Book Proposal Mountain: Camp Four
How to pinpoint the sample chapter that will elevate your entire proposal
I mentioned at the outset of this newsletter that authors writing nonfiction have the benefit of being able to pursue a book deal without having to write the entire book first. What I didn’t mention then is that this is a bit of a double-edged sword.
Today we’re going to talk about that second edge.
You only get one chance
Most nonfiction book proposals feature one sample chapter: a full chapter that not only showcases the author’s writing style but gives editors and agents a real sense of what the finished book will actually be like.
This means that your sample chapter is incredibly important—since you aren’t sharing a full manuscript, this is your ONE chance to show editors and agents what you can do. Making matters worse, I know for a fact that some agents and editors skip right to the sample chapter in a proposal, to see what the author’s writing is like before they consider anything else.
This is why we’re not getting to the sample chapter until now, until the overview, chapter outline, and market and competition sections are all sewn up: we need to make absolutely sure that the sample chapter fits in seamlessly with the rest of the proposal; that it showcases what the finished book will actually feel like; and that it contributes something entirely different from the overview section. (One good rule of thumb, for example, is to avoid writing your book’s introduction or first chapter as your sample chapter, since the material in it will usually overlap somewhat with the overview section of the proposal.)
Writing advice is elsewhere
I confess up front that this post might be unsatisfying if you’re looking for advice about actually writing your sample chapter. Despite the huge importance of your actual prose in the sample chapter, I’m going to focus here on tactical advice about choosing your sample chapter. I’m doing that for two reasons: first, there is thankfully a host of valuable resources out there when it comes to writing advice. I’ve mentioned the wonderful Substacks below before, but it’s worth mentioning them again:
And second, most of the time my writing advice to authors is tailored to their individual quirks and to their particular subject. I could write 10,000 words on writing and you might well not find anything relevant to your own work.
Let’s get tactical
So, how do you choose the best sample chapter for your nonfiction book proposal? In this situation, “best” is a balance between value and ease. By value I mean that you want to be sure that whichever chapter you write will give editors and agents the most vivid sense possible of what your book will actually be like—you want your sample chapter to be as valuable as possible to the folks considering your proposal.
By ease, I mean that, all else being equal, you should write the chapter that is most solidly formed in your mind, that requires the least preparatory research, that will be the most fun to write, or that you just see the easiest path to writing right now. After all, you’re doing all this work on spec—if you can save yourself some effort before having a book deal in hand, I say go for it.
That said, when I wrote “all else being equal” above, I meant it! Ideally, ease should never drive your value decision, it should simply be the tiebreaker.
This is all super tricky to determine, especially if you’re writing your first book proposal and you have no one to bounce things off of. So let’s jump into some real-world examples in the hopes that I can provide a couple extra photons of illumination. In previous weeks I’ve been focusing on a single book proposal, but this time around I’m going to briefly cover several different projects—partly because quoting from a single sample chapter at length isn’t going to help us much, and partly because the way you determine value will depend on your specific project.
The narrative scenario
Let’s start with one of the clearer scenarios: physicist Claudia de Rham’s The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity. (We covered her overview section in the last post.) The Beauty of Falling is a book about gravity, but it has a narrative engine at its core: Dr. de Rham’s story of her career as a physicist. The story has a clear climax—in 2008, de Rham registered for the ESA astronaut selection process, and from the initial pool of 10,000 candidates she made it to the final 42, after rounds of psychological, physical, and team-building tests. At that point, a twist she could never have foreseen plucked her from the astronaut path and set her down on the path to theoretical physics. It’s a wonderful tale, and most of it appears in chapter four. In this case, chapter four was so valuable that it was worth tackling as the sample chapter, even if it was harder to write than another chapter.
If your book will be narrative-driven, the climax is usually the best choice for your sample chapter. Cliffhangers are wonderful in finished books, and you can certainly use them in your overview section, but if the book proposal doesn’t have a telling of the climactic moment of the story somewhere, you’re leaving a ton of value on the cutting room floor. In a nonfiction book proposal, spoilers are your friend, not your enemy.
The advice scenario
Let’s say your book is not narrative-driven, but is instead more of a practical nonfiction project, filled with personal or professional advice. In this scenario, you often have more sample-chapter candidates, but you also have more “value” parameters to consider. Let’s discuss Berkeley teacher Alex Budak’s Becoming a Changemaker: An Actionable, Inclusive Guide to Leading Positive Change at Any Level. (We discussed his book back at camp two, about your chapter structure and summaries.) Becoming a Changemaker is absolutely packed with value throughout its chapters, but there is an introduction and a first chapter that by necessity have to lay a bit of groundwork for the rest of the book. This is common in practical nonfiction, and as a result I usually caution authors against writing one of these “groundwork” chapters as their sample chapter. Instead, I suggest choosing one of the “action” chapters—basically, a chapter somewhere in the middle of the book that is delivering pure advice unencumbered by any throat-clearing introductory material.
I suggest this because agents and editors want to know what the book will feel like in action—they don’t want a sample chapter in which the author is “warming up,” they want a sample of the author at full speed.
In this advice scenario, there is often another factor that might help narrow down your sample-chapter choice: proven efficacy. Let’s say, as part of your tilth efforts, you’ve been giving talks on the subject of your book, or you’ve been discussing elements of your advice on podcasts, or you’ve been posting certain nuggets on social media. If you do any of this with regularity, you almost certainly have been getting feedback on your material. Maybe your audiences clearly love one particular idea or anecdote more than the others, or maybe the post-talk questions are focused on the same thing, or maybe certain types of social-media posts get a ton more engagement than others. Whatever form this feedback takes, it’s a strong signal worth paying attention to as you choose your sample chapter.
For the Becoming a Changemaker proposal, one of the chapters featured a hugely popular exercise from Alex’s “Becoming a Changemaker” course at Berkeley: students are given 15 minutes to leave the classroom and get rejected. That is, they need to ask a stranger for something, and they need to get a “no” answer (and they can’t say that it’s for a class exercise). This exercise is so transformative for students, and the stories that they have come back with are so entertaining, that it seemed like a no-brainer to present it in the sample chapter. If there’s a chapter that will cover material that is already proving its value out there in the world, you should make it your sample chapter if at all possible.
The mini-chapter scenario
This is a much more logistical observation: sometimes your sample chapter should be sample chapters, plural. If your book’s structure is composed of fairly short chapters (let’s say it’s looking like each chapter might be less than 3,000 words), you might want to consider including a second chapter to give editors and agents a bit more to chew on. (N.B. I don’t recommend doing this “for extra credit” if you have chapters that are longer—agents and editors overall are pressed for reading time, and the value of a second long sample chapter is likely not worth the effort.)
For example, when working with Andy Ellis on his book proposal for 1% Leadership: Master the Small, Daily Improvements that Set Great Leaders Apart, it was clear from the outset that one sample chapter might be a bit unsatisfying. By design, the book features concise, spartan lessons—500 to 1,500 words or so—to give readers value even if they just have five minutes of reading time. (Ellis is a master of pithy practicality; the book is a terrific read, honestly. And good news: it comes out in April, but you can preorder it now!)
As a result, we quickly decided to include multiple chapters in the proposal. And since the book’s structure was naturally split into three main parts—“Personal Leadership,” “Team Leadership,” and “Organizational Leadership”—it made sense to include three sample chapters, one from each part. If it’s looking like you’ll have similarly brief chapters, don’t hesitate to include two or three if you think it’ll give editors and agents a fuller sense for your writing and for the book’s scope.
The tempting scenario
If you’ve got a bunch of published articles or newsletter posts already, there can be a real temptation to use one (or some) of them as your sample writing in your book proposal. Most of the time, I suggest you avoid this temptation—even though the “ease” of this solution is off the charts (copy-paste-hooray!), the value can be hit-or-miss.
But! Sometimes it can work, and when it does it’s a marvelous feeling. For it to work, however, the article or post has to be a perfect fit for the book. Let me give you two real-world examples here so you can see what I mean.
The first is neuroscientist Mark Humphries’s The Spike: An Epic Journey through the Brain in 2.1 Seconds. As the subtitle suggests, the book traces the journey of a single neuronal impulse—a single “spike,” in neuroscientific terms—to gives readers a more visceral sense for how our brains work. In addition to his computational neuroscience research, Dr. Humphries writes a wonderful Medium publication called “The Spike” (in fact, that’s how I first came across his work). One of his posts was titled “The Loneliest Neuron”—not only was it beautifully written, it was over 2,000 words, it had a terrific reader response, and like the book project itself, it took readers right into the neuronal world of our brains. It possessed nearly all of the value that an actual sample chapter would have had, and Dr. Humphries had already written it.
The second example is journalist Eric Berger’s Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX. In 2018 (before Musk’s self-inflicted rake-in-the-face Twitter catastrophe), Berger wrote an article for Ars Technica titled “Inside the eight desperate weeks that saved SpaceX from Ruin”. It was nearly 4,000 words of gripping SpaceX-origin-story narrative, it generated a huge reader response, and it set my book-senses tingling. Berger agreed there was a book in the tale, and we set about creating the book proposal. Since the article was itself the inspiration for the book, it was a perfect fit to serve as the writing sample in the proposal.
As these two examples (hopefully) show, in my opinion it’s not enough for an existing article or post to show off your writing style—it needs to be a seamless fit with your book’s subject, it needs to be a real chapter-length piece, and ideally it has also sparked a positive reader response. If it doesn’t clear all three of those hurdles (or at a minimum the first two), resist the copy-paste temptation.
I’ve not even come close to a comprehensive discussion of choosing your sample chapter here—no doubt you’ll have considerations I haven’t addressed that play a unique role in your decision—but when in doubt measure your choices against that “value-then-ease” metric and hopefully a clear path will present itself.
This is your big-boss moment
Once you’ve made your sample-chapter decision, the writing of it will truly be the BIG challenge of the proposal process; it’s likely to take up as much space in your book proposal as the other sections combined. With that in mind, don’t worry at all if you find the writing of the sample chapter is taking a long time. It’s likely to be laborious—not only is this the longest section of Proper Writing in the book proposal, it also might be your first attempt at writing part of your book. It’s almost guaranteed that your thinking will evolve as you start the actual writing process, not to mention that in the act of writing you’ll naturally encounter surprisingly tough explanatory sections, characters that need fleshing out, history that needs to be told in more depth, or other on-the-page hurdles.
So don’t be afraid to take breaks, to let difficulties marinate, to embrace days of single-paragraph progress, to summon your best and most honest allies as alpha readers. Climbing a mountain isn’t easy, after all. The good news is that we’re at camp four—and the summit is in sight.
"... embrace days of single-paragraph progress." Thank you for this. Today I fixed one paragraph and wrote one new sentence! Sigh.
Very helpful information! Have you any suggestions for a way to include a graphic novel chapter that is in a graphic novel script format (there is no standard format), which consists of a panel by panel description of the characters, setting, and action and the the dialog for the characters in each panel?