So, I'm generally a fiction writer, and my other half writes list style articles for sites like Cracked and WhatCulture. Neither of us know anything about pitching non-fiction.
We're planning to write a book about a hundred people who made football (soccer) what it is today, from Henry VIII to Posh & Becks, from Charles Miller to Lily Parr, from the inventor of the leather ball to the inventor of the lawnmower. You get the gist. A hundred people, from the obvious to the obscure, who are significant to the game. A Hundred Faces in the History of Football (or something snappier). There's already "A History of Football in 100 objects", so there's obviously a market for list-histories in the genre.
(that was our first idea - we both love A History of the World in 100 Objects - but having been beaten to it this actually seems a better way of getting away from the straight white english male history of football and pulling out a wider variety of stories)
Since neither of us have done anything like this before, we're basically planning to write the book before sending our proposals (comfort zone!). It'll give us a chance to collate all the different references we need and more time to research agents/publishers etc.
(I have a minor concern that a publisher might demand we change some of the people, but that's a bridge we'd cross when we got to it anyway, and we're looking at 1k or less per person, so unless they wanted us to cut a large swathe of people it wouldn't be too hard to rewrite. Plus I'm pretty certain I'm being paranoid about that.)
Most of the proposal advice I've seen includes a list of chapters and a couple of paragraphs about each. If we did that for every person, that'd be nearly around 40,000 words - basically half the book! Is there a different format for proposing a book like this, or do we just have to adapt? One sentence per person, for example? I assume for sample chapters we'd send entries to an equivalent length; presumably a sample that represents the breadth of the book rather than just the first lot chronologically.
Equally, if it's a book with images that would need licensing, would we need to provide examples of the images we want to use, or leave that up to the publisher? I assume we wouldn't be expected to purchase the licenses ourselves in advance (since with the non-fic proposal model I'm not sure that would even make sense).
Edit: Also, if an agency takes both fiction and non-fiction, but only lists submission guidelines for fiction, is it probable the only non-fiction they're looking for is memoirs?
Reading back over this post, I feel like I'm assuming a lot, which is why making it is looking like a better and better idea.
We're planning to write a book about a hundred people who made football (soccer) what it is today, from Henry VIII to Posh & Becks, from Charles Miller to Lily Parr, from the inventor of the leather ball to the inventor of the lawnmower. You get the gist. A hundred people, from the obvious to the obscure, who are significant to the game. A Hundred Faces in the History of Football (or something snappier). There's already "A History of Football in 100 objects", so there's obviously a market for list-histories in the genre.
(that was our first idea - we both love A History of the World in 100 Objects - but having been beaten to it this actually seems a better way of getting away from the straight white english male history of football and pulling out a wider variety of stories)
Since neither of us have done anything like this before, we're basically planning to write the book before sending our proposals (comfort zone!). It'll give us a chance to collate all the different references we need and more time to research agents/publishers etc.
(I have a minor concern that a publisher might demand we change some of the people, but that's a bridge we'd cross when we got to it anyway, and we're looking at 1k or less per person, so unless they wanted us to cut a large swathe of people it wouldn't be too hard to rewrite. Plus I'm pretty certain I'm being paranoid about that.)
Most of the proposal advice I've seen includes a list of chapters and a couple of paragraphs about each. If we did that for every person, that'd be nearly around 40,000 words - basically half the book! Is there a different format for proposing a book like this, or do we just have to adapt? One sentence per person, for example? I assume for sample chapters we'd send entries to an equivalent length; presumably a sample that represents the breadth of the book rather than just the first lot chronologically.
Equally, if it's a book with images that would need licensing, would we need to provide examples of the images we want to use, or leave that up to the publisher? I assume we wouldn't be expected to purchase the licenses ourselves in advance (since with the non-fic proposal model I'm not sure that would even make sense).
Edit: Also, if an agency takes both fiction and non-fiction, but only lists submission guidelines for fiction, is it probable the only non-fiction they're looking for is memoirs?
Reading back over this post, I feel like I'm assuming a lot, which is why making it is looking like a better and better idea.
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