Getting Published: Proposals, Beta Readers and the Rest

What Does a Book Proposal Have to Prove?

I don’t recommend traditional publishing. Three of my clients’ books went to traditional publishers, and each one took twelve to eighteen months to come out. You wait that long, accept a much lower royalty, and hand over control of your own book. If you still want that route, go in with your eyes open, and make the proposal prove the book is worth that trade.

A book proposal is a business case for why a publisher should invest money in producing and marketing your book. Publishers receive thousands of proposals. They fund dozens. The ones that succeed answer one question convincingly: will this book sell? The proposal has several components, and each serves a different purpose. The overview pitches the book’s concept in two to three pages. The market analysis proves readers exist who want this book and shows where it fits in the current marketplace. The competitive analysis examines similar books and explains what yours does differently.

The author bio establishes your credibility and platform. The chapter outline shows you can execute the concept. The sample chapters prove you can write. Most proposals fail at the market analysis. Authors write “this book is for everyone who reads” without showing they understand their specific audience. Publishers need to know who buys this book, where they shop for books, and why they’d choose yours over the competing titles already available.

The Book Proposals Handbook covers every component of a publishable proposal with templates, case studies, and AI prompts for researching your market, analyzing competition, and structuring a proposal that gets read instead of recycled.

What makes a good query letter?

I dislike the query system. It asks an author to squeeze years of work onto a single page, then leaves them waiting weeks or months for a form rejection or no answer at all. Write the letter well anyway. It’s the one piece of the process you fully control.

A query letter gives an agent or editor sixty seconds to decide whether they want to read more. Most queries waste those seconds on the wrong information.

The hook: one or two sentences that capture the core conflict of your book. What does the character want, and what stands in their way? What’s at stake if they fail?

The summary is one paragraph. It expands the hook into enough detail for the agent to understand what kind of book this is, who the protagonist is, and what makes the story convincing. Write it as a tease. Leave questions unanswered and make the agent want to read more.

The credentials: one paragraph establishing why you’re the person to write this book. Previous publications, relevant expertise, platform size, and awards. If you don’t have credentials yet, keep this paragraph short and let the writing speak for itself.

The comparison: positioning your book in the marketplace. “X meets Y” works when the comparisons are accurate and current. Comparing your novel to two books that published in the last three years and sold well tells the agent exactly where to shelve your book and who the audience is.

Everything else gets cut: your inspiration, your path to writing, your sincere belief that this book will change the world. The agent doesn’t care about your process. They care about whether they can sell the book.

What Are Beta Readers For?

Beta readers answer a fear most authors carry around the whole project. They show you where a real reader got bored, lost, or stopped believing you, and I’d take that over another round of an author beating themselves up any day.

Beta readers are test audiences. They read your manuscript before publication and tell you what works and what doesn’t. Good beta reader feedback is the most valuable resource a writer has. Bad beta reader feedback is the most confusing. I put beta readers before the professional edit, because if they come back asking for a lot of changes after the edit, you pay for the editor twice. Most will come back with not a lot, and you take most of it with a grain of salt, but you might get some good stuff.

The quality of feedback depends entirely on the questions you ask. “What did you think?” produces vague, unhelpful responses. Specific questions produce specific answers that generate usable revision direction.

Recruit maybe 12 people from the industry, because only about a third will come back with anything you can use. Brief them to hunt for content errors and gaps instead of grammar. The good responses can become short testimonials for your marketing.

Questions that produce useful feedback: At what point did you first consider stopping?

Which character did you connect with least, and why? Was there a scene where you felt confused about what was happening? Did the ending feel earned or did it come out of nowhere? Was there a subplot that felt disconnected from the main story?

What questions should you ask beta readers?

Send these questions to your beta readers instead of “what did you think?” Each question targets a different craft element and gives the reader permission to be honest.

1. At what point did you first consider putting the book down?: Identifies your pacing problem’s exact location.

2. Which character did you connect with least, and why?: Reveals weak characterization without asking the reader to diagnose it.

3. Was there a scene where you felt confused about what was happening?: Finds clarity issues the author can’t see because they know the story too well.

4. Did the ending feel earned, or did it come out of nowhere?: Tests whether your climax pays off the setup and your character arc lands.

5. Was there a subplot that felt disconnected from the main story?: Identifies structural dead weight.

6. Did any character’s behavior seem inconsistent or out of character?: Catches motivation problems and plot-convenient actions.

7. Were there sections where you skimmed or read faster to get through?: Pinpoints passages that drag, often description blocks or exposition.

8. Was there information you needed earlier in the story that came too late?: Reveals setup and plant problems that confuse readers.

9. Which scene or moment affected you most emotionally?: Shows what’s working. That’s as important as knowing what isn’t.

10. If you had to cut one chapter, which would it be?: Forces the reader to identify the weakest structural link.

These questions target individual craft elements and give the beta reader permission to be honest about problems without feeling like they’re criticizing you personally. The framing matters. You’re asking for a diagnosis of the book, and the reader should know that going in. I send chapters to two or three beta readers as they’re finished, with a half-page briefing. It tells them to ignore grammar and spelling, because the editor handles those, and asks whether the chapter communicates the subject and what’s missing. A problem then shows up at chapter one, before I’ve written 12 chapters the same way.

Not all beta reader feedback is equal. Three beta readers confused by chapter eight means chapter eight has a problem. One beta reader who wanted more romance in your thriller means they wanted a different book. Look for patterns across multiple readers, not individual opinions from single readers.

I want a couple of people from the business among the beta readers, so they can catch the technical stuff. The editors catch the writing problems, and you don’t need beta readers for that. You need somebody in the field to say you didn’t explain that well enough, or you went off the deep end here. Ask them to get in your face about it, because a lot of people hold back their critique. Better to hear it now than in your Amazon reviews.

The Beta Reader Handbook covers finding the right beta readers, structuring feedback questions, interpreting conflicting feedback, and using AI to pre-screen your manuscript for common issues before sending it to human readers.

DEI in Writing: Authenticity Over Performance

Authenticity is the part I care about. A character or a community written to check a box reads false to the very readers it was meant to include, and those readers notice quickly. Diverse representation in fiction matters because readers from every background deserve to see themselves in stories, and readers from dominant backgrounds benefit from meeting perspectives different from their own. Still, representation done poorly causes more harm than absence. Stereotypes, tokenism and savior narratives do real damage to the readers they claim to include.

The first rule: write characters instead of categories.

A character who happens to be Black is a person with desires, fears, wounds, and agency. A “Black character” whose primary narrative function is being Black is a token. Start with the same psychological character development you’d apply to any character, then layer in the cultural, social, and lived experiences that shape how they move through the world.

Research beyond surface level. If you’re writing a character from a culture you don’t belong to, your research needs to go deeper than food, holidays, and stereotypical behaviors. Read authors from that culture. Read memoirs. Understand internal diversity within the culture: the differences of class, region, generation, and individual experience that prevent any single representation from speaking for an entire group.

Hire sensitivity readers after your beta readers but before publication. They’re specialists who spot where your representation might cause harm: stereotypes you didn’t recognize, cultural details you got wrong, or narrative choices that repeat harmful patterns you weren’t aware of. Their feedback is advisory. You decide what to change.

The DEI Writing Handbook covers authentic representation across race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, disability, and cultural background. It includes research methodologies, case studies of both effective and harmful representation, and AI prompts for testing your manuscript’s representation before publication.

How Do You Survive the Query Process?

The query process wears people down, and the industry built it that way whether anyone meant to or not. If you go that route, give yourself a deadline. Months of waiting on strangers shouldn’t be the reason a finished book never reaches a reader.

Rejection is the default state of traditional publishing. Agents reject the vast majority of queries. Agents and editors decline the vast majority of proposals. The writers who get published are the ones who survive the rejection volume long enough to find the right match.

A rejection usually says more about the agent’s or editor’s situation that week than about your book. The agent’s list is full. The editor just acquired a similar book. The publisher’s budget for your genre is spent for the year. Those are business decisions, and they say nothing about the quality of your writing.

Track your submissions systematically. Note which agents requested pages, which sent form rejections, and which sent personalized rejections. Personalized rejections that mention specific strengths are signals that you’re close. Revise based on patterns in feedback and resubmit to the next agent on your list.

Self-publishing is a separate business model with its own advantages and requirements, and nobody should treat it as a consolation prize. If traditional publishing’s gatekeeping doesn’t serve your goals, self-publishing gives you complete control over every part of your book’s production and marketing. Publish Your Book covers every major publishing path available today. The book promotion skills are the same whichever path you choose.

Building a Publication-Ready Manuscript

When I deliver a manuscript, it’s a solid draft, and I send clients to editors I trust for the next pass. An author who skips that editor to save a few weeks is throwing away everything that came before it. A half-finished manuscript gets judged as finished by every agent and reader who sees it, and it makes me angry when good books lose that way.

Before submitting to agents, editors, or publishing your own work, the manuscript needs to meet professional standards. This means completing the full revision process, structural, character, scene, dialogue, and prose passes, followed by beta reader feedback and incorporation, followed by professional copyediting.

Formatting matters. Agents and editors expect standard manuscript format: 12-point Times New Roman, double-spaced, one-inch margins, header with your name and title, numbered pages. Deviating from this format signals amateur status before anyone reads a word.

Professional copyediting isn’t optional. You can’t effectively copyedit your own work. Your brain auto-corrects errors it’s seen hundreds of times during revision. A professional copyeditor catches the typos, grammatical errors, and consistency issues that your brain has been glossing over for months. The AI-Enhanced Writer’s Library covers every stage from first draft through publication-ready manuscript, because getting published requires both craft mastery and professional execution.

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