Sunday, November 17, 2013
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Day Seven: Write the sample chapter and revise your proposal
Day Seven Tasks
Task One: Write the sample chapter
Write the first chapter of your book.
Task Two: Revision
Revise the first draft of your complete proposal.
Today you write your sample chapter
Write your sample chapter using the A,B, and C method that we talked about. I've also described a fast method that I use to write chapters of books below. If you prefer to use a tape recorder, then by all means do that. I prefer to write first drafts by hand, on yellow legal pads. I find that I can relax and enjoy myself when I write by hand. Whichever method you use, just settle down and write the first chapter.
Note: invariably, after you sell the proposal, and are writing the book, you will make changes and it's likely that the final first chapter you write will be very different from the version you're writing today. Since that's the case, just write as quickly as you can.
A fast chapter-writing method
Writing a chapter of a book is like writing a long article. Most chapters are somewhere between 2000 and 4000 words, but if you want to write a short chapter of 1500 words, that's fine too. Remember that you can’t do any of this wrong, and it's your choice.
Here's a method that I use when I'm writing a chapter in a book. Adapt it to your own needs.
Reread the notes that you've made during this week.
Then take five minutes and write out exactly what you want to include in this chapter. This isn't an outline; your notes can be as brief, or as lengthy as you wish. I usually talk to myself on paper, like this:
"What do I want to cover in this chapter? I want the reader to understand (this process/ theory/ idea/ method). I also want to include these five anecdotes. What do the anecdotes show? The first one shows that…"
By talking to myself like this, I eliminate performance anxiety. Some writers do the same thing by writing their chapters as letters: they can take it easy, as if they're talking to a friend. The big benefit of using a method like this is that it does away with formality and stiffness.
When you feel ready, start to write. As you're writing, just get the words out as quickly as you can. It's useful to set a goal for the number of pages in an hour. I usually aim for three pages an hour. However, if you feel that having a number of pages that you "must" write an hour stresses you, then don't set a goal like this.
When you're writing:
- Turn on the answering machine, and turn off your email program;
- Close your office door;
- Set yourself goal of either pages written, or words written;
- Don’t reread your notes. If you need to look something up, just write "tk" which is an old printer's mark meaning "to come", and keep on writing. If you stop to look something up it may derail your train of thought. Plus you may think: oh, I need to cover this, and this, and this must go in. Assure yourself that you won’t be able to cover everything. Trust that your subconscious will deliver the material which needs to go into the first chapter ;
- Keep going even if you're sure that what you’re writing is less than your best work. You can tidy it all up later. Just get the words down.
If you find that your writing goes slowly with this first chapter, that's normal. First chapters are always slow to write, because you haven’t found the right tone and voice in which to write your book. Once you find those, the writing will go much more easily. Because first chapters are always slow, it's important that you don’t leave your desk until you've written the number of words you set out to write.
Revising your proposal
When you've completed the first chapter, print out the entire proposal. Then go and do something else --- go and watch a movie, or have lunch. Take a good break of at least a couple of hours before you come back to read your proposal.
How to revise
Just like your writing, your revision will go through several phases. Copyediting, or line revision, where you fiddle with word choices and grammar, comes last.
Here are the steps:
Read the proposal straight through. Keep note-making to a minimum. This is so you can get a sense of how the material reads. When you've finished this initial read-through, ask yourself whether what you've written stays close to your blurb. If it doesn’t, you can either change your blurb --- perhaps you've been inspired with some creative new ideas --- or you can change your proposal.
While this read-through is fresh in your mind, write out your impressions. Have you covered most of what you want to include? What else do you think the proposal needs?
Before you start cutting, rename your document (Version B or B1, or whatever naming process makes sense to you).
Now go through the proposal and take out the material that you've decided you want to eliminate. If it's too painful to simply hit the Delete key, cut the material and paste it into another document.
In this pass through the proposal, add the material the proposal needs. Perhaps you've done some additional research --- write up all the material you want to include.
Print out your proposal, and read it through to check for coherency. Make sure that you've included transitions in your sample chapter.
In this pass through the material, you get to jazz it up, if you wish.
In this final pass through your proposal, check for grammar and word usage.
You're done!
You've done it, congratulations!
You've completed your book proposal. Now comes the fun part, selling your proposal. If you need any help with this, you can contact me at any time. Don't forget to send me a copy of the ms for your free appraisal.
Good luck. See you on the bestseller lists. :-)
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Thursday, March 6, 2008
Day Six: Write the proposal
Day Six Task
Task One: Write the initial draft of your book proposal
Write the draft quickly. Don’t think too much about it. In your initial draft, you aim for quantity, rather than quality.
Relax! You'll write your draft in stages
Today's the big day. You're going to write your book proposal. If you're starting to freeze up at the thought, relax. You've already done a lot of preparation work, and you're not going to write it all at once. You'll write it by taking the proposal through several clearly defined stages:
A. First draft. This is your "thinking" draft, in which you think on paper. In this draft, you write whatever you like. You're aiming for quantity here, rather than quality. Write this draft full-steam ahead, without stopping to look things up. Consider "writing" this draft by talking into a tape recorder.
If you need to do some spot research, just leave a note to yourself, and keep working on the draft. You can look up individual items later. The benefit of doing specific research later is that you may find it's unnecessary. It's quite possible that you'll eliminate this material from a later draft.
B. Your second draft. Your first draft has shown you what you want to say. In this draft, you have a crack at saying it. In your second draft, you organize. You decide what material you want to include, and perhaps expand on, and what material you'll delete. Think of this draft as shaping your material.
Occasionally you'll want to take this shaping draft through several documents. You may have a B1, B2, B3 and B4 version, for example.
Keep your drafts.
Use the "File, Save As" menu option of your word processor to keep versions of your book proposal. When you change the name of the file as you work through different versions, it means that you can always go back and reinsert something that you deleted, because it's in a previous version.
C. Your clean-up draft. Your final draft. You've said what you want to say, now you get a chance to say it better. You clean up the redundancies and spice it up.
Paradoxically, the easiest way to write well is to allow yourself to write badly. Every day. This is because writing is hard when you try to think and write at the same time. Allow yourself to think on paper for as many drafts as you need. Then write the final draft with confidence.
Woody Allen once said that 90 per cent of success at anything was just showing up. I've found that that's very true. So no matter how bad you feel your writing is at any given time, go ahead anyway. Your writing is not as bad as you think, it's simply a crisis of confidence, and even if it is rough when you first get it on the computer screen, it can be fixed. However, if you hesitate, and don’t get it on the computer screen, you have nothing to fix. Get it done!
At the end of this book, in the Appendix, you'll find the complete proposal for my book 7 Days To Easy Money: Copywriting Success. This is a real proposal, and it won an agent contract on first reading. Read it through so that you can see exactly what goes into creating a proposal.
We've already covered what your proposal must contain, here it is again, for reference. Please print this page out:
- A title page, with the title, subtitle, author, word count of the completed book, and estimated time frame for completion. You might state: "75,000 words, completion three months after agreement".
- An overview: a description of the book. This can be as short as a paragraph, or several pages long.
- The background of the author. Your biography, as it relates to your expertise for this book.
- The competition in the marketplace. This is where you mention the top four or five titles which are your book's competitors. (Note: if there are dozens of competitors for your book, this is a good thing, because it means that the subject area is popular. Your book will need to take a new slant.)
- Promotions. This is where you describe how you will promote your book, both before and after publication.
- A chapter outline.
- A sample chapter, or two chapters. This is always the first chapter, and if you're sending two chapters, it's the Introduction and Chapter One, or if there's no Introduction, it's Chapters One and Two.
- Attachments. Optional. You may want to attach articles you've written about the book's topic, or any relevant supporting material.
Let's write the proposal
Your chapter outline
You've already been working on a major part of the proposal --- the chapter outline. If you like, you can begin today's work by spending an hour or two with that. If your chapter outline still has major holes in it, don't worry too much about it. Today we'll complete an initial draft of the complete proposal, and you can fill in the gaps later.
Your background—why you're the person to write this book
Next, we'll work on the background section.
The first piece of info you'll need to include in the background section is a brief bio. Every book you own has a bio of the author, so take a few books off your shelves and study the author bios. Most are short. Novelists' bios mention the writer's interests, partner, children and pets. The bios of nonfiction writers (that's you) emphasize the writer's academic credentials if it's important to the writer's credibility, or the writer's experience in the field the book covers, or anything else which might be relevant.
Here's an example of a bio, which I wrote as part of the book proposal for: 7 Days To Easy Money: Copywriting Success--
Quick Bio
Australian author and journalist Angela Booth has been writing successfully for 25 years. She writes about business, technology, women's issues, and creativity. Her books include: LifeTime: Better Time Management in 21 Days, Home Sweet Office: Your Home Office, Improve Your Memory in 21 Days, and Making the Internet Work for Your Business. Her feature articles have appeared in magazines like Energy for Women, The Australian Women's Weekly, Woman's Day, New Idea, Vogue, and numerous other print and online magazines.
She's also a working copywriter, writing copy for businesses ranging from international corporations to small businesses with less than five employees.
Your bio must be slanted so that it relates to those experiences which make you the perfect person to write the book you're proposing. For example, let's say that in your daily life you're a doctor. The book you're proposing is a gardening book: how to grow your own organic vegetables. In your bio, might call yourself "Dr. Jane Smith", but for this bio, you’d mention that you grew up on a farm, have grown organic vegetables for ten years, and write a monthly column for Eat Your Organic Veggies Magazine. Your experiences as a doctor wouldn’t be appropriate for this book. On the other hand (just to confuse you), if you intended to cover the health and nutritional benefits of organic vegetables at great length, then your credentials as a doctor would be important, and you'd include them.
Please remember that there is no way you can do any of this wrong --- something either works, or it doesn't. You can always make changes later, when you get feedback .
Many of my writing students focus so much on the "correct" way of doing something, that they never get anything done. Join any writing group, and discussions of correct formatting abound. If you start to get nervous about anything you're doing, wondering whether you're doing it "right", simply tell yourself: "this is the way I choose to do it. I may choose another way at some other time, but right now, I do it this way, and it's the right way for me."
In addition to your bio, if you have publishing credits you'll want to mention them here. Your publishing credits should be paid credits, rather than work you've done for promotional purposes, or material for which you weren't paid.
What if you don’t have any publishing credits? Everyone has to start somewhere. If you don’t have any credits, don’t worry about them. If your proposal is excellent, and a publisher wants to commission the book, then your lack of credits won’t count against you.
Write the Overview
Now you'll know why you spent time writing your blurb. The Overview, the description of your book, is the first part of your proposal that agents and publishers will read. It's your book in a nutshell. It's also merely an expanded version of your blurb.
I've included a sample Overview below. It's from the proposal for my book Writing To Sell In The Internet Age.
Sample Overview Writing To Sell In The Internet Age
The Internet gives writers unlimited new opportunities
Writing To Sell In The Internet Age empowers writers by revealing the immense new earning power that Internet technology gives them. While many writers are comfortable using the Internet for email and research, most are unaware that they now have many new opportunities, including:
- Clever new ways to market their work and services with tools like autoresponders, email mini-courses, ebooks, auctions, and promotional ezines;
- The opportunity to develop a loyal following of readers. They can write and publish instantly, to a worldwide audience millions strong, with tools like Web logs (blogs). This loyal following makes a writer more appealing to traditional publishers;
- The ability to target specific niches, and to garner an income much more quickly than they can via traditional publishing routes. A writer can write an ebook or report this month, and sell it forever.
The Internet gives writers the power to be their own publisher and distributor by selling their work directly to readers. Many writers are already taking advantage of the possibilities. Judy Cullins, who's building an online reputation as "The Book Coach", says of selling her ebooks online directly to readers: "The first months, I had no idea at the time how powerful this method was. My income bolted to over $3000 a month in less than a year."
The new rule for writers in the Internet age is: "Create, promote, sell". What's amazing is that writers can do all this in one day, even in hours. When I write a report, I can format it in PDF (Portable Document Format) at the click of a key. That's the publishing done. I can then add the report to the online store at my Web site in minutes --- distribution done. Then I can send an announcement out to my subscribers (promotion done) and watch the sales rolling in. Best of all I don't have to be anywhere in particular to do this. I can do it as easily on a sun-drenched beach on the Great Barrier Reef off northern
Are these capabilities within the reach of non-technically-inclined writers? Yes! Although I've been writing about software, computers and the Internet for many years, I'm by no means a geek. The writers who shared their anecdotes and success stories for this book aren't geeks either. They're writers who've seen opportunities and grabbed at them. Many of these writer/ publisher/ entrepreneurs didn’t come to writing via traditional publishing routes. Many started out as marketers, or entrepreneurs. They looked at the Internet, saw how relatively easy it is to make money selling information online, and worked out ways to do it. The Internet is the answer to writers' prayers. It puts writers in control of their own destinies.
We see what we expect to see, so writers have seen the Internet as a magazine-style "content" market. But because of the unlimited free content online, few sites buy content. (This may change, as more sites with good content change to a reader-pays business model.) Writers haven't yet seen that the Internet is a completely new environment, where they can write what they want to write, and can, without too much effort, make a good living.
A how-to plus a how-they-did-it
Writing To Sell In The Internet Age is a how-to for writers to access their new opportunities, but it's also a how-they-did-it. I'll be describing the avenues that writer-entrepreneurs are developing to use the Internet to make excellent money in many new ways. These writers are exploring their new options with amazement and delight. It's an exciting time. I'll be including their stories and tips in this book to inspire other writers that they can do it too.
I won’t include descriptions of technology and the online environment. Information on how to build a Web site, how to sell online, how to create a mailing list and other technical minutiae is readily available online. Also because technology is advancing so quickly, technical information rapidly becomes outdated. What won't change however are the basic concepts of writing to sell in the Internet age.
Include in your Overview:
- A description of your book;
- Why your book is important;
- Something about what's included in your book;
- Why you're the person to write this book.
Don’t hype, BUT DO INCLUDE EVERYTHING RELEVANT
Please don’t try to hype your book in the Overview. Just tell your story as quickly and as clearly as you can.
Also, don’t hold anything back. I've read many proposals from beginning writers where the writer has tried to be coy: "For the complete details, you'll need to read the book!" This kind of thing will work against you. You're asking a publisher to invest around $30,000 to publish your book. Anyone who's going to spend that amount of money wants all the details. Please provide them.
Your Overview can be as long, or as short, as you feel it needs to be. Some proposals have one-page Overviews, in others, the writer needs five pages to describe the book. Use your own judgement here. If you need five pages, then by all means, use them. However, if your Overview is long, make sure that you haven’t repeated information.
Write the Promotions section
Next, you'll write the Promotions section. In this section, you will show your publisher that you intend to go all-out to promote your book. You can do this with an investment of money, or of time. If you can do both, you should.
Company CEOs, sports figures, celebrities and other well-heeled people often write books, or have books written for them by ghost-writers. It's understood that any celebrity will hire a public relations agency, and will spend a lot of money nudging the book up the bestseller list. If you have money to spend on a public relations agency, mention this in your proposal. Your publisher will be pleased that you intend to get behind the book.
If you don’t have swags of cash lying around that you can use to promote your book, you'll need to invest time. There are a million ways you can promote your book, from pasting magnetic letters onto your car and building a Web site to calling bookstores all over the country to talk them into stocking your book. You can even act as your own PR agency, and without anything other than an Internet connection and some time, can do a lot of work to help sell your book. Anything that you do will be appreciated by the publisher.
Sample Promotions section Writing To Sell In The Internet Age
Here's the Promotions section from Writing to Sell in the Internet Age.
My primary focus will be on online promotions. For two reasons: I'm located in Australia, which means I can’t go the usual book store/ speaking venue route to promote the book. And I've been online since 1992, pre-World Wide Web, and know how to promote online. (I wrote a book called Making the Internet Work for Your Business, which is about setting up a small business online (1998, Allen & Unwin)). Also, it's appropriate to promote a book about selling in the age of the Internet on the Internet.
I have a popular Web site (http://www.digital-e.biz/) and three email ezines, and I'll be promoting Writing To Sell In the Internet Age heavily in all of them. I now spend ten hours a week working on my site and my ezines, and on promotional activities for them, so I'll increase that to 15 hours, so that I regularly spend considerable time on the book's promotion.
My offline focus will be on getting press coverage and radio interviews.
My plan outline
- I will create a mini-Web site for Writing To Sell In the Internet Age. This will be a three page sales site, the name of the site to be taken from the book. Such mini-sites are called "buy, bookmark or leave" sites. The entire site is similar to a direct mail letter: its only purpose is to encourage the reader to buy the book. The beauty of such sites is that if they're efficiently linked from other sites, such as my business site, Digital-e, and other sites in which I have an interest, they quickly rank #1 in the search top search engines, that is, in Yahoo! and Google.com.
- I'll write a long sales page on Digital-e for Writing To Sell In the Internet Age. (See an example: http://www.digital-e.biz/ecourses2.html)
- I'll develop an email newsletter for the book's buyers, and prospective buyers. This monthly newsletter will update the information in the book, and will include a link for readers to buy the book online.
- I'll subscribe to a press release Web site, so I can send out monthly online news releases for the book to thousands of media outlets in the
- I'll interact in online chat rooms, conferences, and in mailing lists, subtly promoting the book.
- I'll create a private discussion group for the book's readers in the "Talk" forums section of my Digital-e Web site, so that readers can ask questions and interact with me directly. As this forum grows, I'll appoint reader-moderators for the various discussions.
Write the Competition section
On Day Two, you did a lot of work on assessing the market for your book. Here's where you use all that information. Choose anywhere from three to five books which you estimate will be your book's main competitors. Describe how your book is different from these books, and how your book fills a niche in the marketplace.
Include the names of the books, the authors, and the year of publication. If these books were published several years ago, this is all to the good.
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Day Five: Write your proposal query letter, and submit it to agents and publishers
Day Five Tasks
Task One: Start a contact list of agents and publishers
Finding an agent/ publisher is the first step to selling your book proposal. However, even after you've sold your proposal, you'll want to stay current with agent and publisher news in order to sell your next proposal, and the one after that.
Start a contact list of agents and publishers, and as you find snippets of information online, or in your offline reading, enter notes into your database. Information you might want to add includes: recent sales and the amount the book was sold for, movements of editors from one publishing house to the next, and publishing house changes.
Collecting and maintaining all this information shouldn’t be viewed as a chore. It's vital business intelligence. It could also help you to increase your income by many thousands of dollars each year.
Task Two: Send out ten query letters to agents and publishers
Agents and publishers take time to respond. So today you'll create a query letter for your proposal, and will send it out to ten agents and publishers. You can choose to send only to agents, or only to publishers, or you may want to send out five to each group.
Today you write your proposal query letter
Now you're written the blurb for your book, and the chapter outline, the next step is to start asking agents and publishers whether they’re interested in looking at the proposal for your book. This means that you'll send out a query letter, asking agents and publishers to look at your proposal.
Note: some new authors want to omit this step. They figure --- hey, I'll just send the complete proposal, so I get a response faster. Unfortunately, sending a complete unsolicited proposal will SLOW the process. Agents and publishers receive so many packages of material that they stack them in a spare office, and the office junior gets to read them once every couple of months. Send a query letter, then send the proposals to those people who've asked to see it.
Do you need an agent?
Yes. And no. It can sometimes be harder to get an agent than it is to get a publisher, so it's a good idea to query both. When you get an agent, you can tell the agent which publishers you've already queried. If you get an agent before you get a publisher, you can approach agents who are a good fit for your book to ask them whether they will handle the contract negotiations for you.
You definitely need an agent if you intend to write more than one book. As to whether you should go agent-hunting, the answer is a definite yes. This isn't only because an agent will take a lot of the submission and negotiation workload, and because the agent has (one hopes) her fingers constantly on the pulse of publishing and knows what’s going on, it's also because an agent forms a handy cut-off switch between you and the publisher. When problems occur --- let's say that your editor's demands annoy you, or that your advance payments are late, you've got someone to gripe at other than your editor.
On the other hand, if you'd rather keep all the profits your book makes, and feel that you can handle your contract negotiations yourself, you may want to skip agents, and focus on publishers.
Online resources to help you in your agent-hunt
Here's a list of online resources which will help you to decide whether or not you want an agent, and agent contact details.
WritersNet: http://www.writers.net/agents/browse/loc.php
This is an excellent site, with many useful articles telling you what agents do, as well as agent lists you can browse.
Another excellent site with articles and agent listings.
Index of US Literary Agents: http://www.writersservices.com
This page is on the Writer's Services site, and you'll also find listings of
Preditors and Editors: http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/
You'll want to bookmark this site. It’s a wonderful resource to help you to maintain your writing career.
Literary Agent Warnings: http://www.sfwa.org/beware/agents.html
Unfortunately, as in all fields, in writing there are scam artists. This page, maintained by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Inc, gives you the low-down (pun intended) on literary scammers.
Note: things change fast online. Do your own "literary agents" query on www.Google.com and other search engines for additional agent information and listings.
Sending your query letter directly to publishers
Many large publishers will not look at unagented material. However, this still leaves many who will. And most will look at any letter that you care to send them. Because a publisher can buy your book, and because you're likely to get a much faster response from a publisher than you will from an agent, I recommend that in addition to sending out your queries to agents, you also send them to publishers.
The best resource for finding publisher information online is Writersmarket.com at http://www.writersmarket.com
From the Web site:
>>
WritersMarket.com is your wired key to publishing success, providing the most comprehensive—and always up-to-date—market contact info available, with electronic tools you won't find anywhere else. And it's all risk-free. Sign up today and get:
- More markets than you'll find anywhere else. And with our constantly updated and verified contact listings, you'll find the market information you need to get your work into the hands of the right editor or agent today.
- Easy-to-use searches. Looking for a specific magazine or book publisher? Just type in the title. Or, widen your prospects with our new keyword search for broad category results.
- Expert advice from top editors, agents and writers. Want to know how to improve your cover and query letters? Have a question for an editor or agent? Find the answer you need here.
- Daily industry updates. Debbi Ridpath Ohi has her finger on the publishing pulse - and she shares her insider info with you.
- Plus, personalize your home page, keep track of your work with Submission Tracker, save your best prospects in Favorites' Folders, and more!
>>
Please note, I don’t have any connection to Writersmarket.com, aside from subscribing to the service. I've been a subscriber for several years, and have always been happy with the service. It will save you a lot of time looking for publishers. Of course, the service isn't restricted to publisher listings. You'll find agent listings as well, plus magazine listings and a library of useful articles.
Yes, you can multiple-submit your query letter, and even your proposal
Once you start marketing your proposal, you'll find that some agents and publishers include words like "no multiple submissions" when they're telling authors how they want to receive proposals. In other words, they want exclusivity. Unfortunately, there's a big problem with this. The problem is time. Most agents and editors will take a month or longer to evaluate your proposal. Some take as long as six months. Considering that you may need to approach 20 to 30 editors and/ or publishers, you could still be sending out your book three years from now. Professional writers ignore these admonitions, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t eat.
Sample Query Letter
What goes into a query letter? I've included a sample query letter that I've sent out, and which garnered an agent contract immediately. You'll see that this letter is:
- Short;
- To the point.
I could have spent a lot longer composing this letter --- I could have included a better hook, and included the book's blurb. At the time I sent it out however, I didn’t have the time to spend on revisions. I'm including this plain-vanilla, so-so query letter here for a reason. That is --- and I've found this to be true in 25 years of writing --- it's important that you SHOW UP. In other words, while you might want each piece of writing you send out to be perfect, or at least brilliant, sometimes you don’t have the time. At those times, send it out anyway.
Get into the habit of treating your work with a certain amount of aplomb. That is, even thought it's not perfect, and you could make it better if you had the time and energy, 90 per cent of the time what matters is that you send out your work. If you're a closet perfectionist, as I am, this will be hard for you at first.
XXX
XXX
[DATE]
Dear XX
My name is Angela Booth. I'm seeking representation for my book: 7 Days To Easy-Money--- Copywriting Success.
The book is aimed at writers who would like to make money by copywriting (writing for business). As a copywriter, writers write the words that sell: everyday words. The words on ads, leaflets, brochures, press releases, product instructions and labels, newsletters, direct mail, and on Web sites.
I've been selling the material as an ebook and as an e-course on my Web site (http://www.digital-e.biz/ ) for several months. It has been well received, and now I'd like to take the material and use it as the basis for a book.
Although there are several popular books on copywriting, none approach the material in a step-by-step fashion. My book's constructed so that at the end of seven days and seven lessons, the reader has built a viable freelance copywriting business.
My credentials for writing the book: I've been both a successful copywriter and writer for over 25 years. I've included a brief bio below.
Please let me know if you'd like to see a proposal for the book.
Sincerely
Angela Booth
Bio:
Australian author and journalist Angela Booth writes about business, technology, women's issues, and creativity. Her books include: LifeTime: Better Time Management in 21 Days, Home Sweet Office: Your Home Office, Improve Your Memory in 21 Days, and Making the Internet Work for Your Business. Her feature articles have appeared in The Australian Women's Weekly, Woman's Day, New Idea, Vogue, and numerous other print and online magazines.
~~Angela Booth partial list of credits~~
A professional writer for 25 years, her credits include:
* Feature articles for mass market women's magazines in
* Feature articles for computer magazines;
* Content work for Web sites and Internet newsletters, including the Internet Business Forum (http://ibizhome.com/)
* Business books for major publishers, including many books in Prentice Hall's WorkWise series (translated into several Asian and European languages);
* A series of romance novels for Macdonald Futura
At her Digital-e --- Info to Go Web site (http://www.digital-e.biz/), Angela Booth publishers three popular ezines: Creative Small Biz and Your EveryDay Write, which are free to subscribers, and Freelance Copy Write, which has paying subscribers. She also teaches online writing courses.
Another sample query letter
Here's another sample query letter. At the time of writing, I haven't sent out this letter. Again however, you can see that it's short, to the point, and contains nothing irrelevant. Over the years, I've found that whether I'm pitching (selling) nonfiction or fiction, I've had the best responses to letters which were less than one page in length.
Remember that nothing is set in stone. It's all an experiment. Write your letter at whatever length seems best to you. Your motto should be: "whatever works".
XXXX
XXXX
[DATE]
Dear XX
My name is Angela Booth. I'm seeking representation for my book: Writing To Sell In the Internet Age. The target audience is writers, and aspiring writers, who want to be paid for their skill with words.
Writing To Sell In the Internet Age discusses the new earning power that Internet technology gives writers. Many writers are comfortable using the Internet for email and research, but most are unaware that they now have many new opportunities, including:
- Clever new ways to market their work and services with tools like autoresponders, email mini-courses, ebooks, and promotional ezines;
- The opportunity to develop a loyal following of readers. They can write and publish instantly, to a worldwide audience millions strong, with tools like Web logs (blogs);
- The ability to target specific niches, and to garner an income much faster than they can via traditional publishing routes. A writer can write an ebook or report this month, and sell it forever.
I've been selling this material as an ebook and as an e-course on my Web site (http://www.digital-e.biz/ ) for several months. It has been well received, and now I'd like to take the material and use it as the basis for a book.
My credentials for writing the book: I've been an author, writer and copywriter over 25 years. I've been online since 1993, and know the online world well. (I've included a brief bio below.)
As far as I'm aware, there's no other book currently on the market which presents this material. The few Internet-related books for writers currently available came out around 2000, during the height of the dot com boom, and focus on online markets for writers.
Please let me know if you'd like to see a proposal for the book.
Sincerely
Angela Booth
Write your query letter!
The next step is to write your own query letter. Don’t take too long over this. Make a couple of notes of points you want to include, and write it. You can include your blurb --- your blurb could in fact make up the bulk of your letter.
Here's a quick outline for your letter:
A. Introduce yourself in 20 words or less, and state your business --- "I'm seeking representation for my book: [title]…"
B. Blurb.
C. Your credentials.
D. Identify the market for the book.
"Don'ts" for your query letter
1. Don't make unsupported claims for yourself or your book
Please don't say that you're successful or that you've written a bestseller. Only beginning writers make claims like this. The agent or editor will immediately classify you as a novice, and an irritating one at that.
(On the other hand, if a well-known much-published writer has praised you or your book, say so, and give his/ her contact details so that the editor can call him/ her.)
2. Don't mention that you're unpublished
The agent will figure it out when you don’t mention writing credits. Please note: THIS IS NOT A BAD THING. Everyone has to start somewhere. Editors and agents know this, and they won’t hold it against you. They will judge your book proposal query on its merits. If an agent feels that your material is something that she can sell, she will contact you. As will an editor, if she feels that the writing in your query letter is to the point and professional, and she thinks that your book idea is a good one.
Unless these people have publishing credits, no one cares. Mentioning them marks you not only as an amateur, but also as someone who may be difficult to work with.
What do I mean by "difficult to work with"? Before you sign a contract, your agent and editor will judge your behavior, looking for tell-tale signs that you might be a problem writer.
Problem writers:
o Argue when asked to rewrite. Almost everything you write will need to be rewritten. Your agent will ask you to add, delete or revise material in your proposal. Your editor will ask for rewrites on your book, and perhaps more than one rewrite. Therefore, if you show any sign that you may drag your feet over these chores, or do them without a song on your lips, they will dump you. Life's too short, and publishing is too competitive to indulge anyone's temperament;
o Procrastinate. Publishing is always on a tight deadline. From the day of your first contact, you must show that you can work to deadline.
o Can't follow instructions. Never be afraid to ask if there is something you don’t understand. For example, if you're asked for a "bio" and you don’t know how to write one, ask. No one will think less of you for asking, but they will take several steps backward if you don’t follow instructions, or if you decide that you will do things your way.
o Turn in a messy or less-than-pristine typescript. Or fail to send an electronic file when asked.
Many writers are never asked for a proposal because they don’t nail the query letter. If you tell an agent your book is about "growing up in the fifties", the agent will simply ignore you. This is not specific enough. You must be totally specific, so that the person you're writing to can visualize the book, and can also visualize where it will fit into the marketplace.
Writers do this sort of thing because they're insecure. They imagine that if they're vague, the agent will ask to see their book because they want to know exactly what it's about. This is a HUGE mistake. Agents and editors receive hundreds of letters and proposals each week. If you're not specific, you give the impression that you haven’t thought out your proposal.
