominent print or online sources? Do you have well-placed friends or colleagues who will provide endorsements for you? Do you belong to relevant organizations or associations that might provide other avenues for promotion? It’s a good idea to think about how you will market your book at every stage of the preparation and writing process so that when the book is finished you’ll have a robust plan in place. And if it seems that these connections and other marketing opportunities currently available to you fall short, that can be an important message that you may want to step back from the idea of writing a book until you can bolster them.

6. Possibly save yourself a mountain of work and heartache

Perhaps one of the most important benefits of writing a book proposal is one of the least pleasant. Putting together your sample chapter, chapter summaries, marketing plan, biography, comparable titles, overview, and audience can be remarkably effective at clarifying your thinking. It can guide you to improve your book in countless ways. But it can also show you the limitations of your idea, the paucity of the audience, or why you might not be the person to author this particular book. While these realizations can be bitter to swallow, they are infinitely more palatable after the considerable effort of writing a book proposal than they would be after the Herculean task of writing the book itself. And the sooner you move on from a book idea that has no future, the sooner you can move on to a potential bestseller.