Book Proposal Mountain: Camp Three
How to create an irresistible overview that sets the stage for your book proposal
If you’ve been following along with this newsletter from the beginning, you’ve got some goodies spread out in front of you: a refined book idea articulated in four sentences, an ongoing tilth campaign suited to your strengths, a thoughtful page or two on how your book will fit into the existing market, and even a chapter outline that shows readers what sort of path you’ll be taking them on. You’re ready (more than ready, honestly) to step onstage and perform—it’s time to draft the overview section that will kick off your book proposal.
This is a huge moment because, if you’re going in the order I’ve presented so far, not only will this be the first bit of Proper Writing editors and agents will see in your proposal, it will also be the first bit of Proper Writing you actually do for your book proposal.
As with every part of a book proposal, the overview section has several jobs to do, but its core purpose is to bring editors or agents into the world of your book for the very first time. When editors or agents open your book proposal document, what they are really doing is taking a seat in the theater as the curtains open. What will they see onstage?
How I like to set the stage
As with pretty much everything in book publishing, this is highly subjective, but here’s how I like to set the stage in the overview section.
First: a story
The natural inclination you might have when writing the overview section for your nonfiction book is to get right to “the calories”—authors don’t have a lot of time or space to catch the attention of an agent or editor, so quite often I’ll see overviews that jump right into what the book is and why it will be successful, in the very first paragraph. While that makes perfect sense, I encourage you to resist that inclination.
Remember: editors and agents are just people. More important, we are readers. We love books—if we didn’t, we’d be in some other industry where the starting salary gives us a shot at an apartment with a south-facing window. But we’re not, and the consolation prize is that we get to curl up in a comfortable secondhand chair on weekends and read stories for work.
What does this mean for your overview section? It means that (most of the time) the most convincing logical case for the financial success of your book won’t make a dent in us book nerds unless we connect and get excited as readers first. So don’t go for the hard sell off the bat; take a breath, and tell us a story. (As you’ll see below in our real-world example, I’m using “story” loosely—sometimes it can be as simple as setting a scene or two.)
Then: everything else
After the story, I’m open-minded about the overview structure. There are certainly important ingredients that I think need to appear in an overview, but I don’t really care about the order they appear in. (Or more accurately, in general I don’t care, but in each individual case I care very much—the overview structure is highly dependent on the book idea itself.) If you were hoping for a template, I apologize—but as with any Proper Writing, the course of the overview should develop in a natural way from your intro story and to the premise of the book itself. (I’ll share parts of a real overview below to make this clearer.)
Instead of structure, then, let’s talk about the essential elements of your overview. (If you have those four sentences from “Fit, Fandom, and Freshness”, it’ll be most helpful to have them at hand here.)
The idea
You of course need to describe what your book is about at some point. This can be as simple as taking your “idea sentence” from the fit/fandom/freshness exercise and expanding it out into a paragraph or two. Depending on the idea, you may need to do more—perhaps you need to unpack some history to place the idea in context, or fully introduce the core problem your book is attempting to solve, or actually delve into your book’s structure to show how your message will progress . . . but at some point you’ll want to explicitly tell editors and agents what the book will be about.
The spotlight
At some point in your overview, you need to make your appearance. If you’re proposing a memoir, you might need to appear right from the beginning, but in general there will be a natural moment, often after your book idea has been laid out, when you present yourself as THE author to write this book. That is the perfect moment to take your “fit” sentence and build it out into a couple of paragraphs about yourself and your relationship to your book idea. (Just to refresh our memories: your “fit” sentence describes how perfectly your book idea suits your talents and expertise.) This shouldn’t be a full biography—that will come later in the proposal—but you’ll want to highlight your significant connections to your book idea.
The step-back
This is perhaps the trickiest element for me to describe. I think of the “step-back” as the moment (or moments, more likely) where you step back from the specifics of the book and the author to show how broad the appeal for the book will be. This is where your “fandom” sentence will be invaluable—you’ll want to draw from it to create your step-back moment(s). (Refresher #2: your “fandom” sentence describes how widespread the appeal might be for your book idea.) Unlike your description of the book’s idea, however, the step-back doesn’t always take the form of a cleanly demarcated paragraph. Sometimes you can write a step-back paragraph right before your statement of the book idea—describing a broad audience and then showing how your book is for them can be an effective one-two punch—but often you’ll want to be more opportunistic about your step-back moments, highlighting here and there the appeal of your book’s subject or approach in the course of the overview.
The sell
The sell is what it sounds like: the moment when you suppress all modesty and make a concise pitch for how amazing your book is going to be. This is where your “freshness” sentence will be valuable. (Refresher #3: your “freshness” sentence describes how timely your book idea is.) I often like to put the sell at the end of the overview—ideally by then readers are enjoying your voice, have been introduced into the world of your book, are convinced that you are the best guide to take them through this world, and can see how large the potential audience might be. At that point, “freshness” operates almost like a call to action: “If you like this idea, guess what? Now is the time to publish it.”
(I should clarify that, in a book proposal, “now” means in the next couple of years. Book publishing is a slow business—that’s one of the things I like about it—so if you mention in your book proposal that this book needs to come out within the next year to be successful, editors and agents will simply think, “It would have been nice to get this proposal a year ago then,” and move on.)
Overall, I like to think of the overview section as a “taxicab pitch” rather than an elevator pitch. You’ve got 10 minutes to describe your project instead of 30 seconds . . . or more accurately, I suggest aiming for an overview that is 1,500–3,000 words.
Show me the real thing already
OK let’s jump into an overview section from a real proposal—as with any Proper Writing there’s a big difference between the abstract blueprint and the messy, creative result that works in real life. This week theoretical physicist Dr. Claudia de Rham has allowed me to share the overview section for her proposal for The Beauty of Falling: A Life in Pursuit of Gravity (forthcoming in 2023!). Here’s the story that kicks off her overview:
Imagine yourself alone in the cockpit of a small single-engine aircraft, waiting for your signal to go. Four simple words, “Clear to take off,” resonate like a magic password, unlocking a precise series of events that will achieve what would have been considered impossible just over 120 years ago: a one-tonne aircraft is pulled into the air. . . .
In this first paragraph and the two that follow, Dr. de Rham vividly describes the experiences of piloting a single-engine aircraft, of diving among coral reefs, and of weightlessly floating in space. As you can see, your opening story doesn’t exactly have to be a Knives Out whodunit—de Rham’s goal here is to simply transport the reader into a sequence of scenes that give them a sense of gravity at the gut level.
She deliberately chose those three scenes—pilot, diver, astronaut—because they allow her to transition into a paragraph that is part spotlight and part step-back:
In my life, I’ve been able to experience the joy of the first two, and came within a hair’s breadth of the third. We certainly don’t need any fancy plane, scuba equipment, or space shuttle to play with gravity. In fact, whether it is something as simple as dropping a ball, swinging in a hammock, or stone skimming, we’re all scientists at heart carrying out our own personal experiments with gravity. But what exactly is going on in those moments? What is gravity?
The first sentence of the paragraph above is certainly not a proper spotlight moment, but it gives an intriguing hint of what is to come while making the first case for de Rham’s unique value as the author. She turns from that into an observation about the broad relevance and appeal of the book’s implied subject: not only are we all subject to gravity’s pull, at some point in our lives we’ve all enjoyed interacting with gravity. This naturally leads into the animating question of the book—What is gravity?—and allows her to set the table for the idea.
Over the next few paragraphs she outlines the history of what we know about gravity—Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Hawking, and Ghez are introduced as principal characters—and highlights the mysteries that still linger despite centuries of research. This context is essential to the structure of her book, so in this case it needs to come before the explicit description of what her book will be about. But by the time she’s finished the historical arc, she’s able to describe the idea, and its full arc, in a single paragraph:
In The Beauty of Falling, I will explore these mysteries, building up a palpable portrait of gravity. We will start our journey with the Newtonian notion of gravitational force and make our way to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, while revealing how much more of our picture there is yet to uncover. Even readers already familiar with Newton’s and Einstein’s conceptions of gravity will be provoked and engaged as I present General Relativity under a different light. . . . I will highlight the fact that General Relativity predicts its own downfall, as we build our way to understanding gravity at the particle level. I will close by bringing readers to a new gravitational frontier: a look at the massive gravity theory that I have uncovered with my colleagues, a theory that could help unravel some of the mysteries of our Universe—including the enigma of dark energy—in a way that until now has been considered impossible.
With the book fully described, it’s time for her full spotlight:
We often think of scientific progress as a narrow straight line. In reality, this could not be further from the truth—our path to massive gravity has been full of excitement, compromises, and sharp turns. It is perhaps no surprise that this reflects my own life trajectory. Coming up with a new theory of gravity was surely not on my list of goals when I was young, but challenging gravity in its most fundamental form had always been my dream, for as long as I can remember. As a child, I realized I wanted more than anything to become an astronaut, and I carried that dream all the way into the 2008 European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut selection. Among the 10,000 applicants that registered for the selection, only 42 made it through the many screening rounds before the intense, final medical screening. I was one of them.
In a follow-up paragraph, de Rham hints at the conclusion of her ESA story but leaves the full telling of it for later in the proposal (remember Monty Don’s garden-path opinions—don’t reveal everything at the beginning!). She also fits in another step-back, playing up the narrative appeal of the book by comparing it to an adventure story: “The Beauty of Falling will highlight the adventure of research, the thrill of questioning nature and challenging it in its deepest realization, and the excitement of discovering something entirely new. The story has (as all respectable adventure stories do) its share of setbacks and breakthroughs. . . .”
In de Rham’s final paragraph, she rounds out the overview with the sell, covering the freshness and fandom strengths of the project:
This is a story that, until quite recently, couldn’t have been told at all. The discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, for which Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess, and Brian Schmidt won the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, is one of the prime motivators of massive gravity theory. Gravitational waves, discussed in the second half of the book, were first detected in 2015 by LIGO, with that detection garnering the Nobel Prize in 2017. In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope captured the first ever image of a black hole’s shadow, an astounding achievement that reveals we are entering a new era marked by a deeper understanding of gravity than ever before. In The Beauty of Falling, I will celebrate the beauty of what we know about gravity, and delve into the mysteries it continues to hide, while peeking at future missions that provide new pieces of the puzzle. At the same time, I hope to offer a window into what it means to be a scientist today—the doubt and failure, yes, but also the incredible thrill of discovery—in a way that can inspire people from all backgrounds to fully appreciate our mysterious, playful, gravity-driven Universe.
Vibe check
Dr. de Rham does a terrific job interweaving the elements of the overview in a natural way, but the main reason I wanted to share her overview section in particular is that it perfectly illustrates what I believe is the most important feature of the overview section: a sense of genuine enjoyment in the writing. It might sound odd to mention enjoyment here, especially if you’re writing about topics such as worsening inequality or the climate crisis, but I firmly believe there is a sense of fulfillment in crafting a well-built argument or vibrant story that is kin to enjoyment, no matter how dire your subject.
Trust me, your vibe will show up on the page in the overview, and for better or worse it will be picked up by editors and agents as they read. If you approach the overview as a chore to be completed, reading it will also feel like a chore to be completed. Plus, if you don’t enjoy writing a couple of thousand words for the overview section, you’re in for a looooooong slog when it comes to writing the full book. Make sure you’re starting your writing journey off with the right vibes.
See you at Camp Four in two weeks, where we’ll be tackling your sample chapter. (Hmm . . . one drawback to this mountain analogy is that the tasks seem to be getting harder as the air is getting thinner. Apologies for that—good thing this mountain is metaphorical.) Until then, happy writing, and happy new year!