Although good books differ from one another in a multitude of ways, good book proposals are surprisingly similar. All of them have a set of standard features. In this chapter, we will describe what these features are.

CHOOSING A PUBLISHER

One thing you should realize right away is that, whereas a scientific article generally may be submitted to only one scientific journal at a time, a book proposal typically may be submitted to several publishers simultaneously. It is to your advantage to submit the proposal to multiple publishers, because what greatly interests one publisher may be of limited or no interest to another. Each publisher has its own set of priorities and standards for judging proposals. Before sending a book proposal to a given publisher, look at some of that publisher's recent books to determine whether your book would be a good match. Or you may even want to write the publisher a letter of inquiry, briefly describing what you would like to do and asking whether the publisher would be interested in seeing a full-length proposal. In this way, you can save yourself and the publisher the bother of a submission if the proposal does not fit into its publishing program. Publishers vary in the level of prestige, the quality of the books they produce, the amount of royalties they pay, and many other respects. You may therefore want to talk to publishers’ representatives (called acquisitions editors) as well as to other people who have worked with various publishers to get advice as to which houses are worth pursuing. Looking at a publishing house's publication list, however, is usually the best way of evaluating both the range and quality of the books it produces.

In our careers, we have worked with a large number of different publishers and have found that they vary greatly in almost every respect imaginable. Some are completely honest, and others less so. Some always pay royalties on time; others get around to it sooner or later, but often later. Some spare no expense to produce the finest-quality books; others produce books that start to come loose from the binding as soon as they are opened. Working with a publisher is like forming a close relationship. It is to your advantage to make sure that you carefully investigate the publisher with which you will enter into a relationship.