How the book proposal outline works
A proposal answers four questions in order: what is this book, who is it for, why are you the person to write it, and can you deliver? The overview and sample chapters answer the first and last. The audience, comparable titles and marketing sections answer the second. The author bio and platform answer the third.
Write the overview last, once the rest is clear, and keep the chapter summaries consistent in length and style. Proposals for narrative non-fiction and memoir lean on sample chapters and voice; prescriptive books lean on platform and the clarity of the method.
Where it comes from
The non-fiction book proposal is a long-standing publishing convention rather than one person's invention. The sections below appear in most agency guidelines in some form; their order and naming vary.
Worked example: The Repair Café Handbook
Premise: A guide to starting a volunteer repair café in your town, by someone who has run one for years.
- Overview
- Repair cafés turn waste into community; here's how anyone can start one.
- Audience
- Community organisers, librarians and retired tradespeople.
- Comparables
- Recent books on community building and on repair and sustainability; this one is a practical start-up guide.
- Platform
- Runs a monthly café, talks at local councils, has a mailing list of volunteers.
- Chapter summaries
- Why repair; finding a venue; recruiting fixers; safety; your first event; keeping it going.
Tips
- Write the full chapter outline before the proposal; it makes the summaries easy.
- Choose comparable titles that are recent and successful but not runaway outliers.
- Make marketing plans concrete: name the events, outlets and partners.
- Follow each agent's guidelines exactly; many request only certain sections at first.
Common mistakes
- Vague audiences such as 'everyone who has ever been stressed'.
- Claiming no other book like yours exists, which suggests no market.
- Inflating platform figures; agents can check.
- A sample chapter that is less polished than the rest of the proposal.
Using this template with Inkora
When you start a non-fiction book in Inkora, it first plans the whole book from your brief: a premise, a synopsis, the key concepts, a style guide and a chapter-by-chapter outline. That outline waits for you. You can read it, rename chapters, rewrite summaries and reorder the plan before any chapter is written.
Inkora does not apply the book proposal outline automatically. To have the plan follow it, click Copy as text above, fill in your own notes under each part, and paste the result into the book idea and instructions field when you create the book (it accepts up to 20,000 characters). The planner reads that brief when it designs the chapter outline; check the outline against the template before you start writing and adjust anything that drifted.