This week, I finished filling out my Author’s Questionnaire for Allworth Press related to my upcoming book, Talk Up Your Book. This is something that goes out to authors from the publishing house publicity department. The purpose is to help staff with their publicity efforts.
Not all Author’s Questionnaires are the same, but most are much like putting together a book proposal. The publicist want to know about the author’s background, education, affiliations, awards and so forth. What other books has the author produced? What are his/her sales and marketing leads and media connections? What is this book’s competition and what makes this book different? I was asked to list potential markets outside of the traditional for this book and regions where this book could be promoted. They also ask you to describe the book and write your bio.
Sounds something like a book proposal, doesn’t it?
When filling one of these out, you must do so always with promotion in mind. If you didn’t understand before how important it is to know your audience and how to reach them, you will once you start addressing the questions on an Author’s Questionnaire. And you might if you would sit down and write a complete book proposal before you even start writing your book—especially for nonfiction.
I present an excellent online book proposal course. If you are considering writing or are in the beginning stages of writing a nonfiction book, you might want to sign up for this course and get some one-on-one guidance through the process. The questions you must respond to for a book proposal can give you incredibly more insight into the commercial potential for your nonfiction book. The process of writing a book proposal might motivate you to change the focus of the book in order to make it more salable. I’ve known many authors to do so. One of them, after submitting her newly altered book proposal to Houghton Mifflin, landed a publishing contract.
You can write a book proposal for fiction or a children’s book, too. And I recommend it. The book proposal for fiction looks different than the book proposal for nonfiction, but it is as important.
You may be thinking creative thoughts as you write your fiction or nonfiction book. But if you have commercial success in mind, you’d better start looking at your project from a marketing standpoint and writing a book proposal is a smart way to do this.
Sign up for my book proposal course this week and I’ll send you a FREE copy of my book, How to Write a Successful Book Proposal http://www.matilijapress.com/course_bookproposal.htm
The course is $200 for 8-weeks. It is all done via email. Learn more about how it works here:
http://matilijapress.com/course_howwork.htm
We’ll have a guest blogger this week. I’ll be introducing Hope Clark who will talk about her journey as a successful working writer during the day and a fiction author by night. How in the world does she organize her time? That was my question. Hope has some remarkable and inspiring answers. Stay tuned—her blog will be posted sometime this week.