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One of the most natural ways to deliver your intellectual property is by writing a book. As a practicing literary agent with the highly regarded Helen Rees Literary Agency in Boston, Karen Warner has helped countless professionals through the process of proposal writing, publisher selection, and submission. She also advocates for several nontraditional forms of publication, such as producing e-Books for on-line distribution. These nontraditional methods have been greatly enabled by the ascendancy of the Internet, making them viable vehicles for specific kinds of thought leadership ideas. Since taking a professional and realistic approach to publishing your book is critical to whether your ideas ever sit on the bookshelf at Barnes & Noble, we suggest you take a look at the following video clip from 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney, entitled "The Big Book Business," or you may simply read the script.
Ultimately, you must produce a proposal if you are to be taken seriously by publishers. Your proposal becomes your collateral. It must look professional, polished, and complete before it leaves your hands -- whether to an agent or a publisher. The proposal-writing process forces you to make decisions about your material you didn’t even know were necessary. The proposal outline we encourage writers to use is one we have adapted from Harvard Business School Press. When writers follow this outline, the resulting proposal is exactly what the publishers like to see. Several books available through Amazon can take you step-by-step through the book proposal process. Our favorite is How to Write a Book Proposal by Michael Larsen. Michael Larsen is co-owner of the Michael Larsen/Elizabeth Pomada Literary Agency, which has been representing top fiction and nonfiction authors since 1972. He is the co-author of Guerrilla Marketing for Writers. Larsen frequently speaks at the country’s top writers conferences. He lives in San Francisco, California.
© 2004 Karen Warner & Associates