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,
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.
(Back to top)
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.)
(Back to top)
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.
(Back to top) 
