Melville House Books

“Whereas fiction is occasionally sold on the strength of a chapter or two as in the case of Zadie Smith‘s White Teeth, the booming non-fiction market requires something more,” observes Carl Wilkinson in a commentary for The Observer. “You have to produce an extensive proposal that not only conveys your enthusiasm for the project, but second guesses a whole range of complex questions a publisher may have about your idea. The proposal needs to outline everything you know about your chosen subject and then speak with equal confidence of all the things you will find out . . . . It needs to be written in such a way as to tickle both the artistic sensibilities of a publisher’s editorial team and the marketing nous of the backroom money men who will stump up the advance.” Of course, that leaves one problem: “Having whipped the publishing team into a frenzy of enthusiasm with lots of wonderful promises, you can find yourself spending the next couple of years trying to fulfil all those promises, tracking down all those interviewees and finding out all that elusive dynamite material.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.