Part Four of “How to Find a Publisher for Your Nonfiction Book”
Your sample chapters are the most important part of your nonfiction book proposal. Excellent writing in the sample chapters can rescue an average proposal. Much better to have an outstanding proposal and excellent chapters. But you’re auditioning to write a book not a proposal, so make sure the book chapters are as polished as they can be in the amount of time you have to prepare them. Your prospective agent or editor will assume you’re sending your absolute best work.
As an acquisitions editor, here’s what I’m looking for when I review an author’s sample chapters.
1. Compelling prose. Even before grasping your message, an editor will want to know how well you communicate in writing. The sample chapters need to draw in the target reader and compel him or her to continue reading. Perhaps the most important thing I look for in nonfiction writing is an economy of language. Avoid wasting your reader’s time by using unnecessary words. Nonfiction writing is most compelling when it is direct and quickly to the point. Also, be sure to match your language to your target audience. If you’re writing to the average person, make sure your writing sounds more at home in the home or neighborhood than in academia.
2. Clear message. Good writing is not an end but a means. As important as it is to write compelling prose, a great book begins with your passion about a specific message. Each sample chapter needs to have a clear message, and it should be clear from your annotated table of contents how the chapter fits into the flow of the book and supports the book’s overall message.
3. Consistent structure. This is one of the biggest mistakes that I see frequently in sample chapters. Writing a nonfiction book is not a free form activity. Although it doesn’t have to be immediately transparent to the reader, nonfiction chapters need to be guided by an internal structure, and that internal structure should be more or less consistent across all the chapters in a book. One typical structure goes something like this: (1) introduce a need or challenge; (2) explain the need or challenge in more detail; (3) identify the solution to the need or challenge; (4) guide the reader to apply the solution to their situation; and (5) summarize and conclude the chapter. You don’t have to make the structure obvious, if that’s not your style, but your readers will intuitively sense when the structure is there and become frustrated when it’s not.
If the proposal is the interview before the audition, the sample chapters are the actual audition. So make sure they are polished and ready for public consumption. But there also has to come a time when you’re ready to remove your hand and release them to your prospective agent or editor. Don’t worry that they’re not perfect; they never are and never will be. Stick to your deadline, whether it’s self-imposed or suggested by your agent or editor, and be satisfied that you’ve done the best you could do with the time and resources that were available to you.
Continue the series: Do I Need an Agent?