Nonfiction Book Proposals: advice from literary agents
A nonfiction book proposal is the business plan you sell to a publisher instead of a finished manuscript. It has to prove your idea, your platform, and your writing all at once, across a fixed set of sections. Here is how a literary agent says to build one that gets an agent, and then a publisher, to say yes.
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Questions on Book proposals
- What is a nonfiction book proposal, and why don't you need to have written the whole book?, Kelly Bergh: A book proposal is a business plan for your book: agents sell the idea and the author's personality to publishers rather than a finished manuscript, so you do not need 100,000 words written, but you do need a concrete vision for the book and a clear picture of how it fits your career. Even for authors who end up self-publishing, writing a proposal is a useful exercise for gathering ideas and building an execution plan.
- What three things does every sellable book proposal need?, Kelly Bergh: Every proposal Kelly has helped write contains three non-negotiables distilled from Get Signed, written by her agency's founder Lucinda Halpern: a big idea, a strong platform, and great writing that proves the author can write long-form. Two out of the three is workable, but a nonfiction book especially needs to be about a topic other people care about.
- What counts as an author platform in a nonfiction book proposal?, Kelly Bergh: Platform is non-negotiable in 2026 because publishing has become both easier to enter and more saturated, and publishers have fewer resources overall, so a nonfiction author's challenge is to prove they are low risk and come with a built-in audience rather than requiring the publisher to build one from scratch.
- What sections go into a nonfiction book proposal?, Kelly Bergh: A proposal opens with a cover page (title, subtitle, author name and credentials), then a proposal table of contents listing: overview, About the Author, About the Book, audience, marketing, comp titles, the book's own table of contents, chapter summaries, and a sample chapter.
- What goes in the overview section, and how long should it be?, Kelly Bergh: The overview is 6-10 pages, written in first person, that compresses everything else in the proposal: what the book is about, why you're the best person to write it right now, who the intended audience is, and what structure you're using. It's often the section people find easiest to write first, or last.
- What goes in the About the Author and About the Book sections?, Kelly Bergh: About the Author is a one-page, third-person bio, written like the author bio on a book's back cover, that proves no one else could write this book. About the Book is administrative: it can be as short as a couple of sentences covering projected word count and timeline, and it's honest about how much of the book is still just a sketch.
- What belongs in a nonfiction proposal’s marketing section?, Kelly Bergh: The marketing section is the proposal's heaviest section besides the overview: it lays out your online presence, network, potential endorsers, and everything you've already made publicly available (press, speaking gigs, bylines, partnerships). The more marketing infrastructure you can show, the more likely a publisher is to treat you as a low-risk teammate and offer a higher advance.
- How do you choose comp titles for a nonfiction proposal?, Kelly Bergh: Find 3-5 traditionally published titles from the past five or six years (post-2020), open the section with a paragraph on what those titles have in common and what market gap remains, then work through each one individually, noting what it did well and what your book will do differently. Avoid comping to blockbusters unless your platform is genuinely comparable, though you can still name them elsewhere in the proposal.
- What goes in the book's table of contents, chapter summaries, and sample chapter?, Kelly Bergh: The book's own table of contents is a bare, copy-paste-ready list of chapter titles. Chapter summaries then justify the order and content of each chapter in a paragraph or two. The sample chapter, aiming for roughly 10,000 words, should be pulled from whichever chapters best showcase your long-form writing, ideally showing range if the book mixes practical and narrative material.
- When should you query agents with a nonfiction book proposal?, Kelly Bergh: The best way into nonfiction publishing is through relationships and visibility, not cold querying: most of Kelly's clients found her through fate and friends because she stays active in her field. When you do query cold, don't do it until your full proposal (about 70 pages all in) is complete, keep your pitch to about 30 seconds, and follow each agent's stated genre and submission rules.
- Should you use Canva or design elements in a nonfiction book proposal?, Kelly Bergh: No. Stick to plain 12-point Times New Roman, double-spaced formatting; design goes unappreciated because the proposal is an internally circulated document, and the time is better spent polishing the content itself. The one exception she names is an artist adding spot illustrations throughout the book.
- How should memoir writers think about platform and audience?, Kelly Bergh: Memoir is the exception to most proposal rules; a writer may need to write the whole book, since the true test is whether the story is both universal (a common pain point everyone can relate to) and highly specific (an unrelatable, distinguishing 'it factor'), the same balance struck in memoirs like Wild, Educated, and Hillbilly Elegy.
- Should you use AI to help write your book proposal?, Kelly Bergh: Not to draft actual content. Right now, general AI tools tend to fabricate comp research and other information, and using it to write sample chapters or new content shows in the writing. It's acceptable as a structural thought partner, for example to help order the points inside a chapter summary, but not to generate the writing itself. Kelly frames this as a right-now view and asks to be asked again in a year, saying she may have a different answer by then and that the tools may change.