Episode 7 - The Basics: Book Proposals 101

Writing a book proposal can be overwhelming, especially for experts and entrepreneurs who want to publish a nonfiction book. In this episode, Meghan Stevenson, an experienced proposal writer and publishing insider, breaks down why book proposals matter and why most authors shouldn’t write them alone. She shares how a strong proposal can make or break your chances of landing a literary agent and a book deal. She'll cover the key elements of a proposal, from the business sections—like competitive titles and marketing plans—to the editorial sections that showcase your book’s unique message.

You’ll also hear common mistakes authors make, like skipping audience-building, failing to research comparable books, and sending proposals to the wrong agents. Meghan also discusses how literary agents and publishers evaluate proposals, why platform matters, and how a well-crafted submission speeds up the publishing process. If you’re serious about getting published, this episode will save you time, money, and frustration.

Find the 3Ps freebie here: https://meghanstevenson.kit.com/50230df9e1 

Episode Highlights:
(0:00 Intro)
(5:06) What a book proposal is and why publishers require it
(7:02) Key elements of a strong proposal
(9:37) Why publishers prefer proposals over full books
(10:54) Common mistakes authors make with proposals
(15:49) The role of literary agents and how they evaluate proposals
(22:46) How editors and publishers review submissions
(24:38) Why your platform and audience matter in the publishing world
(26:10) How a strong proposal can fast-track your book deal
(29:38) Outro

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Have a great idea for a book but don't know where to start?MeghanStevenson.com/quiz


Traditional publishing expert Meghan Stevenson blasts open the gates of the “Big 5” – Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan – to share what every entrepreneur and expert needs to know about landing a book deal.

In episodes released every other Monday, Meghan shares wisdom and stories from 20+ years in publishing as well as interviews with authors, literary agents, and editors. She also answers questions from listeners like you.

Whether you are an experienced entrepreneur with an empire, or are just starting out – this podcast will help you understand what you need to do in order to turn your dream of being a bestselling author into real life.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

But you want to, as an expert or entrepreneur, you will save time. You will save money in hiring someone who knows and has a proven track record of writing great, saleable book proposals in your category in what you're writing, with experience with authors that are similar like you, maybe even people you know. Welcome to the Kind of a big book deal podcast where entrepreneurs come to learn about traditional publishing. I'm your host, Meghan Stevenson. After working as an editor for two of the biggest traditional publishers, I started my own business helping entrepreneurs become authors. To date, my clients have earned over $5 million from publishers like Penguin, random House, simon Schuster and Harper Collins. In these podcast episodes, I blast open the well-kept gates to traditional publishing. I'll explain what every entrepreneur needs to know about landing a book deal without losing your mind. I'm going to share stories, answer your questions, interview the successful authors I've worked with and probably say platform more than a tech bro. So if you dream of landing on a bestseller list but have no idea how, this is the podcast for you and I am so, so glad you're here. So I'm going to start this episode with kind of a hot take. I've never seen a proposal that I did not want to rip to shreds like absolute shreds. So there are well-meaning authors out there maybe yourself included that go to a workshop or attend a writing membership or they go to a writer's conference or they buy a book or they buy a PDF guide all about how to write your own book proposal. And, honestly, even when these are well executed, I literally am like I could tear this to shreds and make it so much better and that's why I really, really believe that authors shouldn't write their own book proposals, and I've believed this for a long time and it's before I even made a business out of writing book proposals. Like I would see author written proposals as an editor at Simon Schuster, at Penguin, and I'd be like, all right, great, I got to rewrite this in order for me to acquire this book Right. So proposals are super important and that's what we're going to talk about in this episode. Proposals are the last of the three P's in my get a book deal framework, which, if you have listened to these episodes, to the previous, you know six episodes. You know the framework already, but I'm going to go over it just in case y'all haven't listened to everything or you forgotten, because people forget stuff. I forget stuff all the time. So the three p's to get a book deal are potential, platform and proposal, and that is how you get a book deal. So today we're going to talk about proposals.

Speaker 1: 2:55

This is episode 7 of a 10-part series on traditional book publishing. Meant for experts and entrepreneurs who want to become. Meant for experts and entrepreneurs who want to become authors and are working on how-to books, self-help books, prescriptive nonfiction. So if you haven't heard the previous episodes, I'm going to quote my grandma and the Beverly Hillbillies when I say go on back. Now you hear and go check that out because it all built right.

Speaker 1: 3:21

But seriously, podcasts are free. I'm offering a ton of great information, and so it is literally your loss if you don't listen to all of these episodes. You're already listening, so be sure to subscribe. And if you want really good karma, leave a review or share this with a friend who also wants to publish a book. So we're also on YouTube. So if you wanna go see how I got frostbit the remaining bits of frostnip I got snowmobiling in Idaho with my visor open on my snowmobile, or funny appearances from my Shih Tzu, you can also tune in there too. I wanted to mention that, cause I don't think I've mentioned it so far in any other episode. Whether you're on your iPhone, you're listening in the car on Spotify or running YouTube in the background while you do tours, clean your house, the same rules apply. I would love it if you like, share, subscribe and write a review again. If you really want those camera points, I really appreciate it.

Speaker 1: 4:21

I don't have to tell you as authors that it can be kind of crazy to create content and not hear anything back, and I'm in that zone right now hardcore. So please give me your feedback. Let me know what you want to know. You can leave a voicemail. That's all in the show notes for you. So let's get back to the regularly scheduled programming, shall we?

Speaker 1: 4:43

Let's get back to what you came to the episode for, which is to learn about book proposals. You don't want to hear about my insecurity. You want to write a book proposal, right? So if you're like most people I meet, you might be wondering what is a book proposal? Anyway, I literally had this conversation at dinner with a new friend and her husband like why do publishers want a book proposal instead of a whole book? One question at a time, partner.

Speaker 1: 5:06

So let's start with what a book proposal is and how you write a good one, right? How do you do it? Well, if I told you you know well how to write a book proposal, I'd be out of business as a proposal writer. But seriously, a proposal is kind of like a mullet. It's business in the front party, in the back, with business being how you're going to market and sell the book and the competitive space that it's in the books that are similar to it. And then the party is the editorial. Right, the party is you delivering what only you can deliver, which is your methodology, your framework. You know what you're writing this book for and what this book is.

Speaker 1: 5:46

I'm kind of joking about this being a mullet, but honestly, the way we do book proposals in my business is kind of mullety. Like, I handle the business sections and I have collaborators to handle the editorial who also then write full books with our clients when they get book deals right, I do that too, but I have to do this and I have to be on Instagram and all sorts of things, so like I only have limited amount of time to do that now, but I have hired collabs who are also former editors and writers of novels and other things that are professional writers to help you. So we do separate proposals in that way and I feel like it's really helpful, because where authors go wrong is that y'all come to it as artists. Y'all come to it way too close to the material and so you think this book is like a precious work of art and agents and editors need to see it as a product and they need to understand as a commodity in a lot of ways, and so we want to like kind of separate that out and just part of the reason that we separate in my mind, I separate the business sections from the editorial, even though they are two sides of the same coin and they are like inextricably linked. So let's talk about those business sections real quick. So we have what's called the overview.

Speaker 1: 7:02

This is essentially the book pitch. It's like the headless horseman of pitches and I'm going to like throw in so many different analogies. Just get used to it. I just tend to do that. I mix metaphors constantly. So the headless horseman of you know pitches. I say that because the proposal is often going to a publishing house and an agent without you there, right, without your explanation of like sort of what's going on, and so it needs to be headless, it needs to be personless and it needs to come across amazingly um to the agent and the editor. They need to feel your vibe before you even get into the room and that's really important. So that's the overview. It is essentially a, you know, a headless, personless pitch.

Speaker 1: 7:46

The about the author, which is like a humble brag on steroids. The competitive and comparative titles, which I've talked about a little bit in the episode two, about category, how you're going to market the book and promote it. That's all in the front, right. So that's all the business in the front, in front of the mullet, and then the editorial content is in the back. That's the party. That's chapter summaries and a sample chapter. So that is what is a proposal.

Speaker 1: 8:14

Proposals don't always come with a sample chapter. It sort of depends on you know who you're being represented by on the agent side. You know what your platform is Like. Someone that's a huge, huge celebrity usually doesn't have to write out this whole business you're being represented by on the agent side. You know what your platform is like. Someone that's a huge, huge celebrity usually doesn't have to write out this whole business case for themselves. They just show up and say, hey, I'm Taylor Swift or hey, I'm Kenny Chesney. He just got a book deal. Um, recently, in like February of 2025, it was announced. Like Kenny Chesney doesn't have to do a lot, he just has to roll up and be like I'm Kenny Giosni, you want to publish my book, versus the average author who does have to do a lot, right? Even if you have a really big platform, you've got to explain that platform and really make a case for your book. So that's all I'm going to say about what goes into a proposal, because everything else that I do within four clients that has resulted in me and my team being able to have an 80% success rate over the last five years, being able to earn our clients more than $6 million in advances. That's all proprietary right. I'm not out here to give away what I actually sell and as entrepreneurs, as experts, you probably have respect for that is my guess.

Speaker 1: 9:23

But what I can tell you is why publishers want a proposal instead of a whole book, and a mistake, though, a lot of people make is they go into their hidey hole and they write the book instead of working on their platform, which is a really easy mistake to make. The reason that we use proposals instead of whole books is because everyone in publishing is overworked, underpaid and constantly busy. The more complex answer to that is because we'd like to evaluate potential projects, otherwise known as submissions, fast. We have to look at them fast and we also want the ability to tinker with those projects if needed, and that happens at both the literary agent stage and the editor stage. So that kind of brings us to the submission process, which happens once you have a book proposal, preferably written by someone like me and my team, who knows what they're doing. So the reason you want somebody that knows what they're doing is because it's going to be that headless horseman, right? It's going to be that headless horseman, right? It's going to be that book proposal that goes out on its own as a word doc to people you don't know, selling something that presumably is very important to you.

Speaker 1: 10:36

And the reason that book book proposals are so, so important and why I think authors should pay people to do them, is because a book proposal can make or break your chance at landing a literary agent and your chance at landing a book deal right. It is single-handedly the thing that makes or breaks the book deal, and there are so many mistakes that well-meaning authors make in this process, right? So we could talk about the really easy mistake, which is that whole Heidi hole idea of like I'm going to go write this amazing book and what you're not doing when you're doing that is building your platform or continue to build your business or grow your audience. We just had a client recently who was dead set on writing her own book when she got her book deal and then, like a month later, she was like you know what? Actually, I'm going to hire you guys, because I know that only I can promote and grow my business. Y'all can write the book for me. And that's exactly what we sort of exist in this space to do is to help experts and entrepreneurs like yourself do what only you can do, and we can do what we can do. Right, and we can do it better, so why not? It's kind of like why would I do my own books if I could hire a bookkeeper? Why would I do my own taxes if I could hire an accountant? Same idea.

Speaker 1: 11:57

So not building a platform or an audience first is a big mistake people make with their proposals. So that's really, really that's an easy, avoidable mistake, right? If you don't have a platform, don't write a proposal because you're basically, if you hire someone like me, you're investing a lot of money into a very expensive Google document. That's not going to get you the result that you want.

Speaker 1: 12:18

Another example that I see people making with proposals when you're authors and you're writing them yourself is that you're not doing enough homework on the books in the category that are similar to you. Right, you don't really know, and that's because, if I walked into an independent bookstore and I did this yesterday actually my independent bookstore, which I love shopping at, only has room for about 50 to 100 books in all of prescriptive nonfiction Okay, all of it, so their finance books. If I was a personal finance expert, I might find five books there, but that does not indicate actually how many personal finance books on the market right now are doing. Well, I would have to have sort of industry inside knowledge to do that, or be a bookseller or go to like multiple stores or like hunt down Amazon or buy a subscription to Publisher's Marketplace, right, you don't have the level of knowledge that you need to really understand where your book fits in the comps.

Speaker 1: 13:18

Comps is something we argue about with agents like my team and I all the time with agents like my team and I all the time Like that is the one area of our proposals where I'm like if the agent changes this completely, I'm good with it, because comps are very complicated and they're nuanced and they're complex and they're hard to nail down when you are outside the industry which, as an expert or an entrepreneur, you are. So another mistake people make when writing their proposals is when they send it to literary agents. They don't research the literary agents or they don't pay attention to submission guidelines, which is really important, and I see a lot of it of you know, hey, like I reached out to these agents, they never got back to me, or I don't know how to approach an agent, or any of those kind of questions like that's all into that, right, because there are so many communities online Pub tips on Reddit is great that you can find for, like submitting to literary agents. And the last mistake is that I see a lot of just plain bad writing that doesn't really fit how the industry views, know, views proposals right, like they just don't. It's just not written in a way that we would see either. It's that whole precious, my precious book will find everybody, everybody will love this book. I'm gonna be oprah tomorrow attitude, which I don't see as much as I used to, but like it's still there, right. Or my favorite, which is like magic, things are going to happen to me, the industry is going to come to me, the day show is going to come to me, right?

Speaker 1: 14:53

I recently had a comment on Instagram from someone that doesn't work on the type of book that I work on, who literally wanted to put her manuscript onto a platform that agents would go come find her at, and what that shows to me is that she does not recognize that most agents, especially those that represent fiction and I know we're not talking about that here get thousands of queries a month, thousands, so like they're not going to go looking for shit, they're just not so it's just really interesting. So those are the mistakes that I see with a proposal, right? So you go hidey hole. You don't build the platform and audience which basically makes your proposal DOA. You don't understand the industry, whether that's the comps, the agents like, how things get submitted, how things get published, the requirements that publishers are looking for and I want to touch on agents for a second because it's such an important part of the proposal process.

Speaker 1: 15:49

So literary agents, who we work with a lot. I am not a literary agent. I do a lot of the same work that a literary agent does, but I'm not your legal or financial representative, which is really what an agent's primary job is. So literary agents they work on commissions. They only get paid when you get a book deal right. So that means they have to make a lot of bets usually and they also have to monitor their own time and their own bandwidth. They're never super 100% sure that anything is going to sell and also they have reputations to protect. They need to sell a certain amount of books because if you as an agent send a lot of crappy proposals, you get legitimately a label slapped onto you. We used to call them shmagents to stand for like shady agents. Shmagents Like yes, are the agents sure in name and in practice, but they're not good agents, right, their stuff isn't.

Speaker 1: 16:49

When I used to get certain projects from certain agents, they would go to the top of my list. I'd read them immediately. I would be able to say you know the publisher? Or my boss would say, hey, who's the agent on this? And if I told them someone reputable they'd be go okay. Or people have reputations to be hard negotiators or easy negotiators or fun people or whatever, right? So agents really look at clients the same way I do in terms of like, hey, do I think this can sell? Do I think there's a market for it? Do I think it can help people? Can everyone win? Here is basically the question we're asking, and that's really important, right? And when we think about agents and the fact that they work on commission, when you roll up and expect them to drop everything to write the proposal with you or represent you, you're basically asking them to work for free. So that's a pretty big ask in a lot of ways, and we want to make sure that we're bringing them. As authors, and certainly as someone who's helping my clients to get book deals, I want to make their life easy, right? I want to make it an obvious yes. I want to make it so clear that this person's going to sell that we don't have any problem getting a literary agent, and that's what's happened.

Speaker 1: 18:04

Now, some literary agents will help you with a proposal. Sometimes you don't need to hire us, right? But other times and this is especially true for the experienced literary agents that I tend to work with, which includes some of the best in the business. Their time is taken up by existing clients, so they will literally send you to someone like me and say, hey, like we would love for you to write this proposal. We just want someone else to help you do it Right In order to expedite the process, in order to actually make sure you do it, in order to save them time and, you know, just make sure that they're getting a quality proposal and they don't have to go to draft six or seven. All that is to say spoiler alert, in case you didn't already notice.

Speaker 1: 18:54

I feel really strongly that authors shouldn't write their own book proposals. You will save time, you will save money by hiring my team or someone like us. You don't have to hire us, right? But, like, I really think I mean, if you're listening're listening this podcast, you should want to hire us because we're awesome, but you want to as an expert or entrepreneur. You will save time. You will save money in hiring someone who knows and has a proven track record of writing great, saleable book proposals in your category, in what you're writing, with experience with authors that are similar like you, maybe even people you know, and that's true.

Speaker 1: 19:33

Even when you want to write the book, even when you want to write the chapter summaries, which we often allow our clients to do, encourage them to do, even when you write your own content, even when you see yourself as a writer, there's this weird dynamic of people who see themselves as writers kind of like negging on or hating ghostwriters or sort of like. There's a feeling of like resentment there and I just think that's so weird because I can't do my job without you as the author, right, and the reason for that, like I can't like ghostwriter, it's not that like I can create ideas out of the scratch. I can't do that. I need you to be present, I need you to bring me your expertise and your voice and all of that, and I'm just here to shape it right. It's kind of like an accountant again, like they can't do your taxes without your W-2 and your tax forms.

Speaker 1: 20:26

Same idea the reason I feel really strongly that an author shouldn't write their own proposal, in addition to like it being a make or break, is that hopefully it's a one and done, meaning that once you get an agent, you'll never have to get an agent again. Hopefully, because that relationship will be amazing and you won't have to fire your agent or get a new one, or even, if you do, you'll be able to say, hey, I have this previous book deal, will you help me with my new book deal? Um, but then also, once you get a book deal, it can be ridiculously easy to get a second book deal. Sometimes you don't even need to like go through the submission process again, right, or the proposal process. You have a book that does well and your editor reaches back out and says, hey, second book, that's the easiest way, right? I'm getting ahead of myself. Now, though, um and I hope this doesn't sound super rambly because I totally went off script for this trying to help you out, I'm going to follow my own advice that I tell authors all the time and say first book first. So we're going to talk about your first book first. Let's go back into that. So let's pretend you are lucky enough to get a literary agent, right, with your proposal. And that's when your proposal goes to editors who work at publishers, publishing houses, right. So editors, we have to also say, are overworked and incredibly busy.

Speaker 1: 21:53

Back in the day, when I first started doing kind of this publishing, thought leadership, minor influencer thing, I reached out to a bunch of the editors I knew and I said, hey, how many submissions do you get a week? And I was really surprised and I used to be an editor so I kind of remembered. But they told me they get anywhere from 10 to 25 submissions a week, meaning they get 10 to 25 proposals a week. So can you imagine doing that right? Your job and this is not your whole job, by the way, this is a facet of your job and this is not your whole job, by the way, this is a facet of your job is to read 10 to 25, 50 to 100 page proposals a week. Would you guess that you have to make a determination really quickly on what you're going to pursue and what you're not going to pursue? You betcha. So that is really really important.

Speaker 1: 22:46

Editors also let's say they do love a project, then they have to go get buy-in. Your headless horseman gallops again in your proposal, it goes out again. And they have to get buy-in from publishers and often publicity and marketing folks that aren't going to read your proposal. You know word for word, which is why it's really important to have a great proposal and while editors aren't going to read the proposal pretty closely. They're going to read really word for word. It's likely that their colleagues aren't going to. So it's really important that the proposal sing and be amazing and that the overview needs to be easy to explain quickly, needs to be easy to comprehend quickly and needs to sort of last between meetings so they remember that your submission is something they want. So lastly and I know I've jumped around a lot today I hope it's been easy to follow Because of how the industry works the agent, the editor, the publicist, the marketer, the big boss of the publishing, publishing house they're likely to move through your project really quickly.

Speaker 1: 23:58

Their kind of process and their evaluation of your project and this is particularly true for an agent or an editor is going to be to google you. Right, if they're interested in the project, they're going to start googling you, which is circling back to why your platform matters so much, because those google results are a quick, if admittedly inaccurate, way to gauge how many books you're going to sell, because all of this again is guessing in a very capitalist manner is this book that you are proposing in the book proposal going to be successful? So I could recap all of that, but I just want to sum it up to say your proposal is so important. It is the make or break of you getting a book deal, of you getting a literary agent, of you being able to explain what you want to say and also, just for you, as the author expert, figuring out if you even want to do this, because a proposal is a lot of work and we have at least a client every year who could be successful with their proposal, reads it and says, hey, this has been great, I love you, Meghan, I love you, Meghan's team, but I don't really want to do this right now, and thank you for helping me discover that. So that's really, really important too.

Speaker 1: 25:23

It's not just that you're doing this to get a book deal. A lot of times, people come to me transactionally and say, hey, Meghan, I want a book deal, will you write a book proposal for me because I want all this money, or I want this New York Times for the seller or whatever, and it's like, yeah, I can do that, but you got to be able to do the work of what we're proposing and what we're promising these folks, whether it's a literary agent or publisher which is not only writing the book but promoting it and selling it and supporting it and getting out in front of it and being really the writer and the author of it. Okay, so that was the not so quick and not so dirty explanation of why we use book proposals in traditional publishing, at least for prescriptive nonfiction, and it's also a little bit of an explanation on why my team and I exist and what we do. We help authors like yourself navigate the tricky and slippery and gatekept world of traditional publishing. Last year, my team and I had a 90% success rate at landing deals for our clients, and that is fucking incredible.

Speaker 1: 26:27

Partially, we are that successful because we intentionally pick clients that we know have a great chance at being able to land a literary agent and get a book deal. Often that's because of the author's audience and overall platform and their effort, but it can also be the idea right. It can be an amazing idea for a book. That is really great. It can be. The author's expertise is unique. There's a lot of different factors, but I do think our success is because we're industry insiders. We know exactly what our industry expects and we have deep relationships with our colleagues that allow us to skip some of the more arduous steps of the publishing process that an author would otherwise have to go through. So a great example of this is that our clients never, ever, ever, ever, ever have to query, meaning that they don't have to cold pitch literary agents. Instead, most of our clients get a direct introduction to literary agents personally and they often end up getting a deal really, really quickly. So our proposals take a lot of guesswork out of the process for our clients and authors, while still being your book right.

Speaker 1: 27:41

One of the biggest misconceptions I hear is that if you hire someone to help you either with the proposal or with the book, that somehow this is less of your book or you're not as much of a writer as someone who does it all themselves. But that, my friend, is bullshit. It's just complete bullshit. As I mentioned before, I can't do my job without you, the author, so do me a favor, please, and let me and my team help you. Okay, we have a quiz on our website. You can check it out. It's in the show notes, and when you are ready for a proposal, when you know you've got the potential, you've got the platform, platform and you're ready to do the next step, we are here to help you land that deal. That's our place in the broader book universe and we would be thrilled to help you. So, if you're not sure where you're at, the quiz is there for your help and it will tell you. And then, if you already, hopefully, if our quiz is designed well, it will tell you, and then you know, if you already, hopefully, if our quiz is designed well, it will kick you to a meeting directly with me, which is awesome.

Speaker 1: 28:53

Okay, so that's the end of my rant, or shall I say my teaching, about why book proposals are important and then that's their facet of you getting a book deal. But I also want to take a moment at the end of this episode to thank you for listening. I I'm so excited that you all are listening and downloading and subscribing and in order to return that love and that attention I'm excited to share that my team and I have set up a way for you to ask a question forward slash podcast or simply look in today's show notes for a link that will allow you to leave me a voicemail with your question and I will answer it in upcoming episodes. I cannot wait to hear from you. So until next time. Cheers to your success. Thanks for tuning into the kind of big book deal podcast. Want to see where you're at on your book journey? Check out my free quiz at meghanstephenson.com forward slash quiz. That's M-E-G-H-A-N-S-T-E-V-E-N-S-O-Ncom forward slash quiz. See you next time.