Ensight - Jeremy Wright’s Personal Blog

My Book Proposal

by Jeremy Wright on April 19th, 2005

In recent weeks, I’ve helped numerous author and potential author friends by sending them my proposal for my upcoming book. Not because I feel that mine is ideal or anything. More like because the “where to start” question is a big one. In fact, the proposal has helped 2 other authors land deals. Obviously I can take very little credit for that, since a good proposal is like a good resume: it only helps what is already there shine through.

I’ve decided to make my proposal publicly available in order to help anyone who may need it. I won’t say it’s perfect. I won’t even say it’s better than the one you’ve written. Yes, I spent about 20 hours on it. And, yes, it’s now out of date. If you are looking for a structure for a proposal, though, there are many worse examples available.

Here is the proposal. Please use and distribute wisely (always attribute when you distribute).

Once again, I can’t make any warranties about this. Ultimately, getting a book published is more work than I’d ever imagined. Doing the proposal right is a pain in the ass. Having to do several is even worse. And even after you’ve gotten someone to pick up your book, it is still hundreds of hours of work to finish it.

If you really want to write a book, count the cost. Hopefully seeing this fully done proposal will help both with writing yours and realizing that even after you’ve gotten through this, you haven’t even finished 1% of the work necessary to write your book.

Good luck in your travels. And feel free to improve on this if you’d like. I’m happy to update it periodically based on comments from readers, authors, editors, publishers and agents.

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POSTED IN: Writing