Book Proposal Mountain: Camp One
How to build a convincing market and competition section
Reminder: Hook to Book is now biweekly (every other week). After today, you’ll hear from me again on December 16.
Two weeks back, I compared writing a book proposal to climbing a mountain. If you’ve learned anything about me since the start of Hook to Book, it’s that I love seeing how far I can stretch an analogy. So let’s try it again: the next five posts will cover each (common) section of a book proposal by comparing it to a camp on the way to the summit of Book Proposal Mountain. This week we’re at Camp One—the market and competition section—where we have the somewhat unpleasant task of considering all the other authors who have climbed this summit before us. Visit any bookstore, and it’s hard not to be awed by the sheer size of your author community.
It’s also hard to hold on to that vision of your own book idea as a special creation worthy of a prime spot somewhere on those bookshelves. But, if you can move past those initial deflating feelings, the visual challenge of a bookstore filled to the rafters with new books can be quite productive as you build your book proposal. As you’ll see farther down, I recommend that all authors visit their local bookstore as they put together their market and competition section.
But before we get to that: Why am I starting the book proposal process with the market and competition section? Not only is this section the least fun, it’s the last section of your full book proposal document (in my individual opinion). Why am I subjecting you to this, in the middle of winter no less?
First, you’ve hopefully already been thinking about market when formulating your book idea. If you have those four sentences from my “Fit, Fandom, and Freshness” post in October, take them out now, and finish this loathsome task while the information is fresh in your mind.
Second, every section in the book proposal is going to be so much easier to tackle with this done and dusted at the beginning of the process. Trust me, you do not want to painstakingly write a chapter outline and a sample chapter only to discover there’s a book (published or forthcoming) manspreading all over your market niche, and now you’re faced with a significant overhaul to make your project viable.
So, now that we’ve resigned ourselves to starting with the market and competition section, what does the thing actually look like? What is its purpose? Ideally, your market and competition section will do two things:
define your book’s potential audience (its market); and
present potential competing titles to your book (its competition) while describing how your book will stand apart from them.
To show what this looks like in practice, let’s walk through a real market and competition section, from Dr. Moiya McTier’s book proposal for The Milky Way: An Autobiography of Our Galaxy.1 Here’s how Dr. McTier begins:
MARKET AND COMPETITION
The Galaxy is right—we have mostly forgotten about the deep relationship humankind once had with the stars. We no longer navigate by them or plant crops by them, and if you live in New York City you might not even see them anymore. The good news is that readers have not lost their fascination with the world beyond our tiny planet: Moon-landing anniversaries, Mars rovers, and images of black holes still have the power to dominate news cycles. And some of the biggest popular-science books of the last five years have stretched beyond our earthly horizons: ASTROPHYSICS FOR PEOPLE IN A HURRY by Neil deGrasse Tyson (2017, Norton); SEVEN BRIEF LESSONS ON PHYSICS by Carlo Rovelli (2016, Riverhead); and THE BIG PICTURE by Sean Carroll (2016, Dutton), to name a few.
There are countless ways to present this market and competition information, but if you have indeed written a “fandom” sentence for your project already, it can be an excellent statement to expand into the opening paragraph of your market and competition section. In Dr. McTier’s first paragraph, she started with the big-picture material that comes from a fandom sentence; before getting into specific competing titles or audience demographics, she described the enduring human fascination with the subject of the book. But we then quickly pivoted to specific titles that The Milky Way would sit next to on the bookshelf. Notice here that if you mention the most successful competing titles as Dr. McTier did in this opening paragraph, they do double-duty: they set up her next paragraph on how The Milky Way differs from them, but their proven success also shows that her book’s subject has a large potential audience.
This is a good point to keep in mind: if your book idea’s freshness sentence is rock solid, you don’t need to be cautious about including bestselling competing titles—instead of detracting from the market potential of your book idea, they will support it by highlighting the size of your core audience.
Here’s Dr. McTier’s second paragraph:
THE MILKY WAY will remind readers of our cosmological curiosity, sharing the very latest astronomical discoveries in a fresh, entertaining voice that will naturally resonate with readers. Scientists might seem stuffy or intimidating, but the Milky Way that everyone loved as a kid? That’s a voice that popular-science readers, Science Friday listeners, and fans of Cosmos or Bad Astronomy (to give just a sampling of the core audience) will want to hear.
If you build your first paragraph from your fandom sentence in the way that Dr. McTier did, then your next paragraph can be built naturally from your freshness sentence. To expand upon that freshness sentence in a satisfactory way, you might consider trying to answer these sample questions: Why might your book be important, influential, or entertaining? Do you have unique access, or have new sources only recently become available? Are you conducting original primary research? Is your book tied to an upcoming compelling anniversary of some event? Are you telling a vivid story that until now has only been perfunctorily presented in scholarly monographs? In short, why should people care about your book if they’ve already read book X, Y, or Z?
In Dr. McTier’s proposal, we highlighted her galaxy-channeling voice as the entertaining, appealing feature that set her book apart. I’ll be honest: we did not have to do as much “freshness” work in this particular market and competition section as I normally do. Dr. McTier’s writing talent, and wonderfully creative voice-driven idea, meant that we didn’t have to spend time carefully delineating how The Milky Way would differ from existing books about our galaxy—it was immediately apparent from the outset of the proposal.
From there, Dr. McTier rounded out the competing titles:
It’s worth pointing out as well that popular-science titles have had success when leveraging a unique voice or unexpected angle to communicate knowledge. HOW TO TEACH PHYSICS TO YOUR DOG by Chad Orzel (2009, Scribner) features imagined dialogues with Emmy, the author’s dog, to cover complex science. Astrophysicist Paul Sutter’s super casual conversational voice and whimsical humor upends reader expectations in YOUR PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE (2018, Prometheus). Ryan North’s HOW TO INVENT EVERYTHING (2018, Riverhead) is delightfully committed, from page one, to its stranded-time-traveler fictional premise. And I (Jeff, that is) will eat my hat if Katie Mack’s forthcoming THE END OF EVERYTHING (2020, Scribner), which imaginatively speculates about five future universe-ending scenarios, isn’t a bestseller as well.
Her first paragraph had highlighted the absolute biggest competing titles, and so here she included other recent and forthcoming successes that not only were in the popular-science category, but also had a unique voice or fresh framework similar to what Dr. McTier was proposing with The Milky Way.
Overall, I suggest you aim to mention five to ten competing titles in your market and competition section—and ideally these are books that are close enough in subject or approach to your book that they would be neighbors on the bookshelf in a Barnes & Noble. And to the extent possible, focus on books published in the past five years by commercial publishers or university presses, to give editors and agents a sense for the current competition. This list does not need to be comprehensive—in fact, that would be most unhelpful for agents and editors who might be pressed for time as they’re reading. What you’re aiming for is a decent high-altitude overview of the landscape, a sampling of titles that represent the two or three primary categories of competitor that your book idea might have.
(A logistical note: you’ll see that for each book we mentioned the title, author, publisher, and year of first publication. This will help editors, agents, and their colleagues more easily compare the competing titles to your proposed book.)
How do I unearth all these competitors?
This is the most common question I get from authors about the market and competition section, and for good reason—I don’t care how many books you read, it’s impossible to know all of the major competing titles for your book idea without doing some research. And as much as it pains me to say it, that research usually begins at Amazon. It’s far and away the largest online marketplace for books, and their “Customers who viewed this item also viewed” title carousel is invaluable. If you already have a couple of competing titles in mind, go to their Amazon pages and start chain searching through that feature. (They do like to move that feature around on the page, FYI—be sure to avoid any of the carousels with the “sponsored” label on it.)
After doing your Amazon research, though, it’s time to have a little fun—as a next step I wholeheartedly recommend visiting your local bookstore to see what they have on the shelves in your book’s subject area. Since most indie bookstores have limited space, you’re almost assured of seeing titles that have been selling well recently. And don’t be afraid to talk to the staff! Their knowledge is often near-encyclopedic, and as an author you’ll want to forge a great relationship with your local bookstore anyway—they are key to a flourishing book ecosystem.
Last, there’s a bonus step that is totally optional, but has the potential to impress agents and editors: visit Publishers Marketplace to peruse recent book deals. Editors and agents self-report book deals there, for books that have not yet been published. You can search the deals database for various keywords related to your book idea, or you can browse by broader categories. If you’re able to show how your book will fit in not only with existing books, but with new titles that will be coming out in the next year or two, the case for your book will be that much more convincing. (See, for example, Dr. McTier’s third paragraph above, where we mentioned Dr. Katie Mack’s then-forthcoming The End of Everything.)
BIG DISCLAIMER #1: You have to become a Publishers Marketplace member to get access to the deals database. At the moment, membership costs $25/month, though they have launched a new $10 “Quick Pass,” which gives you access to the site for 24 hours or 50 page requests, whichever comes first.
BIG DISCLAIMER #2: Because these book deals are self-reported, the deals database at Publishers Marketplace is not comprehensive at all. Even if you pony up the money, there’s no guarantee you’ll unearth a forthcoming competing title in the deals database.
In light of those two disclaimers, let me reiterate that you should not feel any pressure to take this last step—it is not a make-or-break add-on to your book proposal. And let me clearly state as well that I am not shilling for Publishers Marketplace; I have not been paid or otherwise compensated to mention them here. But for those of you who are curious about book publishing, and want to see what the innards of one of the industry’s biggest news sites looks like, I thought I should mention it in this conversation.
Tasty extras
At this point, we’ve covered the essential ingredients of the market and competition section, but let me briefly cover a few tasty toppings I try to add in whenever I feel it’s valuable.
First, you’ll notice in Dr. McTier’s second paragraph above that we took a moment to define the book’s core audience with a bit more specificity by mentioning places you can find them (Science Friday, etc.). Many proposals will delve into the core audience of the book with even more detail—sometimes with an entire subsection in the market and competition section—as a way to help publicity and marketing staff at publishers see more clearly how they might be able to launch your book. (For Dr. McTier’s proposal I thought the pop-sci/space readership had been so well established with past bestsellers that publishers wouldn’t need us to devote any more words to it.)
Second—and we actually didn’t use this in Dr. McTier’s market and competition section—is the use of prototypical comparisons. That is, if you can use successful existing books to describe your book, that positioning will stick in agents’ and editors’ minds and might even help to quell any hesitation they might otherwise have.
For example: I’m working with an author on a project right now that I’ve been thinking of as “J. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place meets Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl meets Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning”. I’ll kick the tires of that description more before I actually start pitching it in that way, but you can see how a capsule description like that could quickly grab attention, right? If you see a natural prototypical comparison to make for your book, find a way to weave it into your market and competition section (and in your pitches to agents and editors as well! But that’s farther down the road. . . .).
And the last little topping that I suggest authors add to their market and competition section is simply a more relaxed, writerly conclusion. This section winds up being quite dense by design, so I like it when authors soften things at the end, to remind agents and editors that there’s a sparkling writer behind all of this, not a sales-optimizing AI copywriter. Dr. McTier concluded her market and competition section with a clever voice change to the Milky Way:
As for the Milky Way itself, it can only hope its story—a story not only of galaxies, stars, and planets, but of the plucky intelligent life that has arisen within it—fascinates a new generation of human stargazers, curious about the Way of Birds, the Silver River, the Milky Way, or any of the other names they’ve come up with to describe their home galaxy.
Don’t sweat it
Speaking of soft conclusions, let me close by letting you off the hook. The market and competition section of your book proposal will not be published worldwide, to be picked over by critics in the national media. Do not worry too much about achieving sparkling prose throughout this section—it is a tool, meant to be roughly handled and modified by publishing professionals as they consider your book proposal internally. Think of your market and competition section as lembas bread, not a royal spread on the polished tables of Minas Tirith. (I know you were wondering when the next Lord of the Rings reference would pop up.)
All the best with your market and competition sections (say hi to your local bookstore for me!), and I’ll see you at Camp Two in two Fridays.
A bit of context as you jump into Dr. McTier’s market and competition section: The Milky Way is a book about our galaxy, written by our galaxy (as playfully channeled by astrophysicist Moiya McTier). Throughout her book proposal, Dr. McTier jumped between writing as herself and writing as the Milky Way.