Why you need a book proposal for a non-fiction book [Video]

Charles Duhigg explains why a book proposal is so important for non-fiction. The full interview is on The Creative Penn Podcast.

In nonfiction, you put together a book proposal and you sell the book proposal and they give you an advance based on the book proposal, and then you use that advance to essentially go write the book.

What I do is I put together a 50 to 70 page proposal and that proposal is first of all written in the voice of the book. So it’s actually as if you’re reading little samples of chapters from the book. And what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to prove to myself as much as my editor, there’s enough here for a book.

That allows me to kind of stress test whether there is a book there. ’cause if I can’t write a great proposal, I’m not gonna be able to write a great book.

The other thing is that for the publisher, it gives them a lot of confidence. They’re going to be comfortable paying you a larger advance if they have a fully fleshed out proposal.