Crafting a Winning Book Proposal - The Prospectus

In the fifth episode of Publish My Book, Avi completes his deep dive into the book proposal by zooming in on the prospectus. Avi breaks down the key components of a prospectus and offers expert tips to ensure the strongest output. Authors should first highlight the significance of your work and identify how it meaningfully contributes to existing literature. Part of this process requires revisiting your dream publisher’s literature collections to ensure your research has a potential home. Avi then discusses how to define your target audience, how to articulate why you are best suited to author your research, and how to calculate your publishing timeline, and your publishing budget. Avi provides a sample prospectus template (located in the related resources section) for you to adapt to your own book proposal.

Related resources:

• How to Get a Contract from a Reputable Academic Publisher Before You Write Your Book
• Sample book proposal
• Hear from acquisitions editors: The Authors Handbook to Academic Book Publishing
• Identify your current stage within the publishing journey (and navigate the rest of the journey with success!)

Episode transcript:

Hello and welcome to Publish My Book, your one-stop podcast for navigating the publishing journey from manuscript draft to published monograph. In each episode, we'll dive into a specific topic on the road to publishing your manuscript to offer you clarity, confidence, and an increased chance of publication success. I'm Avi Staiman, host of the Publish My Book podcast. Over the past 10 years, I've had the privilege of being the CEO of Academic Language Experts, a company dedicated to helping researchers and research institutions publish their high-quality humanities and social sciences research with respected academic publishers. During that time, I've worked with thousands of talented scholars from research universities and colleges to museums, foundations, and scholarly associations around the world, shepherding their research from ideation to publication. Now I've teamed up with the incredible team at the New Books Network to share everything I've learned about the journey with you, to help you streamline your process and transfer your idea into a book published by your dream publisher. Publish My Book, here we go!

In today's episode, we're going to talk about the prospectus. And the prospectus is the most important part of your proposal, your book proposal, that you're going to send off to the acquisitions editor at your intended publisher. So what is a prospectus? A prospectus is where you have the opportunity to lay out in two, three, four pages all about your book, but it's a little bit different than what you'd expect. So let's dive in.

First of all, you're going to want to define the significance of your work. And this is probably something you're familiar with. There's a certain amount of academic rigor that needs to go into your research process that you want to be able to share with the acquisitions editors so they understand what it is that you're coming to do, what it is that you found, why it’s important. However, that can't come in a vacuum and it needs to engage with other books that have been published and talk about what's similar and what's different. As researchers, we sometimes have a tendency to think, well you know what, we want to be entirely unique, we want to show an entirely different perspective. But actually, you need to couch your ideas and say, well, this relates to previous books, but it's different from previous books as well. Otherwise, there's no justification for publishing your book. And what this does for the publisher is it signals to them where it is that your research fits into the existing literature and whether or not they're the ones who are going to be able to publish it successfully.

I would suggest thinking carefully about what the related literature is. If you're intending to submit to a particular publisher, let's take Stanford University Press for the sake of an example, you may want to bring a few Stanford books that it relates to. If it doesn't relate to any Stanford books, you may want to ask yourself, well, is this actually the best publisher for my manuscript? Now, you also want to think about where it fits into the publisher portfolio. So if they have a series that you're interested in joining, we'll talk about that series in an intelligent and informed way and ask them or suggest to them where you think your book would fit in a particular series in engaging in dialogue with existing research. That helps the acquisitions editors understand what it is that you're working on and how they may be able to sell your book to potential authors and readers and libraries.

Now the other thing you want to do very carefully is to define your target audience. Talk about who it is that's going to potentially be interested in reading your book. You can talk about students, you can talk about lecturers, other professors, maybe people in industries who might be interested in what you have to say. The more specific you can get, while still leaving room for enough people to buy the book to make it worthwhile, will give you an upper hand and advantage. Keep in mind, most books are not best sellers and not going to sell even up to a thousand copies. So be realistic about what it is that your book can do, but also think about the cycles and circles around your book. So let's say, for example, you're studying 16th-century philosophy in Spain. Well, would 15th century Spanish philosophers or researchers of this field or 17th century, would they be interested? Maybe there would be Spanish historians who might be interested in this field as well. So think about the concentric circles around you that maybe would broaden your audience a little bit greater.

Also, of course, you want to talk a little bit about yourself and why you're the best person to actually write this proposal. I will give you in the show notes an example of a well-written proposal so you can take that as a template and plug it in. There's also going to be some practical considerations that you want to keep in mind for your prospectus. You want to talk about a timeline. The acquisitions editor is going to want to know, well, is this something that you're going to be done with in six months? Is it already finished now? Is it something that's going to take you two years to write? That's going to be important when they're planning out their publishing schedule, because, at the end of the day, we are dependent on the publisher.

The second thing is about budget and funding. While this may be an uncomfortable topic to talk about, it's important to think in advance about whether we're going to need grants or funding help. Look into whether the publisher charges for their services or not, or whether you'll get certain monies for selling a book. It's going to be important to understand if you need external funding or a grant to help you publish this book and how you're going to go about doing that.

The other thing that comes up a lot is the question of permissions. If there are images or other artifacts that you want to include in your book that require permissions, that can sometimes be a bottleneck and hold up the publishing process. So be sure to raise these issues with your publisher at the very outset so they know exactly what they're going into and you have a smooth ride.

Thank you for joining us on today's Publish My Book podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for links to some of the resources we mentioned and hit the subscribe button to get notifications every time we publish a new episode. Thank you to our partners at the New Books Network for helping us to produce these episodes and the platform they've built to spread to researchers around the world. Until next time, keep on forging ahead with your research and moving forward on the road to publication.