I want to write a non-fiction book - part 4 - the pitch letter

By Brian Clegg

To date in this series, we’ve got a book proposal together. There’s one last component that can seem relatively trivial – but in reality requires as much effort as you can put into it – the pitch letter. This is the cover letter for your proposal.

In reality, these days, the ‘letter’ is likely to be an email, and that makes it particularly dangerous as we’re used to writing emails quickly with limited editing. I highly recommend you craft your basic cover email in a separate editor, such as Word and only paste it in as an email once you are happy with the contents. This should help give it the attention it deserves.

Put yourself in the head of the person who receives this email. They will receive many such emails. Although I’m not an editor, I review a lot of books and I get sent plenty of book press releases from publishers, which are a form of pitch email. They go through a two stage filter. Quite a few will get deleted after a few seconds, because I can already tell they won’t be interesting to me. I’m likely to have read the subject of the email, the title of the book and the first couple of lines in the press release. If they pass that filter I’ll read on – but even then, they only get a minute or so before deciding whether to bin or to ask for a review copy, the equivalent of reading your proposal.

Note, by the way, I’m looking at this assuming you will be pitching direct to a publisher. This is likely to be fine with smaller publishers, but some of the big names use agents as gatekeepers – if that’s the route you decide to go (I’ll explore whether or not you should have an agent in the next item in the series), all that I’m saying about appealing to a publisher will also apply to catching the eye of an agent.

So, a starting point has to be the subject line of the email, a title line for your book and those first couple of sentences. By that point you need to have hooked the reader sufficiently to get past their first filter. Make the email subject simple and to the point – don’t try to sell in it. I’ve already covered the book title in the previous part of the series. Next, I’d suggest putting in a single sentence summary – if you like, an elevator pitch. This is really hard to do, but essential to get right. I’d suggest getting quite a few possible versions in place before going for one and refining it.

Broadly there are two relatively obvious ways to do this. One is to compare it to books that have already done well, often in an X meets Y format. For example, if I was writing a book on relativity that made use of a collection of emails and other bits and pieces of communication, I might say ‘A Brief History of Time meets The Appeal.’ While I personally find this approach rather cheesy, I do know that some people have used it successfully. (X or Y could also be an author, e.g. ‘Terry Pratchett meets Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire‘ is one that would make me read on.)

A good alternative is to pick out the USP (unique selling point) of your book – what makes it different, interesting and sellable? List some key words that describe what is distinctive about your book and see how you can bring them together into a pithy, attractive sentence.

Apart from that I’d probably only include three more paragraphs. Use a couple to expand on the book a little more – why it’s important and (ideally) timely. And finally say a little about why you are the ideal person to write this book. We don’t want your life history or greatest achievement (unless is directly relevant) – be aware of answering ‘Why am I the right person, right now, to do this?’

One final consideration on content is whether to send out the pitch email with the proposal attached, or whether to send it out asking if they’d like to see the full proposal. (Either way, you should have the full proposal ready before sending out your emails.) The simple answer is I’m still not sure which works better. I tend to use a pitch email without a proposal, but have the advantage of being reasonably well-known in my field. The advantage of attaching the proposal is that if they like your idea, they can get straight into it; the disadvantage is it feels a bit pushy. If you aren’t sure, I probably would attach the proposal.

Are we ready to send the email? Not quite. Who are you going to send it to within a publishing company? If at all possible, send it to an individual rather than a generic email address. Spend a few minutes researching the publisher online. The worst address to send it to is a generic information email for the publisher as a whole. Better if there is an address specifically for proposals and even better still if you can get the address of an appropriate commissioning editor. This may be possible from online searches, the Bookseller magazine (or similar), or contacts you might have in the publishing world.

At this point you are pretty much ready to go – but I’ve jumped the gun here, because in coming up with the right email addresses you need to know which publishers to send your proposal to. It’s essential you do some research first – and that’s the topic of the next post.

To finish, here’s an outline of the topics this series of posts will cover.

1. Is my idea a book?
2. Outlining
3. Other parts of a proposal
4. The pitch letter
5. Finding a publisher (or agent)
6. The contract
7. Self-publishing

Image by Markus Winkler from Unsplash

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.