Making Your Proposed Crisis Story Stand Out to Potential Publishers
Recently, I attended a short worshop sponsored by Lucinda Literary, an agency based out of New York City. The session, titled “What AI Can’t Tell You About Book Publishing,” started off with sharing wildly offbase advice from AI about what an author needed to know before they could ever consider approaching an agent with a book proposal. Some examples:
Don’t consider approaching an agent unless all of your book manuscript is written and is perfect.
When you are offering an analysis of comparable titles, provide only the most high-profile books as a point of comparison.
Don’t even think of approaching an agent unless you have at least one million followers on line.
All of these pieces of advice are shoddy. For one, book proposals for non-fiction books normally require only two sample chapters, so it’s nonsensical to even start with the idea that the whole manuscript is perfectly written. Second, a book proposal should offer only the book titles that are most relevant to the subject one is writing about. So, if an author is writing a book about how they overcame the trauma of being kicked out of the house by two alcoholic parents, citing Jon Krakauer’s best-seller Into the Wild would be nonsensical. The protagonist of that book, a man who went into the Alaskan wilderness and died inside an abandoned bus he used for shelter, would appear to have nothing to do with the proposed book’s accounts of finding ways to survive on the street. Lastly, while it’s true that publishers like to see that a prospective author has a platform (which can also be offline, like doing public speaking or seminars), the raw numbers of a potential audience isn’t the whole story. How well that author uses their network, and how it can be leveraged to amplfy the book’s presence, is the bigger point.
In response, the workshop offered a few key things to think about when fashioning a book proposal. Here are the major areas and my take of their importance, especially regarding telling the story of crisis:
Audience — what are the types of audiences that would care about this crisis? How are you telling the story in such a way that it entertains the reader AND offers them insights that are meaningful to their life?
Timing — is this crisis story relevant? That is, does it offer timely details and observations (as opposed to mostly decades-ago accounts divorced from today) that the reader will find compelling? Also, does it offer a timeless theme that the reader will be drawn to? Offering details, even if timely, without an enveloping and enduring theme will read like diary entries. Conversely, proclaiming broad themes without showing what those themes look like will lose the reader in a sea of generalities.
Market opportunity — is the story something that distinquishes itself from other book titles? This doesn’t mean it has to be a completely unexamined area. In fact, such a claim would likely be suspect. The reality is that a book distinquishes itself by offering a new angle, an unexplored perspective, on something that has already been written about.
The takeaway here: drill down into what are the distinctive aspects of your crisis story and be skeptical of what AI will tell you. The AI-drafted bullet points Lucinda Literary shared are typical of what I’ve seen from AI text: maximalist language that reflects a relentless self-optimizing language that too often prevails on the Internet. Don’t worry about the self-optimizing. Instead, nail down the compelling story you want to tell.