Book Proposal Mountain: Camp Two

How to bring your proposal’s chapter structure and summaries to life

For a brief period a few years back, I got addicted to a British gardening show: Monty Don’s Big Dreams, Small Spaces. I imagine this was partly pure escapism—my wife and I lived in a junior one-bedroom in Brooklyn at the time—but thinking back on it I realize it also had a surprising affinity with developing book ideas. A delightful guest or two would present an initial garden idea for some small parcel of unused space on their property, and Monty would come in, have a ponder, and gently make suggestions on how to make the idea actually work within the space.

One aspect of these garden ideas that cropped up over and over was the garden path. Monty has strong opinions on garden paths, and his observations firmly lodged themselves in my head, to the point where I can’t help but think about him whenever I see a path in a garden or yard.

Monty’s pet peeve was the purely ornamental garden path. He’s on record as saying, “The first law of any garden path is to get you from A to B. . . . It is not enough just to have paths looking good. They must work, if they are to be used.” Whenever a path popped up in a guest’s garden plans, he would ask something like, “Where does this path take you? What is its purpose?” Without a solid answer to those questions, it didn’t matter how beautiful the path was—it wasn’t going to serve the garden.

Today, we’re building garden paths of another sort: the path that readers will walk when they read your book. As with gardens, this can be surprisingly difficult, even for writers and journalists who have plenty of storytelling experience. That’s because building a book-length path is quite a different challenge from writing a terrific article, or short story, or keynote presentation. How do you create a path that readers will happily follow for hundreds of pages?

Monty’s views have some value here, in my opinion. (And I simply can’t resist an analogy.) As with any satisfying path, you need a clear beginning that frames the journey but doesn’t reveal everything; you need to carry them to a proper destination; and ideally they arrive at the end with a new perspective and some sense of achievement.

In fiction, you have more freedom when it comes to creating your path—you can pace your story however you like, you can introduce protagonists, antagonists, sidekicks, foils, pre-climaxes, climaxes, and so on. (I know, I know, I’m making fiction-writing sound like it’s all Mai Tais on the beach dictating your latest rollicking novel into your phone while getting a foot massage. It’s not—the creative labor involved in fiction is monumental, and all that freedom can harm just as much as it helps.)

In nonfiction, when it comes to structure you usually have to respond to the lay of the land for your chosen subject. If you’re writing history, the details and characters are set in place (unless you’re bringing new scholarship to bear), and building your book’s path is more about choosing your narrative container (which period will you cover, which events, which characters) than building a narrative from scratch. (Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial is a phenomenal example of curating a nonfiction narrative, in my opinion. Give it a read if you have the time.)

If you free yourself from uninterrupted chronological narrative, however (or if you’re writing an idea- or argument-driven book rather than a narrative one), there are plenty of creative paths out there that are completely viable. Bill Bryson’s At Home is a sampler-platter history of domestic life, in which he walks the reader chapter-by-chapter through the rooms of his former-rectory Norfolk house. Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches tells the story of marine life, along with the author’s own story, through ten sea creatures from the surface to the depths.

Or, in the example we’ll cover today, Haas School of Business professor Alex Budak’s Becoming a Changemaker uses what I like to call a “level up” structure, which you can see in countless guises in practical nonfiction. Let’s get into real-world specifics—watching gardening TV and making lofty metaphorical comments is a fun way to spend an evening, but it only gets us so far.

Enough metaphor—what does this look like in a book proposal?

Becoming a Changemaker is a research-backed, classroom-tested guide to developing the skills (and mindset) needed to spark positive change in any arena, at any level. For the book, Alex modified the path of his Haas’ course, “Becoming a Changemaker,” which brings students along bit by bit into real-world changemaking efforts. You can immediately see what this “level-up” structure looks like from a glance at the table of contents. (N.B. The table of contents for the finished book is slightly different from what you see below, but it still works for our purposes.)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: What is a Changemaker?

Part 1: Changemaker Mindset

This section introduces crucial traits and attributes successful changemakers have, all of which are learnable, practicable, and applicable regardless of sector or role.

Chapter 1: Developing a Changemaker Mindset
Chapter 2: Question the Status Quo
Chapter 3: Confidence without Attitude
Chapter 4: Beyond Yourself
Chapter 5: Student Always

Part 2: Changemaker Leadership

This section teaches leadership skills for courageously collaborating with, influencing, and motivating others towards a vision of change, regardless of title, status, or power.

Chapter 6: Reinventing Leadership
Chapter 7: Microleadership: How to Be a Leader Even If You’re Not the Leader
Chapter 8: Become the Leader You Wish You Had
Chapter 9: Intrapreneurship
Chapter 10: Leading Change when Change is Hard

Part 3: Changemaker Action

This section provides tangible frameworks, tools, and approaches—combined with inspiration from a diverse array of changemakers—to apply one’s mindset and leadership skills to turn ideas for change into action.

Chapter 11: Sparking Change: From Idea to Action
Chapter 12: Change that Sticks
Chapter 13: Your Changemaker Toolkit
Chapter 14: Catalyzing Your Changemaker Journey

Part I focuses on the readers themselves, instilling an awareness and mindset that will serve them in the chapters to come. Part II starts to give readers exercises that require interaction with others, to develop the leadership skills that they’ll need; and Part III brings it all together, encouraging the reader to use what they’ve learned and giving them more tools to help them go out and make an impact in the world. If you’ve ever played Dungeons & Dragons, or almost any role-playing game, this structure will feel incredibly familiar—build your level-one character, equip gear and get used to entry-level abilities, go confront the pack of kobolds that have taken over the town mill, and presto: welcome to level two. (To be clear, I’m NOT suggesting the work Alex’s students and readers undertake is as easy as this! I’m only pointing it out as a satisfying path with a proven track record.)

Note that, while Alex split his structure into three parts, this is not always necessary—or even helpful. For Becoming a Changemaker, this was an excellent idea because there were a lot of chapters, and they could be batched into incredibly clear themes. But if you have far fewer chapters, or if they build on each other individually rather than in bunches, or if they don’t naturally distribute evenly across the parts, there’s no need to force a part framework onto your chapters.

For the structure section of your book proposal, the table of contents is just the appetizer, of course—the main dish is the chapter summaries. Let’s look at one from the Becoming a Changemaker proposal.

Chapter 1: Developing a Changemaker Mindset

No matter the sector, role, or type of impact a changemaker pursues, there are certain traits and characteristics we all share. I call the collection of these underlying attitudes and behaviors a “Changemaker Mindset,” the development of which is the first step to becoming a changemaker. I introduce research I have done through my “Changemaker Index” measurement tool, which I developed in partnership with Berkeley Haas’s former dean, Richard Lyons. The Changemaker Index, currently only available to my students, measures unifying traits and behaviors that successful changemakers share. Readers will gain access to it for the first time in this chapter, coming away not only with the confidence that a changemaker mindset is accessible to them, but also with a clear roadmap for developing it.

The chapter traces the journey of a UC Berkeley student who was initially skeptical that being a changemaker is something that can be learned. Despite his skepticism, he developed a changemaker mindset throughout the course and then applied this newfound mindset to successful entrepreneurial and social impact endeavors upon completing the course. Along the way I curate key concepts from fellow academics and authors including Carol Dweck (Stanford University, author of Mindset) and Adam Grant (University of Pennsylvania, author of Originals), showing how these concepts can be applied specifically towards leading positive change. Finally, I give readers an overview of Berkeley Haas’s Defining Leadership Principles (which are the titles of the next four chapters) and provide a conceptual scaffolding for them to learn and develop all aspects of a changemaker mindset.

First, let me mention the feature that is immediately apparent: these summaries are written in normal prose. There’s a temptation when writing these dense, brief summaries to move into a rough-and-tumble style with lists or sentence fragments, i.e. “To be explored: a) things; b) people; and c) ideas.” I suggest you avoid this if at all possible—editors and agents are looking for authors, after all, so your writing is just as important in these chapter summaries as it is in your writing sample.

Moving on to the content itself: As you can see here, these chapter summaries are fairly brief, but when done well they contain a TON of value. In the first paragraph of this Chapter 1 summary, Alex lays out the key idea of the chapter, highlights a specific tool (the “Changemaker Index”) that will appear, and even manages to hype the fact that this tool has never been shared outside the classroom.

The second paragraph then briefly describes the narrative arc of the chapter, sprinkles in a sampling of satisfyingly specific references that Alex will cover in the chapter, and closes by gesturing at the path of the chapters to follow. In general, I think this two-paragraph form—in which the first paragraph lays out the core goal or idea of the chapter, and the second highlights the anecdotes, examples, tools, or scholarship that you will cover to support that goal or idea—is really effective.

Let’s take a look at the Chapter 2 summary to see the arc progress.

Chapter 2: Question the Status Quo [sample chapter]

Changemakers throughout history have had the courage to question the status quo in ways large and small. They see opportunities where others may only see challenges, and they apply this lens when challenging conventional notions and pushing new ideas, approaches, and innovations forward. Questioning the status quo starts with recognizing opportunities for change, and then applying changemaker mindset traits―including smart risk-taking, learned optimism, resilience, and failing forward, all of which are presented in this chapter―to take action.

The chapter begins with the story of civil rights leader and legal changemaker Bryan Stevenson, showing how his ability to question the status quo on everything from his own career choices to the lack of equitable justice in the legal system have propelled his ability to lead positive change. I then provide a profile from the business world, describing how the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, built a company—and, indeed a career—on challenging conventional notions of business, work, and sustainability. I discuss the role that both nature and nurture play in approaching risk, and present a “smart risk-taking” framework which helps all of us take more and smarter risks no matter our personalities. The chapter includes an application of classic studies like the Asch conformity experiment to show why it can be hard to be a nonconformist, but buttresses these challenges with social psychology concepts, including “idiosyncrasy credit,” to show how we can break free from norms and expectations to lead change. The chapter challenges traditional definitions of resilience popular in Silicon Valley, often defined as “enduring as much pain as possible,” and instead presents my own definition that resilience is “staying strong for the long haul.” Change is hard, and so this chapter presents tangible frameworks and tools for developing resilience.

I close with an experiential exercise from my class that has become legendary on campus. To help students—and now readers—forever reframe the way they think about failure, I present a surprise challenge in the middle of one class every semester: “You have 15 minutes to go outside and get rejected. You need to ask for something and have someone say ‘no,’ and you cannot tell them that it’s for a class.” Upon hearing this challenge, students often turn bright red, start sweating, and feel their hearts leap out of their chests, but they come back 15 minutes later with huge smiles on their faces and with a brand new perspective on failure internalized. The crucial lessons from this exercise―that failure isn’t fatal, and that not taking a risk when we should is itself a failure―will give the reader the mindset and confidence to keep pushing forward through the many inevitable setbacks they will experience as a changemaker.

One thing to note immediately: you’ll see that we included a little note after the chapter title to let editors know that Chapter 2 was the sample chapter, included in full toward the end of the proposal. In my opinion, you should include a chapter summary for every chapter in the book, even if the full chapter is included later in the proposal—you don’t want editors/agents to have to scroll back and forth to find out what the sample chapter is about when they’re looking at the chapter summaries.

Second, you’ll see in this Chapter 2 summary that Alex went to three paragraphs. In this case, the exercise presented at the end of the summary—go get rejected in less than 15 minutes—required longer explanation to get the idea across. While in general I’m a big fan of the two-paragraph format, it should never be a straitjacket—if there’s something intriguing that needs to be unpacked a bit more, by all means unpack it!

That said, the law of diminishing returns is real when it comes to your chapter summaries—do your best to ensure that every paragraph is packed with value, and as concise as it can be. The longer your summaries, the more work you are giving editors/agents. It’s unfair, but the truth is that editors and agents often have so much to read that they can’t immediately delve deeply into everything in their inbox. They might start by scrolling to your chapter summaries (I know editors who do precisely this), and if they see multiple pages devoted to each chapter they might disengage, especially if they are pressed for time at that particular moment.

Plus, long chapter summaries might throw up a caution flag to editors—if you can’t distill the core message of each chapter in a few paragraphs in the proposal, how difficult will the editorial process for the full manuscript be?

Speaking of running long, this post is getting a bit verbose . . . but let’s cover one more chapter summary from Alex’s proposal to help give you a more solid grasp on this proposal section.

Chapter 10: Leading Change when Change is Hard

This book is filled with optimism—with stories that inspire everyone to become a changemaker and the tools to start taking action. But I also recognize that leading change is hard. And so this chapter equips readers with both the reassurance as well as tools, frameworks, and inspiration to keep going even—and especially!—when times are hard like they are right now.

In this chapter I build on the work of academics who study grit, resilience, and change management, pulling out the findings and lessons that are especially applicable to changemakers. I cover Angela Duckworth’s popularization of “grit” with a lens towards practical application; I refresh John Kotter’s classic “8-step change model” for the 21st century; and I highlight Debra Meyerson’s “Radical Change, the Quiet Way” model to help readers understand how to lead change with a spectrum of approaches depending on the situation rather than a one-size-fits-all mentality. Along the way, we take lessons from myriad sources: marathon runners teach us how to sustain enthusiasm and energy for the long-haul; Simon Sinek shows us how to shift our thinking to zoom out from short-term setbacks and play what he calls “the infinite game”; and I share advice from entrepreneurs and innovators for identifying and recruiting others to join your change efforts, to both share the responsibility and to magnify the potential impact. The myriad tools from this chapter help readers prepare for Part 3, where they will begin to learn how to translate their changemaker leadership into real-world action.

I’m including Alex’s summary of Chapter 10 for a couple of reasons. First, he absolutely packs his second paragraph with a parade of rapid-fire examples that will appear in the chapter. Don’t be afraid to do this! (As long as you are providing a bare minimum of explanation, that is—you don’t want editors/agents to be entirely lost, or missing the references you’re making.) Curious editors and agents will not be afraid to reach out to ask you for more detail if they want it.

Second, in Alex’s chapter structure Chapter 10 is a hinge chapter; it’s the last chapter before the start of Part III. If you do have a part structure like Alex has, you will want to be sure to end your chapter summary by connecting to the next part in your structure. As you can see here, it can be as simple as a one-sentence closer that sets the stage.

It’s called a proposal for a reason

No matter what path you wind up building in your book proposal, it’s worth mentioning that—unlike many real garden paths—this structure is not set in stone at all. You might find that a Monty-Don-esque editor or agent thinks some segment of the path is missing, or that it goes on past the satisfying endpoint, or that it should be reshuffled a bit for clarity or narrative satisfaction. That’s OK! In fact, it’s excellent; if an editor or agent comes back to you with structural suggestions, you’ve hooked them. Not to mention, even if they wind up not moving ahead with you and your book, they’ve still given you free advice (it better be free—if an editor or agent asks for a fee to consider your proposal, that is a giant red flag) that will likely improve the book.

Let’s take a moment here to let this all sink in. Make no mistake, this is a BIG step for your book. This may be the first time your book actually starts to feel real, which is a wonderful feeling. But it’s no exaggeration to say that this may be one of the most difficult and time-consuming steps of the proposal. After all, you’re building something out of nothing! So go easy on yourself, and don’t expect to hammer this out over a cup of coffee and a danish.

. . . . It’s probably a five-danish problem.