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June Cotner’s Tips: Creating a Non-Fiction Proposal (part 2)

For June’s next post on non-fiction book proposals, she offered the following advice: Last week I posted a one-page summary from the book proposal for FOR EVERY LITTLE THING, which was co-authored by Nancy Tupper Ling, illustrated by @helencannart and published by Eerdmans Books for Young Readers . Today Nancy and I are sharing more parts of that proposal: the Table of Contents, the description of the book, and the description of two competitive books.

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June Cotner’s Tips: Creating a Non-Fiction Proposal (part 1)

Writing a book proposal is an art. I’ve learned so much working on these with my co-author and mentor, June Cotner. By sharing her recent posts about creating proposals, I hope you’ll find some invaluable tips as well. Below find Part 1 from June’s Facebook post.

“Every writer needs to create a book proposal to sell a nonfiction book to a publisher. It’s essentially a business plan for the book. I’ve started to create one-page summaries for all of my book proposals. FOR EVERY LITTLE THING was published Sept 2021, coauthored with Nancy Tupper Ling, illustrated by @helencannart and published by Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. The one-page summary (below) gives the publisher a succinct overview about the project and what the authors propose for the book. My books have sold more than one million copies and have been published by major publishers such as Penguin Random House HarperOneBooks HarperCollins Simon & Schuster and midsize publishers such as Chronicle Books and Andrews McMeel Publishing. Many, many thanks to my agent Marcil-O’Farrell Literary Agency, LLC!”

See Sample Overview Below: