WRITING LIVES and THE CRAFT OF BIOGRAPHY If you have or know of another website about writing biography and biographical nonfiction and would like it listed here, please
E-MAIL ME the address and a one-sentence description.
(Back to top) GUIDES to WRITING a BIOGRAPHY BOOK PROPOSAL All trade biographiesthat is, biographies for a general audienceand undoubtedly most university press biographies are sold well before they're finished, or sometimes even begun, through what's called a book or publishing proposal. There are dozens of books about how to write a nonfiction publishing proposal. I've picked these three because they give some attention to biography. The two aimed at the trade market provide actual examples of book proposals, as do many others I don't mention here. If you're a biographer who has sold a proposal with help from a book you can recommend, please
E-MAIL ME and I'll take a look at it.
Caveat: As with any advice books, use intuition and common sense. The sample proposals in these books are meant to suggest possibilities, not to provide you with iron-clad rules for selling a literary "product." Biographies are as singular as their writers, and no one size or shape will fit all.
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Germano, William. Getting It Published: A Guide for Scholars and Anyone Else Serious about Serious Books. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001. How to submit a book to a university or academic press, with information on submissions, the peer review, what to do and what not to do. Though he gives no examples, Germano makes clear what a university press submission package should include.
Larsen, Michael. How to Write a Book Proposal. Writers Digest Books, 1997. Overview by a commerical literary agent of things to bear in mind when writing a nonfiction book proposal. Pages 104-106 discuss writing a proposal for a biography. Appendix includes 3 sample proposals, complete with chapter outlines.
Rabiner, Susan and Alfred Fortunato.
Thinking Like Your Editor. How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction--and Get It Published. Norton, 2002. Practical advice on appealing to a general audience from the perspective of a former editor-in-chief of Basic Books. Gives more space to biography than some of the competition. Includes the proposal for Debby Applegate's prize-winning biography of Henry Ward Beecher. (See "Caveat," above.)
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And more: Appelbaum, Judith. How to Get Happily Published. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. I haven't checked to see whether publishing developments in the Internet age have outstripped some of the advice in the fourth edition of this long-lived perennial, but Appelbaum's book provides a comprehensive, if somewhat cursory, survey of the entire publishing process and includes advice on how to write and sell nonfiction book proposals.
Literary Marketplace. Annual book publishing directory put out by R. R. Bowker every fall. The Yellow Pages of the publishing industry, it includes not only large trade publishers, their editors, and the kinds of books they generally publish, but also literary agents and many small and university presses. The paperback costs about $300, so you might want to go to your local public library for the most recent edition. Don't confuse "LMP," as it's known, with
Writer's Market, an annual aimed chiefly at magazine and article writers. For advice on writing a book proposal, you're better off with one of the books listed here. For tracking down editors and literary agents, stick with LMP or try the Internet. (More on that some other time.)
Walsh, Pat. 78 Reasons Why Your Book May Never Be Published and 14 Reasons Why It Just Might. Penguin, 2005. Read this only if you're very determined. Walsh's book is a harsh but honest look at publishing realities for writers of both fiction and nonfiction, including biographers. An editor and the co-founder of his own publishing house, he offers 78 short chapters on what can keep a book from finding a publisher and 14 more on how to improve the prospects of finding one, as well as some useful straight talk about book publishing as a business and why editors go into it. Among the reasons Walsh gives for
not getting published, I especially liked, "You Do Not Kill Your Little Darlings" and "You Sacrifice Clarity for 'Art,'" problems that can afflict experienced biographers as well as novices. (Wish he'd also included, "You Refer to Your Work as 'Creative Non-Fiction.'" Why? The next time you're in a bookstore, ask the bookseller where he keeps his "creative nonfiction." Then watch him try to figure out what shelf to send you to.) Of Walsh's final 14, my favorite was, "You Learn from Rejection." Not for the faint of heart, but salutary, smart, and valuable.
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WEBSITES for BIOGRAPHERS AND READERS The Biographer's Craft. Newsletter for practicing biographers and general readers with announcements of new books, interviews, practical tips.
Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawai'i at Manoa Archives past issues of
Biography, an academic journal. Also: conference announcements, numerous scholarly links for researchers.
Consortium for the Study of Biography. New at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Journalism.
(Back to top) DAUGHTER OF PERSIA Website of
Sattareh Farman Farmaian.
PODCAST: "That Was Sattareh in Action." Dona Munker recalls what she heard about Sattareh Farman Farmaian after writing
Daughter of Persia.
Two moving anthologies by and about Iranian-American women, compiled by Persian-American poet and essayist
Persis Karim.
Click here for more information.
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Notice of Copyright:
All material on this website
Copyright © 2005-2010 by Dona Munker except where expressly stated or contributed by others. Copying, altering, or reproducing this material in any form without written permission is prohibited by law and may be prosecuted regardless of the venue or purpose of the copying.
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