Writing a proposal for your novel

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

November 15, 2016

junior-dev I’ve been writing Darklight for six years now. At first, it was things like Deep Point of View (POV), cutting out adverbs, and other bits of writing craft. Then I yanked out things like explaining too much, removing every expression, every phrase, every word that we redundant. I’ve never faced writing a proposal for my title.

Well now that I’m shooting to reach either an agent or a publisher, I must change gears and put my full attention on writing a proposal.

darklight-query-letters-piling-up There are two key things to pursue:

  1. Don’t stop
  2. Read submission guidelines carefully.

As for the first, just go and read Steven King’s On Writing if you want to see what struggles he endured to get published.

As for the second, it’s important to know that each agent/publisher are looking for slightly different things.

So I started writing multiple query letters, each one a little different. Some people want a two-page synopsis, some want four pages. Others want a chapter-by-chapter, 1-2 sentence synopsis. And then the worst: comparable titles. You can see in the snapshot I have LOTS of query letters. I never throw anything away. And further down are my two different synopses (which, BTW, took considerable effort!)

But buried in many submission guidelines is more evil, most nefarious, most bedeviling requirement of all: Comparable titles

Stop what you’re doing and go find 3-5 titles that are kind of similar to your own handiwork in some aspect, aren’t too old that they’re worthless, illustrate that you’re book would sell well like those, and yet doesn’t trample on your own originality. (Try to read that last sentence out loud, without taking a break!)

Cedric So I have an eight page proposal written up for a nice, clean SFF publisher I feel I have a decent shot with. I have nicely listed the details of my platform, past/future published works, and the two-page synopsis I wrote a few months ago. Yet I feel blocked on coming up with three titles that I deem comparable.

I’ll figure it out. I always do. But the whole process, from beginning to end, is never easy. It’s never simple. I saw the following in a CreateSpace forum and was sad.

“Yes, I don’t like the marketing end of it at all. I just want to write and let someone else get it out there. Guess I won’t get that unless I get picked up by a publisher.” –CreateSpace forum user

It’s sad knowing this won’t work. The only people that actually get real marketing budget are, as is commonly known, only given to the authors that don’t need it. Nope, those of us that want to get into writing have to do ALL of this legwork ourselves, and it begins with doing our own research of comparables. The first signs of understanding our market, because at the end of the day, publishers are in business to make money, not publish our pet projects.

Good luck and happy writing!

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