h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yay! Only to find with a non-fiction book you have to write a book proposal first (luckily I found this quite quickly, before I'd written the whole thing), so am working my way through that. I have to keep stopping to go off and research stuff. Argh...

Taking longer to do this than it's going to take to drag the info kicking and screaming out of my brain...

Writing a book on dog training?

Dog Walking.

I am fed up with researching after working on the proposal all day.

Nice.

Yeah I can imagine writing the proposal is a chore, we do that sort of thing in my job. PITA

Apparently they are normally 25-60 pages. That's like writing another book!? At least h2g2 gave me plenty of practise. It wasn't time wasted after all...

OUCH!

I guess it's maybe different but our research proposals are *strictly* limited in length (much shorter than that) to 6 pages at least for the main body. This used to make people type them out with 1 mm page margins and 6 point fonts but they stopped that by defining minimum font size and specifying fonts that are allowable plus fixed margins. There was uproar at the time but it means much less work for the reviewers and we're used to it now.

I guess you have to define what's new and unique about your book and what's timely about it along with specifying content huh?

Yes, basically who I am and why I have the cheek to think I can write on this subject, overview, table of contents, sample chapter (which is where the length comes in I assume), what the market is for this book, who else is writing books like this and how I will be much much better (the competative analysis which I have currently stalled on), what my marketting plan is and some other bits and bobs I haven't got round to reading through properly yet...

_Your_ marketing plan? Isn't that the publisher's job?

Apparently only for best sellers...