Occasionally you'll want to take this shaping draft through several documents.
You may have a B1, B2, B3 and B4 version, for example.(^)
Keep your drafts.^
Use the "File, Save As" menu option of your word processor to keep versions of
your book proposal. When you change the name of the file as you work through
different versions, it means that you can always go back and reinsert something
that you deleted, because it's in a previous version.
(^)
C. Your clean-up draft. Your final draft. You've said what you want to say, now you
get a chance to say it better. You clean up the redundancies and spice it up.
Paradoxically, the easiest way to write well is to allow yourself to write badly. Every
day. This is because writing is hard when you try to think and write at the same time.
Allow yourself to think on paper for as many drafts as you need. Then write the final
draft with confidence.
Woody Allen once said that 90 per cent of success at anything was just
showing up. I've found that that's very true. So no matter how bad you feel your
writing is at any given time, go ahead anyway. Your writing is not as bad as you
think, it's simply a crisis of confidence, and even if it is rough when you first get it on
the computer screen, it can be fixed. However, if you hesitate, and don’t get it on the
computer screen, you have nothing to fix. Get it done!
At the end of this book, in the Appendix, you'll find the complete proposal for
my book 7 Days To Easy Money: Copywriting Success. This is a real proposal, and it
won an agent contract on first reading. Read it through so that you can see exactly
what goes into creating a proposal.
We've already covered what your proposal must contain, here it is again, for
reference. Please print this page out:
- A title page, with the title, subtitle, author, word count of the completed book,
and estimated time frame for completion. You might state: " 7 5,000 words,
completion three months after agreement".