The marketing game-, how I sell novelsThe nineties is not one of those periods. In book publishing, the
nineties is a buyers' market. Publishers have a 'prove it to me" atti-
tude. They also want to shorten the time between laying out money
for a book and getting revenues from bookstores; thus, they pur-
chase complete, ready-to-go manuscripts. In addition, there are
simply a lot more whole manuscripts making the rounds these days.
Editors can pick and choose.
For all of those reasons partials are somewhat less salable than
they used to be. The one exception, as I mentioned, is the option
book. Here partials are customary, except among those admirable
authors who resist deadline pressure or who do not want to expose
their fiction before they are certain that it is fully ready.
Sometimes you will hear the word proposal being used in the busi-
ness. What exactly is that? In the fiction game, pros tend to use pro-
posal interchangeably with partial, which itself generally means "sev-
eral sample chapters with an outline."
Technically, the word proposal is more applicable to nonfiction
projects. It means a document that describes a work to be written
later. With fiction there is little point in describing a book to come;
better just to write it, or at least some of it. A fiction proposal is
chapters and an outline.
About that word outline... little causes new authors and some
established authors more anxiety than the idea of summarizing
their story. How unfair! How limiting! Their feelings are justified,
but outlines are a fact of life in the fiction game.
Outlines for as-yet-unwritten stories can also be useful, once one
gets over the fear that they will somehow sap the juice out of the
writing process. Outlines are simply maps to character development
and plot. You can stare at them and ignore the trip, if you wish, or
you can savor the scenery secure in the knowledge that you know
where you are going. It is up to you.
Lots of authors find that outlines set them free. Even those who
hate them sometimes have to write them, so for all concerned I
have included a sidebar on the art of writing outlines.