Richard Altschuler & Associates, Inc.

Scholarly Book Proposal
Preparation & Contracting

The mission of our Scholarly Book Proposal Preparation & Contracting Service is to help professors and other scholarly writers prepare professional book proposal packages, select the right presses for their work, and obtain favorable contracts with academic and trade publishers. The primer below is intended to help you “happily publish” your book by providing you with valuable insights and information about the 21^st century publishing environment. After you have read the primer, if you have questions about publishing your book, would like more information, or wish to arrange for immediate services, simply click on the “How to Contact Us” link below, call 212-397-7233, or send an email to raltschuler@rcn.com.

A Primer on How to Prepare a Book Proposal Package,
Select a Publisher, and Obtain a Favorable Contract

Below you’ll find valuable perspectives and answers to key questions about preparing your proposal for acquisitions editors, targeting the right publishers, and increasing your chance of getting a publishing contract, including the following: What are the elements of the successful book proposal package? How do you identify the publishers most likely to publish your book? What are the best ways to increase your chance of being offered a publishing contract? How can you turn an editor’s rejection of your work into a publishing contract? What publishing options exist today and which one is best for you? For answers to these and related questions, click on the choices below.

Elements of the Successful
Book Proposal Package

The successful book proposal package quickly lets acquisitions editors see what is unique about your book, how it develops from chapter to chapter, how you write and connect with your intended audience, and who the market is for your work. Let’s look at each of these respective elements of the successful book proposal package.

What is Unique About Your Book?
As a scholarly writer, it is assumed you are making a contribution to a topic rather than rehashing old material to fill a category that sells well. So one of the most important things publishers will want to know about your book is, “What is your unique selling point (USP)”?

You can communicate the USP of your book to editors and sales personnel, as well as to outside readers, in a variety of ways, e.g., in the introductory chapter to the book itself, in a cover letter, and on a separate sheet designed specifically for this purpose. In general, you should frequently repeat your USP in a proposal, since editors and salespeople are preoccupied with many book projects. Repetition increases the probability that they will notice what is unique — and salable — about your book.

Ideally the USP should be stated simply and in a few sentences. This approach will increase the chance that editors and sales personnel who read your work will remember your USP and easily be able to communicate it to others.

We can help you conceptualize and effectively communicate your USP to editors and sales personnel at publishing houses, in the ways that are most suitable for your book proposal.

How Does Your Book Develop?
Editors want to know if your book has a dynamic and will hold the reader’s attention. Does it develop logically? Provide fresh examples and insights? Or does it lull, confuse, and bore the reader?

Editors can quickly learn the answers to these questions from your chapter-by-chapter outline — a second key ingredient of the successful book proposal package. The outline presents the title of each chapter and describes, in a few sentences, its content and contribution to the whole.

Your chapter-by-chapter descriptions should be concise, clear, and interestingly written. If the editors and salespeople cannot understand your outline or find it boring, then there is little chance they will want to read your sample chapter(s), let alone your complete manuscript

We can help you develop and present your chapter-by-chapter outline so that it attracts the attention of the editors and salespeople, excites their curiosity and interest, makes them appreciate the quality of your writing, and whets their appetite to read your sample chapters.

How Do You Write and Communicate with Your Intended Audience?
If the editors find your USP and outline interesting, then they will want to see how you write a chapter and connect with readers. In some instances, an editor may want to see only one completed chapter. If so, it is a good idea to submit a prefatory or introductory chapter that presents your USP and an overview of your book’s content and development.

If an editor wants two sample chapters, then select any other chapter you feel is powerfully written and interesting to read. Your sample chapter(s) will enable the editors — plus the sales personnel and outside readers —to decide if you communicate effectively with an audience or will need help from the editorial department or an outside writer. If the latter, then your chance of getting a contract is decreased, and perhaps eliminated, since your work will entail added staff time and expense.

We can ensure that your sample chapters are clearly and interestingly written, dynamically developed, and focused around the USP of your book — as well as meet the requirements of the press involving style, language usage, and formatting.

What is Your Market Analysis?
Your book proposal can be applauded by editors, salespeople, and outside readers, but that is usually not enough to go to contract. The publisher will want to know if its financial investment in your book will be justified by revenue from sales. In short, for every type of publisher today, including the university presses, the publishing decision is almost always about the “bottom line.”

Because market factors are so important to publishers in determining whether or not to publish your book and what kind of contract to offer you, you should include in your proposal package the following information, crucial for marketing your work: (a) the titles of all other books in print that can compete with your proposed book, indicating, at a minimum, their publishers and how long they have been in print; (b) the maximum size of the potential market for your proposed book; and (c) a demographic description of the individuals in your target market(s), including their age, sex, ethnicity, occupational or school status, and residential distribution.

In addition, it is wise to include any special factors that may account for sales, e.g., if your book can be used in college courses and the publisher, therefore, can anticipate bulk sales, then you should list the courses, where they are taught, and what the potential size of the student market is for your work.

Conducting market research can be relatively fast and easy, if you know where to obtain the pertinent information.

We can help you specify both the competition for your proposed book and the market, in terms of demographic characteristics and size. We can also help you present your market analysis effectively, using both text and visual devices, such as tables and graphs.

How to Select the Right
Press for Your Work

A good book proposal package sent to the wrong publisher will guarantee either rejection or oblivion for your work. What is the “wrong” publisher? There are many possible answers to this question. It may be one that does not publish books in your discipline; or that recently published several books on your topic that have not sold well; or that has announced it will not publish any more books during the year; or that is in the middle of relocating its editorial offices and is in disarray; or that will publish your book but not promote or sell it, among other possibilities.

If your book is related to current events, then sending your proposal to the wrong presses can ruin your chance of getting published anywhere, because of the generally slow speed of decision-making and response-time in the publishing industry. These factors have induced many trade book agents to submit the same proposal to several presses at once, and sometimes run an auction on the work, with a rather short time deadline attached. This situation is rare in scholarly publishing, however, since few authors have agents with the clout to run auctions or “hot properties” for a mass audience that could excite large publishers to get into a bidding war. For these reasons, it is especially important for scholarly authors to know how to identify the publishers most ideal for their work at the time their proposal packages are ready for submission.

Identifying the right publishers for a specific book proposal requires research and an intimate knowledge of the publishing environment based on first-hand experience, including personal relationships with editors at publishing houses.

Based on our many years of success working with scholarly authors and editors at academic and trade publishers, we can help you identify the publishers most likely to publish your book and that also meet specific financial, production, or distribution criteria you may designate.

How to Increase Your Chance of Getting a
Favorable Book Publishing Contract

Once your proposal package is completed and you know where you are going to send it, you must decide whether you or a professional representative, such as a book agent or literary attorney, will submit the proposal and negotiate a contract. A contract, per se, can be good or bad for you and your work, depending on the terms and conditions. It is, therefore, vitally important that you fully understand what to expect from your publisher, from the moment you sign the contract.

Submitting Your Proposal to Scholarly and Niche Publishers

If you are submitting your proposal to small university presses or independent niche publishers, you should plan to submit it yourself, especially if your target presses typically offer no or low advances or require subventions. A major reason is that reputable professional representatives earn income only from a percentage (usually 10%-15%) of an author’s advance, so they have little incentive to represent work that will involve no or a low advance (such as a serious scholarly monograph intended for professors in a highly specialized discipline).

Submitting Your proposal to Large Publishers
If you are submitting your proposal to large trade or scholarly publishers, including university presses that publish at least several dozen titles a year and sometimes offer sizeable advances, then you should strongly consider using a professional representative to submit your work. This approach is absolutely necessary, in fact, with the largest publishing houses, since they only consider book proposals submitted by agents or other professional representatives and automatically reject “unsolicited manuscripts.” If you personally submit your proposal to large presses, therefore, you will almost certainly lose valuable time, which can reduce your chance of being published by any press if your work is related to current events.

We can serve as your professional representative to help get your proposal read by an editor at the right press for your work and receive a timely reply. We can also submit your proposal to several publishing houses at the same time, and even run an auction, if your work justifies this approach.

Negotiating Your Book Publishing Contract
If a professional representative submitted your proposal and you are offered a contract, then your representative will review the contract and should work to negotiate the best possible terms on your behalf. If you submitted your proposal yourself and are offered a contract, then it is strongly advised that you have an intellectual property lawyer or agent review your contract and negotiate the final terms with the publisher on your behalf. This is especially important in the current publishing environment, when contracts are more complex and confusing than ever before, especially as regards electronic rights, copyright law, distribution, and applicable financial matters, such as royalties, an advance, a subvention, and reprint rights fees.

We can effectively represent your interests to both trade and academic publishers, including the compensation you receive, the terms of payment, the rights to your work, and performance deadlines and criteria, among other contractual terms and conditions.

The Author Subvention
The author subvention, or payment to a publisher, allows many writers to have their books prestigiously published that otherwise would be rejected based on publishers’ projected revenues from sales ¾ including books that are well written, solidly researched, and contribute to a field of study. This is especially true for serious scholarly books intended for academicians in specialized disciplines. In serious scholarly publishing, in fact, the subvention has become commonplace for two major reasons: (1) universities have reduced or eliminated subsidies to their own presses, which now must be “profit centers,” and (2) academic libraries have been buying fewer scholarly books ¾ especially monographs ¾ due to outlays they must make for journals and computer-based hardware and software. Most university presses, therefore, have been forced into a “profit-or-perish” situation, and increasingly need subventions to bring books to market that are not expected to earn enough revenue from sales to justify their investment.

A growing number of independent publishers today model themselves on university presses, i.e., they require subventions to help defray the cost of publishing worthy books for limited audiences and thus minimize marketplace risk. Such risk is at an all-time high in today’s revolutionary book publishing environment. This environment is characterized by chain stores that promote “Big Publisher” titles, celebrity-author media campaigns that dominate public consciousness, “electronic books,” soaring production costs, and an unprecedented number of books in print that compete for consumers’ attention ¾ many of them financed by authors who use Internet “publishing” sites and print-on-demand (POD) technologies to publish their books.

While many people confuse university presses and other reputable publishers that accept subventions with so-called “vanity presses,” the former are distinguished from the latter because their decision to publish is separate from the willingness of the author to pay.

In the revolutionary 21^st century book-publishing environment, the role of the subvention will continue to grow. As it does, more authors than ever before will have the opportunity for their books to be prestigiously published and to negotiate contractual terms that best serve their interests.

As your professional representative, we can guide you through the subvention process and offer the subvention on your behalf, if deemed advisable, to a publisher of your choice, including one that has previously rejected your work.