The Art of the Book Proposal
Wednesday, September 29
About 85% of all books sold are nonfiction, but almost 100% of those titles are sold before they’re even written. The ones that sell all have this in common: a killer proposal.
This one-night seminar will introduce participants to the components required to craft this necessary sales tool to land an agent and help that agent land a publisher. We’ll cover how to do market analysis, how to put together outlines and sample chapters, and how to write query and cover letters, as well as how to perfect author bios and platforms.
Students will walk out with a solid sense of how to assemble a polished and compelling 20-40-page proposal—the first step to selling almost any nonfiction manuscript from memoir to self-help to true crime to humor and everything in between.
Writer’s RoadmapWhether you have an idea for a nonfiction book that you’ve been meaning to get around to writing, or whether you have a finished nonfiction manuscript that you’re trying to sell, this is the seminar for you.
About the Instructor: Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press (publisher of the popular Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction and Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry), and the author of the critical study Reading with Oprah: the Book Club that Changed America, the memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object, the essay collection For You For You I Am Trilling These Songs, and the poetry collections Oneiromance (an epithalamion) and That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (with Elisa Gabbert). Currently at work on her first novel, she lives and writes in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago with her husband, the writer Martin Seay. She blogs sporadically at www.kathleenrooney.com.