Step #2
Know What Your Book Is About and Why Someone Would Want to Read (Buy) It

Most aspiring authors think they know exactly what their book is about and why someone would want to read it, which, unless you plan to give your book away for free, means “buy” it. In truth, they typically possess only a general idea.

When I work as an editor critiquing manuscripts, proposals, and pitches at writers conferences, most writers who enlist my services spend at least three to ten minutes explaining their books’ subject to me. Novelists go into great detail about their main character, describe secondary characters, and reveal every single twist and turn of the plot. Nonfiction writers offer me the full spectrum of content they plan to include in their books. I’m privy to every minute detail including why they want to write the book. Almost all of them fail to explain why readers might benefit from reading their books or to mention the angles or themes they have taken with their subjects or stories that make their book unique compared to other books already on the market.

These writers haven’t honed their story or subject. They haven’t thought carefully enough about what makes their books different to articulate this idea. They don’t fully understand why someone would want to read or buy their books. They haven’t become so familiar with their subject matter and their angle that they can tell me in under a minute the gist of what they are writing or have written. They can’t answer their readers’ primary question: “What’s In It For Me?” (WIIFM?)

That’s a problem. Some of these writers plan to pitch their books to agents or acquisitions editors while at these conferences. They may have three to five minutes total to do so in a “speed dating with agents” session and to conduct a follow-up conversation about their book. They will use all their time describing their book idea before receiving any feedback.

In general, if you can’t speak or write about your book idea in a pithy and compelling sentence or two, known as an elevator speech, book pitch, or log line, you don’t have a way to communicate that your idea has the potential to be:

• a sound business proposition
• a book that adds value to lives
• a story worth reading
• information your readers need or want
• a totally new idea or never-before-told tale

That’s what agents and acquisitions editors have to hear before they “buy into” a book idea, but it’s also what makes potential readers carry a book to the register. The ability to condense your idea into a sound bite easily understood from both a business and creative perspective, therefore, helps you gain clarity on your idea and determine if your project is viable. That’s why you need to learn how to write a book pitch.

You typically find a book pitch in the “Overview” of a book proposal because this section does just what it says: It provides a big-picture view of your entire project. It explains in a condensed manner what the book is about and justifies its publication—i.e., it explains why it is marketable. Thus, writing a pitch and an Overview provides important starting points for any book project and essential elements in your book’s business plan.

The Overview: Justify the Writing and Publishing of Your Book

Step #2 of the Author Training Process, Know What Your Book Is About and Why Someone Would Want to Read (Buy) It, asks you to accumulate the information necessary for the Overview of your business plan. The Overview serves as the first page or two of your business plan, just as it serves as the first page or two of a formal book proposal. Your Overview will include your hook, your pitch, a summary, and information about word counts, special features, photos or illustrations—everything an acquisitions editor will quickly need to know to feel compelled by your idea. I will walk you through exercises to help you gather the information necessary for your business plan’s Overview, which we will assemble together at the end of this chapter. These steps include:

1. Write a book summary.
2. Determine the angle or storyline of your book.
3. Write a theme statement.
4. Compose a list of benefits.
5. Develop a purpose statement.
6. Decide on a title.
7. Create a compelling pitch.
8. Consider special features.

By creating an Overview, you will gain clarity about your subject or story, justify the writing and publishing of your project, discover your book’s true angle and theme, identify your book’s benefits to readers, train yourself to see your idea from a business perspective, and develop confidence in your idea. If you aspire to become traditionally published, the Overview in your book proposal attempts to entice a literary agent and then a publisher—a venture capital partner for your project—to discuss your project further. The Overview is the first thing an agent or acquisitions editor reads in a book proposal; therefore, it must sell your book idea to them. (A query letter entices an agent to ask for a book proposal, if you write nonfiction, or a manuscript, if you write fiction; the agent then sends a query to an acquisitions editor, who again asks for a proposal for nonfiction or a manuscript accompanied by a proposal for fiction.)

If an acquisitions editor at a publishing house gets excited about your idea, your Overview provides the basic initial details used by the editor at the weekly editorial board meeting to justify purchasing your book idea and establish you as a publishing partner. The rest of your proposal provides further justification.

Whether you self-publish or traditionally publish your book, you need to train yourself to evaluate the business plan you write through the eyes of everyone on that board—the acquisitions editors, publisher, marketing team, salespeople, and publicist. They all have to buy into your project—and into you. Like them, you must discern if your Overview (and, ultimately, every section of your business plan) provides justification for the writing and publishing of your proposed book. If you self-publish your book, your Overview must justify to you the writing and publishing of your proposed book. It must make you feel confident that you will earn back everything you will invest in your book. You must feel convinced that your book idea represents a viable business proposition—that it is marketable. As an indie publisher, you serve as the editorial board, unless you recruit others to serve on it with you.

If you plan to ask others to invest in your project, such as with a kickstarter.com or indiegogo.com campaign that allows you to crowdsource the funding for your project, you also want to approach the writing of this first section of your business plan with objectivity—with an Author Attitude. You will benefit by determining if your Overview (and later your whole business plan) offers a compelling argument and enough benefit for you or others to want to back your project.

This type of an “idea evaluation” increases your confidence in your book concept. You need that confidence—confidence backed by hard facts obtained as you continue your Author Training and refine the Overview. When completed, your Overview should convince you that your book will be salable because you will write it keeping in mind the criteria used by an editorial board or even just one acquisitions editor.

Also, the Overview serves as an important part of the road map for your book. It concisely details what you plan to write about and why anyone would be interested in reading your book. As you create this document, your vision of what you need to do to arrive at your final destination—a successful book—becomes clearer and clearer. Whether you write nonfiction or fiction, your Overview should describe the scope of your concept so anyone can understand it.

For this reason, your Overview, much like your vision for success, serves as inspiration as you progress through the Author Training Process and then as you write the actual book. Review this one piece of your plan before each writing period to remind yourself of the promises you must keep to your readers and what you intend to accomplish. When you get confused or veer off track, reread this document to remind yourself of your book’s subject, angle, theme, story line, benefits, and purpose. This puts you back on the track to success.

What Is Your Book About?

The ability to write your Overview, including a pitch, will determine if you know your book’s subject or story. If you can’t describe your book in a brief, compelling manner, you don’t know what it’s about. (And if you can’t write about it in a compelling manner in a short amount of space, you can feel certain readers won’t buy it.) However, there are some steps you can take prior to actually writing your Overview that will help you figure out what your book is really about. These include writing a summary and identifying your book’s idea, angle, and theme. Once you have done this, you can move on to identifying your book’s benefits and purpose. Then you can determine the best title and pitch for your book. At that point, you will be ready to write your Overview.

Your Book Summary

To begin, take some time to write a short description of your book. You may do so in your journal using the exercises in the back. I call this your “book summary.” Describe your nonfiction book or summarize your novel, and for now, try to write it in less than three paragraphs. For nonfiction, this is about how long a summary might be in your Overview. In fiction, a synopsis will be a paragraph or two at most in your query letter or a full page in a separate synopsis. For now, keep it under three paragraphs.

Pay attention to whether or not you find this exercise difficult or easy. Obviously, if you can summarize your book in one or two paragraphs quickly and easily, you probably know what you are writing about. If you struggle with this exercise, you’ve got a bit of work ahead of you, but keep working through the steps. It will get easier.

Your Book Idea and Angle

As you write your summary, you want to keep your idea and angle in mind. You can even define them and include this information in your business plan for reference. For example, a nonfiction book begins with an idea. This could be defined as an opinion, conviction, view, belief, or principle. Your idea might be quite broad, such as “saving money,” “spirituality,” or “leadership.” However, every nonfiction idea needs an angle, or a narrower topic, such as “saving money in your sixties,” “Kabbalistic meditation practices,” or “leadership tips for women.” A subject angle serves as a book’s primary organizing principle and helps your book become unique and interesting to the most people or to a particular set of people.

Let’s say you want to write about training dogs. Dog training serves as your book’s general idea. You must now find one aspect of dog training about which to write, such as how to train dogs without using treats. That becomes your book’s angle.

The broad idea for this book was “How to become a successful published author.” The more specific angle on that idea was “How aspiring authors can train to become successful published authors using the nonfiction book proposal as an evaluation tool for themselves and their ideas.”

Novels begin with a different type of idea—the idea for a story or the idea for a character. Your fiction idea will be angled based on genre. Other details of your story, such as place, inciting incident, age of reader, theme, and moral of the story (or even morals of the characters) will affect the angle as well. You might, for instance, have the general idea for a romance novel. You angle that idea by writing a romance novel involving a love triangle between a duke, duchess, and knight that takes place in Scotland in the 1700s.

Your Book’s Theme

Your book will also have a theme, a unifying or dominant idea. This provides an overriding emotional, philosophical, or universal aspect to the story. The theme statement for your dog-training book might be: “Human encouragement and love quickly and easily accomplish canine training goals.” For this manual, it might be, “Learning to see yourself and your book objectively through the lens used by publishing professionals provides the key to successful authorship,” or, more simply, “Learning to develop an Author Attitude provides the key to success as an author.”

Novels and memoirs tend to stress themes. If you have written a romance in which a woman “heals past hurts” or “reclaims her self-confidence,” these are themes that benefit other women. The broad idea for your romance novel might be:  “A woman goes to New York and has an affair with a man.” The angle of your novel might be: “A failed actress travels to New York after asking for a separation from her husband, has a fling with a young actor, and realizes the bright lights of Broadway now have less allure than her marriage.” The theme of this novel might be: “Old dreams sometimes cloud current realities.” See how an angle is more specific but a theme is deeper and more meaningful? Angles make your book unique. Themes give them value. Within themes lie benefits, and benefits sell books.

How Will Your Book Benefit Readers?

To create a successful book—one that sells to many readers—you must conceive your idea with the “What’s In It For Me?” factor in mind. The WIIFM? factor represents the value your book adds to your reader’s lives or how your book caters to their interests and needs. Your book must focus on providing readers with benefits. Think of benefits as concrete “things” you will “give” readers in the pages of your book. You can also consider them the promises you make to your readers.

In his book Sell Your Book Like Wildfire: The Writer’s Guide to Marketing and Publicity, Rob Eagar suggests people purchase books that appeal to their self-interest. “If you miss this fundamental principle, you will fail to create the sparks needed to sell books like wildfire,” he writes. He explains that when potential readers ask what your book is about, “actually they are wondering, ‘What’s in it for me if I buy your book? Is it in my best interest to read what you’ve written?’”

As you write the business plan for your book, concentrate on how to conceive your book with your readers’ interests in mind. Once you can write and talk about those benefits in a concise manner, you can later write your book with your readers’ interests in mind as well.

Your job, therefore, involves discovering the benefits your book might offer a reader. Fiction books sell on uniqueness and story, but they often have benefits embedded in their stories. You might provide value to readers by exploring relationships, challenges, places, history, language, lifestyles—all from within the pages of your novel. Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series offers readers a history lesson (and a Gaelic lesson) along with romance and the possibility that time travel is real. Beverly Lewis shows readers what it is like to live an Amish life in her romance series, Home to Hickory Hollow, The Rose Trilogy, and Seasons of Grace. In The Harbinger: The Ancient Mystery That Holds the Secret of America’s Future, Jonathan Cahn tells a story based on a mystical interpretation of a biblical verse, giving readers a chance to gain a different perspective on historic events. Jasinda Wilder’s best-selling novel, Falling Into You, tells readers a story about how a person can heal from grief by entering into another relationship.

However, nonfiction books sell directly on their uniqueness, value, and benefit. Through the pages of your book, you help readers do or achieve something, solve problems, answer questions, fulfill desires, or learn something new. Think of timeless nonfiction bestsellers like Richard N. Bolles’ What Color Is Your Parachute? or Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, or consistently best-selling authors, such as Deepak Chopra, Suze Orman, Wayne Dyer, and Jack Canfield. They all use these formulas. However, your nonfiction book doesn’t have to be a how-to book to add value to readers’ lives. Even best-selling memoirs, such as Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, solve problems and add value. Strayed shows how someone can pick up the pieces of a broken life and put it back together. In his memoir, Proof of Heaven, neurosurgeon Eben Alexander shows us why we should believe in life after death.

Think of current bestsellers, like Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, which offers readers benefit by explaining why some people succeed and how readers can, too. Or consider The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, which stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for 186 weeks and provided the benefit of advice on how to have a positive attitude and achieve better results because of it.

The benefits of the book you want to write must resonate with readers emotionally. If you can make your readers feel something, they typically will purchase. What they feel is more important than what they think. That’s why, for example, considering what they stand to lose if they don’t read your book can bring up a totally different set of benefits than what they stand to gain by reading your book. To figure this out, ask yourself, “What will my readers lose if they don’t read my book?” Instead of receiving benefit or value from reading your book, what hindrances, handicaps, or disadvantages will they discover they have because they are not privy to the information in your book? Looking at the issue from this perspective can provide a more emotionally driven answer than the opposite question, “What will my readers gain if they read my book?”

Create a list of your book’s benefits. These can include anything you feel adds value to readers’ lives, including a good belly laugh. If you cannot create a list of at least three to five benefits—preferably five to ten-this means your book does not add value to readers, and you’ll need to rethink your concept. If you want to produce a successful book, you must be willing to objectively and tenaciously retool your idea until you conceptualize it in a way that offers high value to readers.

Megge, a student of mine, admits that when she finished her Overview she thought she’d completed that section of the plan and the Author Training Process. “When I came to the part of Nina’s plan that asks for the benefits of this book, I sort of stalled out. No, I actually balked,” she says. “Benefits! Of a memoir? C’mon, girl.”

I explained to Megge that even a memoir could provide benefit to the reader. To make it marketable, her transformative story should have some sort of universal lesson, inspiration, or personal insight for the reader. What will the reader learn? What will they apply to their own life after reading the memoir? “Once I connected back to what originally propelled me into this book in the first place, I had more benefits than I could possibly fit on the page,” Megge says. (That initial reason for writing her book likely corresponded with her purpose, which we will discuss next.)

It was easy for Deborah, another student, to find benefits in her self-help book. Yet, the process of writing an overview, which forced her to adopt a businesslike view of her book, helped her clarify the added value to her readers. “It’s like applying for a job: It’s better to approach it from the perspective of what benefit you provide rather than what you get out of it yourself,” she related. This sentiment points out how you must move out of Step #1, in which you focused on how your book might affect you—your vision of success—and fully into Step #2 (and most of those that follow), which ask you to focus on how your book will affect your readers.

Does Your Book Have a Purpose?

Like many writers, you might believe writing a book fulfills a sense of personal purpose. Or maybe you think your book has its own purpose to fulfill. That purpose could be an extension of your personal purpose and is what gives your book a reason to exist.

Your book’s purpose includes the benefits it provides to readers. For example, Seth Godin’s bestseller Tribes, has a simple purpose: to inspire readers to lead. He states it this way: “We need YOU to lead us.” Godin’s book promised to make readers “think (really think) about the opportunities for leading your fellow employees, customers, investors, believers, hobbyists, readers.”

The back of Mark Victor Hansen and Robert G. Allen’s bestseller, The One Minute Millionaire, features a list of concepts you will learn from reading their book. Among these are “the power of one great idea, how to develop multiple streams of income, six forms of leverage, and the essentials of marketing success.” These constitute three of seven benefits promised to the reader. The back cover copy of The One Minute Millionaire also says,

The outcome of the author’s promise—its purpose—is that readers will quickly learn to become enlightened millionaires who can give back to their communities.

“Purpose” speaks to why you think your book must exist, why people must read your book, and why you must write it. Your reasons have to resonate with those you ask to invest in it—publishers or other backers and your buyers (readers). If you strike an emotional chord with your work, readers will hear it. You need only read the first pages of Brené Brown’s bestseller, Daring Greatly, to find yourself feeling what she has felt. Who likes to feel vulnerable? No one. Her book’s purpose lies in showing us how we can succeed in all areas of life by learning that vulnerability makes us stronger and more capable. That’s the benefit it promises to give us.

Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller, The Tipping Point, promises to explore and illuminate “the tipping point phenomenon” and how it changes the way people “think about selling products and disseminating ideas.” The purpose of the book, found in the introduction, is to answer two questions: “Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or products start epidemics and other don’t? And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?” This is also the benefit it delivers to readers.

Most novels won’t make such clear promises because they don’t have a strong purpose statement, but you might find something similar if you search. On the back cover of John Irving’s The Fourth Hand, for instance, I discovered this:

Answering the question “What if the donor’s widow demands visitation rights with the hand?” represents the novel’s purpose. The fact that the book takes “a penetrating look at the power of second chances and the will to change” also serves as the author’s promise to readers and serves as a “WIIFM? statement.” Readers of the novel benefit by exploring these themes.

I found a statement of purpose on the back cover of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment:

In best-selling author Lisa Scottoline’s most recent novel, Don’t Go, she tells the story of a soldier who “discovers what it means to be a man, a father, and ultimately, a hero.” This is the purpose of her book, and that purpose benefits readers, who also discover what it means to be a man, a father, and a hero in the process of reading the story.

As mentioned in Step #1 of the Author Training Process, when you create clearly definable goals, you increase your chances of achieving them. Your book’s purpose represents a goal. It’s what you and your book set out to accomplish.

When you can clearly define this purpose, you will have an easier time fulfilling it. If you keep the purpose in mind while writing your book, then you will have kept your promises to your readers when you have finished. It’s important, therefore, to write a statement of purpose for yourself and your book. Determine why you feel the need to write your book. (You can answer this in your journal, along with other questions we will cover here.) What will you accomplish by writing a book? Examine the goal you want readers to achieve; why do you think it’s important for them to do so?

Once you’ve written this statement of purpose, keep it handy. Read it often—especially before each writing period. It will become part of your book’s business plan.

Although you still lack a few elements—a good title and a pitch—with a summary, unique angle, list of benefits, and purpose statement, you’ve got the start of a convincing justification for the writing and publishing of your book.

Create a Title for Your Book

Now it’s time to take the work you’ve completed and create a title for your book. You may already have a title in mind, but more often than not the first—or even second or third—title you come up with doesn’t represent the best title. Just as with everything else about your book project, your title must promise readers that the book you’ve written will add value to their lives in a way that they seek desperately, or that it will fulfill a desire, tell a compelling story, or in some other way serve their interests. It has to answer the question: What’s in it for me?

When creating a title for a nonfiction book, you might use:

• a play on words
• alliteration
• a popular phrase
• slang
• your subject’s name or title

You might try to highlight something unique about your subject. If your book falls into the self-help genre, you want your title to:

• identify the reader’s problem
• offer a solution to a problem
• give readers hope
• be specific and to the point
• cut straight to the chase

Readers shouldn’t wonder what nonfiction books are about; the titles should clearly tell them. For example:

• Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life by Wayne Dyer
• Secrets of the Millionaire Mind by T. Harv Eker
• Secrets of Silicon Valley by Deborah Perry Piscione
• Unsinkable by Debbie Reynolds and Dorian Hannaway
• Give and Take by Adam Grant
• Killing Kennedy by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard
• Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss

John Kremer, author of 1001 Ways to Market Your Books, recommends titles that are no more than five words “because short titles are more memorable. You can add a subtitle to give more information. Having a number in the title can be good, too—particularly the number 7 as in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Here are other book titles that contain numbers:

• 101 Things You Need to Know by Julie Mullarkey-Gnoy
• The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra
• 10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace by Wayne Dyer
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni

In Write the Perfect Book Proposal, Jeff Herman and Deborah Levine Herman say a book title can be longer if the first few words “provide emotional appeal.” Book titles that evoke an emotion do tend to sell well. Readers must feel as if they can’t live without the information within your book’s covers. Additionally, titles that create what the Hermans call “a motivating visualization” also draw more readers; if readers can “see” in their minds’ eyes the end result that will come from reading your book, they are more likely to carry your book to the register.

Kremer says, “Consider coining a word of your own as John Naisbitt did with Megatrends.” Or follow the lead of other fiction and nonfiction authors who made their titles “brandable,” like:

• Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen’s Chicken Soup for the Soul series
• Joshua Piven’s The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook
• Jay Conrad Levinson’s The Guerilla Marketing series
• J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series
• Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga
• Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series
• R.L. Stine’s Goosebumps series
• James Patterson’s Alex Cross series
• Stan and Jan Berenstain’s Berenstain Bears series
• Ann Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles

You can write a much longer subtitle, especially if your title is short or witty and needs further explanation. I like these:

• Lapsing into a Comma: A Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things that Can Go Wrong in Print—and How to Avoid Them
• Damn! Why Didn’t I Write That? How Ordinary People are Raking in $100,000.00 …or More Writing Nonfiction Books & How You Can Too!

Fiction titles that offer a sense of story, evoke emotion, or provide a motivational visualization work well, too. Look at some recent bestsellers:

• Walking Disaster by Jamie McGuire
• Fever by Maya Banks
• Starting Now by Debbie Macomber
• The Host by Stephenie Meyer
• Breath of Scandal by Sandra Brown
• Bones Are Forever by Kathy Reichs

It’s possible to get a sense of their storylines or a feeling for what they might be about, especially if you know the category or genre in which the author writes. Novels with titles that convey a storyline are a good choice as well, such as:

• The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis
• The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty
• Under the Dome by Stephen King
• The Longest Ride by Nicholas Sparks

Fiction titles tend to be shorter than Kremer suggests, often just two or three words. Many use genre-recognizable words, such as blood for vampire stories, death or killer for thrillers, dragons for fantasy, and kiss or lust for romance.

If you plan to write a series or have spinoffs, you might want to brand yourself with your book titles (more on this in Step #7). Think J.K. Rowlings’ Harry Potter series and Kathy Reichs’ Bones, and even Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, which is easily recognizable by the titles (One for the Money, Two for the Dough, etc.).

It’s also important for book titles to be “searchable” and “discoverable” on the Internet. Therefore, if you can include keywords or keyword phrases in your title, which are the words people use when they conduct Internet searches for topics, you increase the chance your book will be found when potential readers look online for something related to your subject. Nonfiction books often have quite long subtitles in an attempt to include as many keywords as possible. Novelists are using this tactic more and more often.

Training yourself to write a marketable title and subtitle represents an important part of Step #2 in the Author Training Process. It requires seeing your book not just creatively but from a business perspective. The marketing team in a publishing house makes the decision about a book’s title. If you self-publish, you must make this decision based on what title will help your book sell the most copies, not on what you like.

Successful books require great titles. Of course, to some extent you never know what will sell or why. Who would have thought books with titles like these would become big hits?

• The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel
• Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson
• The Happy Hooker by Xaviera Hollander
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss
• The Ominivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

By writing an appropriate title, you will increase the odds of selling your book. Go ahead and use the training exercises in this book. Since you know what your book is about and its benefits, writing a title should come easily at this point, but play around anyway and come up with many options before whittling them down to the perfect title. If you are still not sure what your book is about, this exercise will feel difficult. If this is the case, simply keep working through the Author Training Process and return to this section later. The training exercises and questions will be there when you’re ready!

Writing a Pitch or Elevator Speech for Your Book

I was once told, “Nina, if you can’t write the subject of your book on the back of a business card, then you don’t know what you’re writing about.” This was my introduction to the concept of a book pitch. Even though you’ve already written a summary of your book, it’s time to hone that to a pitch. Then you’ll discover if you really know what your book is about.

Start with the business card test. Get a business card, or something the same size (2 × 3½"), turn it over, and write, “My book is about…,” and fill in the rest in the amount of space you have. Write in words large enough to be read by anyone without a magnifying glass. Can you do it?

Now, try something a bit longer. Just as you did at the beginning of this step, describe your book’s subject, but this time do so using all the information you now possess about your book idea, including the angle, theme, benefits, and purpose. Try to fit this book summary or synopsis into 150 to 300 words. Include your title in this description. (You can go back to your original summary and rewrite and revise it if you like.) Think of this exercise as answering the question, “What is my book about, and why would someone want to read (buy) it?” Produce a concise summary or description of your book. Save this. You will come back and edit or revise this description of your book several times.

Next, save a copy of your summary as a new document. Then edit what you’ve written down to 100 words and then down to a 50-word book pitch. The final word count doesn’t have to include the title. You will use this concise, pointed pitch many times and in many different circumstances—not just at conferences, where you will pitch to agents, but also when you pitch the media, when you provide a book description on Amazon (or other book distributors), when you write guest blog posts or articles, when you create press releases, or when you tell the person sitting next to you on an airplane about your book (and hopefully sell them a copy). Your pitch appears in a query letter, too.

Keep in mind that there is a difference in pitching fiction and nonfiction; memoir, while nonfiction, can be pitched more like fiction because it reads like a novel. Both genres can and should stress the benefits your book provides.

Nonfiction writers should focus a pitch on what the book is about and why it is unique, timely, or needed. The rule of thumb for nonfiction pitches is to answer three questions: Why this book? Why now? Why you?

You should also include information on your market, your book’s unique features, and any comparison you can make to another best-selling book, if possible.

Fiction writers should provide the narrative arc in the most creative way possible to hook the listener. Katharine Sands, agent and author of Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent’s Eye, recommends that a pitch “distill aspects of your work in such a way that it creates alchemy.” When pitching fiction, she says, include three elements: Place (setting), Person (who), and Pivot (inciting incident or event).

Chuck Sambuchino, author of Create Your Writer Platform and the editor of Guide to Literary Agents, offers a four-step pitch formula: Offer the details of your book, such as genre, title, and word count, then a one-sentence log line, a pitch, and a description of your character arc.

James Scott Bell, author of Self-Publishing Attack! The 5 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws for Creating Steady Income Publishing Your Own Books, teaches a pitch formula with three sentences.

For nonfiction writers:

• Sentence 1: most gripping question + the specific answer
• Sentence 2: In [title of book] + you will learn …
• Sentence 3: about the author (Who the heck are you?)

For fiction writers:

• Sentence 1: character name + vocation + initial situation
• Sentence 2: when + the doorway of no return (inciting incident)
• Sentence 3: now + death overhanging (physical, profession, or psychological death)

And Rob Eagar, author of Sell Your Book Like Wildfire: The Writer’s Guide to Marketing and Publicity, says that no matter what you do when pitching, do not answer the question “What is your book about?” Only answer the question: “What’s in it for me?” (That’s right; it’s that WIIFM? factor again.)

I thought the following was the final version of my pitch for this book—49 words (without the title and subtitle).

I felt I needed the extra words to be more specific, but later I reduced it to 28 words this way.

Before my agent submitted the book proposal to Writer’s Digest Books, I took another crack at the pitch because I had, in fact, re-angled the whole idea and the title to make it more marketable. (Agent Katharine Sands thought that the word evaluate in my title might turn some readers off and suggested I come up with another title.) That suggestion generated this 42-word pitch:

I reworked the subtitle after the book sold—9 Steps to Prepare You and Your Book Idea for Publishing Success—to increase marketability and search optimization. Writer’s Digest Books dropped nonfiction from the title, and the marketing team finalized the subtitle to what you see on the cover, keeping salability and search-engine optimization (SEO) in mind. (You will learn how to do this in future steps and come back to refine many of the pieces of your Overview.)

“Writing a great pitch forces you, as one writing teacher once told me, ‘to give up your darlings,’ and get to the heart’s core of the writing project,” Megge shared. “Everything else is chaff for the wind.” Indeed, she related, “Working on my pitch and Overview has taken months and given me invaluable insights. As I shape and edit, I get closer and closer to what I really want to say.”

Create an Overview of Your Book

To finish the Overview step of the Author Training Process, take the 150- to 300-word book summary or description you wrote earlier, your book pitch, and your list of book benefits, and combine them into one document that you will place at the beginning of your business plan. You can also include your theme and purpose statement if you wrote them. Later, when you have compiled the information on your markets and your competition and you’ve written your table of contents and chapter summaries, you will return to this document to add or revise this information.

A formal Overview for a book proposal includes, in this order:

1. A hook—this is similar to an article’s lead paragraph.
2. A book pitch—the short summarization of your book or story with a slant toward reader interest or benefit; for fiction, this could be one short sentence, sometimes called a log line. As stated earlier, this sometimes includes your title, purpose, and angle in a catchy way.
3. A synopsis—a one- to five-paragraph summary of your book, going into further details about what you plan to offer the reader.
4. Book features—a word count, special features, illustrations, as well as the back matter (glossary, appendix, etc.) you expect to include in your book.
5. A description or list of benefits—these two bulleted lists are most commonly found in nonfiction proposals but can be used for fiction as well.

Remember, you are creating a marketing document with the intention of selling your book “idea” to a publisher or to yourself. Later you will sell it to readers.

If you plan to include any special features in your book, describe these in your Overview as well. Special features might include things like end-of-chapter questions, epigraphs, meditations, tips, exercises, charts, photos, etc.

Use everything you have learned and created in this step to put your Overview together. When you are done, you should have a two-page document that accurately describes your book. It should read like marketing copy. Most important, it should sell your book.

“Defining the subcomponents of an effective book Overview is exactly the process I needed to help me get beyond the beginning of my own book proposal,” claims Victoria Hudson, author of No Red Pen: Writers, Writing Groups & Critique. “Even though I was using excellent resources for how to write a proposal, I found the examples and descriptions lacking, as often too much information or experience was assumed. As an emerging writer and first book author, I needed to drill well down into the procedure in order to understand what I was trying to create when writing the book proposal or business plan.”

Read your Overview carefully, whether it is in “rough-draft form” for your business plan or written more formally for a proposal. Ask yourself if this is the book you plan to write—and want to write. Ask yourself if you think readers want this book, or, better yet, need to read this book. Does it address their interests? Does it answer their real question: WIIFM? Ask yourself if this document provides enough compelling information to make a venture capital partner (a publisher) want to read the rest of your business plan and if it provides enough justification for the writing and publishing of your project to entice a publisher to ask to see more or for you to proceed with the project as an indie publisher

If so, you’ve competed the first step in the proposal process and are on your way to conceiving a successful book.

If not, your idea may have a low likelihood of success at this point, which means you may need to go back to the drawing board. Or you might need to revise your idea, find another use for it, or start fresh. It’s also possible you need to adjust the content you include in your book; in this case, keep moving forward through the steps and see what happens as you flesh out your concept.

You must determine the source of the problem, however, and resolve it. If that’s not possible, you may need to give up on this particular book idea and come up with a new one. If you need help evaluating your idea objectively, hire a professional book doctor, a book coach, or an author coach. Asking someone with a different perspective than yours to look at the “big picture” can help you find the answers you seek—a new angle or theme to your book idea or even a new market or structure. It may be easier for an “outsider” to see your idea from a business perspective.

Hopefully, at this point you know exactly what your book’s about and why someone would want to read (buy) it. That means you know what benefit your book will provide readers, and in turn, when you begin writing you’ll know what commitments to keep to them. Plus, anytime someone asks you what your book is about, you can tell them—and it won’t take more than thirty seconds to do so. It also means you’ve trained yourself to think like a successful author. You’ve begun to look at your project with an Author Attitude. WOOT!

Reading Suggestions:

Crafting Titles by Elizabeth James
# Book Title Tweet Book01: 140 Bite-Sized Ideas for Compelling Article, Book, and Event Titles by Roger C. Parker
Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent’s Eye by Katharine Sands