Research Your Book Proposal, And Flesh Out Your Book’s Outline
| Hot: |  | | | | |
Day Four Tasks
Task One: Create your research plan
It’s a good idea to create a research plan to guide you, both in writing your proposal, and later in writing your book. Knowing that you can find all the information you need is a confidence-builder.
Task Two: Create a chapter outline for your book
Write a chapter outline for your book proposal.
How much do you have to know?
Recollect that this is simply a proposal, you are not composing the complete book. Consequently, you may not have to do any research at all. You might have all the material you require. If this is the case, you will be able to go right to rounding out your outline.
If you need to gather material, then first you should develop a research plan. This may take you an hour or two, but it’s time well spent. You will use this plan first to develop your proposal, and later when you’re writing your book. For your proposal, you probably won’t need to go past # 6 in your plan to get all the information you need.
Your research plan
1. Develop a frame of reference, and write it down as a complete sentence, using no more than 25 words. The shortest blurb you wrote should work well for this step.
2. Next, mind map or outline everything you need to research. This is to give you a quick overview. It’s a good idea to print this mind map out so that you can glance at it as you work. You’ll find that if you’re online, or at the library, it’s tempting to explore other avenues. These avenues may well be productive, and you can explore them at some stage, but not while you’re trying to write your proposal. Once you start writing, your only goal should be: “get it done”.
3. Do a general search on the Web using a search engine like Google.com to locate additional areas you could explore.
4. If you find mention of any online groups or mailing lists which seem appropriate for your subject, join them. The members may be able to provide you with anecdotes or other information.
5. Make a note of companies which are mentioned in your Web search. Can they help you? The benefit of asking companies to help you in your research is free, current information. Most companies will be only too pleased to help, for the PR boost you can give them. Make a note to yourself to acknowledge them in your book. If any company has given you a lot of help, it’s a nice gesture to send them a copy when the book’s published.
6. Check periodical indices for articles which might be useful. Once you needed to trudge along to the library for this kind of help, but LexisNexis (http://www.lexis.com/ ) is faster.
7. Are there any books which could help you? Try www.amazon.com to find recent books on your topic. (You may already have notes on these books which you collected while you were trying to come up with an idea for a book.)
8. Original sources. This is where your list of contacts comes in useful. Make a note of people you will want to interview, first for your proposal, and later, for your book.
9. Experts and organizations.
STOP! Don’t collect more information than you need to write your proposal.
Creating your research plan shouldn’t take you more than an hour, or two hours maximum. Until you get into the writing process, whether it’s your proposal, or the book itself, you won’t know exactly what you need. As long as you have sufficient material for that day’s work, you’ve got enough information.
Work on your book’s outline and the first chapter, as you research.
We’ll do more work on the outline and first chapter later this week. But, because they form such a big part of your proposal, start working on them now, as you research.
related post
- Write The Blurb And Outline Your Book
- If You Have Publishing Credits
- Write the proposal
- Write Your Blurb In Easy Steps
- Concept Generator 1: What You Are Good At
Shared Post
Related Posts - Write the proposal Day Six Task Task One: Write the initial draft of your book proposal Write the draft quickly. Don't think too much about it. In your initial draft, you aim for quantity, rather than quality. Relax! You'll write your draft in stages Today's the big day. You're going to write your......
- Step Number 11 Eliminate All Objections With "Preventive Move Credibility" This is a technique I pioneered that I'm particularly proud of. Since I created it, and started talking about it in my newsletter and at speaking engagements, I've seen it used and imitated hundreds of times by other marketers. That's fine – I wouldn't be......
Related Websites - We Got Cards!! My husband and I got home from visiting my mother out of town. When we came home, my husband checked to see if any mail came. We found out our car insurance premiums will go down $20/month. Yea! We got even better news, a school program we donated through donorschoose.org......
- How To Be Successful in the New Year [Note: Last year I published this article and was fairly popular. I think it's as relevant this year as it was last year, so I figured it's worth a reminder.] The Most Important Key to Success Do What You Love - You aren't going to be successful at something you......
Tags: author, book, book proposal, material, proposal, Writing