Turning a Proposal Into a Non-Fiction Book

"I’m Bobbi Linkemer on behalf of expertvillage.com, and I’d like to invite you to visit my website at writeanonfictionbook.com. A lot of what you put in a proposal ultimately finds its way onto a book. There’s a lot of transfer; it isn’t like you do this exercise and it’s useless for instance. On the back of this book, which is one I wrote a few years ago on how to survive and thrive as a freelance writer. On the back of the book are the main bullet points. What you’re going to find is the main things that this book covers. That’s something I worked out in the proposal. Here’s my bio, which is my unique qualifications to be writing this book. There’s the table to contents. The table of contents was something I worked out in the proposal, so there’s a lot of transfer. It isn’t like you do this exercise and it’s useless. You find out a lot of things; you find out that you may have a larger audience than you thought, or you may have a narrower audience than you thought. No matter what kind of publishing you do, if you want this to sell in a bookstore, something that you have to have is a category. The bookstore is going to want to know where to put this. It could be self-help; it could be memoir; it could be history; it could be maybe if it’s in 10 different categories, but it has to go somewhere in the bookstore. So that category has to be listed, and that’s something that you have to think through when you’re doing your planning document."