Thread by @lportwoodstacer

Welcome to my unfortunate new series, A Baby Is Awake and I’m Giving Writing Advice. Tonight’s offering: book proposal overviews (for academic books).

Perennial caveat: you don’t *have to* use this structure in your project description. Try it if you’re stuck or don’t know where to begin. Change it up as needed to make it fit your voice and your project (and the format requirements of your target press, if applicable)

Ok here’s a structure I like for book proposal overviews (each ▪️ is a paragraph):
▪️hook + big takeaway
▪️central arg + conclusions in more detail
▪️what’s at stake
▪️describe evidence & methods used to build arg
▪️lay out structure/narrative arc of bk
▪️audience + press fit

Paragraph 1: Your hook can be an intriguing episode from your research or a particularly vivid or familiar real-world example that readers can relate to. Use it as an entry to the big thing you want readers to take from the book

Paragraph 2: Take a few more sentences to lay out the book’s main arguments. Here’s where you also give away the conclusion(s). Readers/reviewers need to know this up front in order to assess the merit of the contribution (sounds harsh but this is the peer reviewer’s actual job)

Paragraph 3: explain why the conclusions in this book matter. Highlight consequences for human actors here (or maybe animals/environment). What will readers know, believe, and/or be able to do as a result of this book?

Paragraph 4: here’s where you can talk about the Stuff in the book. What sites/objects/texts do you analyze, and how? Give the reader a sense of what you’re basing your argument on and how you arrived at your conclusions

Paragraph 5: describe how you get from point A to point B over the course of the book’s chapters. You don’t have to list and describe every chapter here! You’ll do that in the annotated table of contents later. Here you can give a more general sense of the arc of the book

Optional paragraph: you can maaaaaybe talk about how the book contributes/intervenes in a scholarly field, esp. if you’re doing theory. Don’t get bogged down in the literature & don’t spend *too* much time talking abt other scholars/paradigms. This just isn’t the place for that

Paragraph 6: describe the main audiences you are trying to reach & why they’ll find the bk useful. Bonus points if you can explain why your target press is the right place to reach those audiences. (Sometimes this para. is explicitly requested elsewhere in the proposal template.)

I like this structure because someone can kinda stop reading at any point & still appreciate what the bk is abt & why it’s impt. But don’t forget to check the template given by your press. Following directions early on says that you will be easy to work with later. Good luck!