Making Housewarming: Part 2, the Proposal
Hello! Welcome to “Making Housewarming,” our series on this here blog about how we created our debut book from start to finish—everything from how we decided what we wanted to create to organizing photoshoots to finding the right publisher and a whole lot more. We’ll be covering a different part of the process every week for the next eight weeks, so make sure to check back in or join our weekly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss anything!
Be sure to scroll to the very bottom of this post where you’ll find ‘em all and catch yourself up to speed. Or don’t! I’m not your mom!
Beau with draft 1 of our book proposal, Santa Fe, NM, January 2020
The fact that we were going to be embarking on the very big and daunting journey of book writing got very real once we were faced with the task of writing an entire book proposal. We’d mastered the elevator pitch of our book enough to convince ourselves and our literary agent Nicole that it was going to be a success. The elevator pitch went a little something like this:
A survey & expansion of all of the work we’d done on our blog for the past several years; an intro-to-homemaking guide geared towards young people, renters, first-time homeowners, and folks on limited budgets; and all-inclusive walkthrough of creating a home that’s uniquely yours, consisting of three sections: ‘Design’ to help plan your space, ‘DIY’ to bring it to life, and ‘Entertaining’ to host your friends and family when the place is all done and ready. And it’s gonna be fun and irreverent, too!
But we needed much more than just an elevator pitch for Nicole to be able to sell the book to publishers. We needed a fully fleshed-out proposal. It was time to expand on our little elevator pitch and prove to ourselves that we actually had something to say of value, which is honestly a theme that would continue to come up pretty often for us throughout the entire journey of writing this book: self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and hyping ourselves up to believe that what we wanted to create was worth anybody else’s time.
To be honest if I met anyone who was about to write their first book who wasn’t feeling a little self-doubt, I’d take out my handy dandy DSM-IV and start diagnosing.
Anyhow! Nicole was incredibly supportive at this stage and filled us in on how the structure of our book proposal should look. Last week we mentioned we’d get into the nitty gritty of working with a literary agent, so here’s the scoop: if you want to write and sell a book via a publisher (as opposed to self-publishing), you’re going to want an agent. A literary agent not only helps you flesh out the initial concept for your work, but also helps package your proposal and then uses their existing network and relationships with publishing houses to secure your book deal. They’ll take a percentage of whatever your advance is (usually 15%) in exchange for their work. It’s 100% worth it and we never ever in a million years would have been able to make Housewarming happen without our literary agent. We admittedly had an easy time of getting connected with our agent (via our friend who was our agent’s client), but you can ask around your own network for recommendations or search for literary agents online who take submissions and go from there—though we have zero experience doing that so can’t really weigh in!
But back to the proposal.
Nicole suggested this format, which we’ve come to learn is pretty standard:
Overview: An authors’ letter that explains our experience, our perspective, and a short description of the book that should make it clear why we’re the right ones to write it.
About Us: I mean, self explanatory, but this was a pair of short biographies that further expanded on our expertise and gave us the chance to share a little bit of our individual personalities.
Audience: An outline of the various groups this book would be aimed towards; a breakdown of our existing audience on all our various channels (this blog, our newsletter, and Instagram and TikTok) as well as descriptions of whom beyond our existing audience we believed this book would appeal to.
Comparative Titles: A list of published books similar to the one we wanted to write, either in category, tone, or structure, with short descriptions of what the similarities would be. These would be books we looked to for inspiration as well as books we thought might sit next to ours on the shelf of a book store.
Marketing & Publicity: This is where we’d get into the nitty gritty of numbers and contacts. A breakdown of our audience demographics and size, plus lists of the media connections we’d developed through our years with the blog and any contacts with their own relevant audiences that, essentially, we could eventually leverage for publicity. It can get kind of icky to reduce personal relationships to numbers, but that’s marketing, baby, and someone’s gotta do it.
Chapter Outline & Summaries: A full list of every chapter we planned to include in the entire book, plus a paragraph or so summary of each chapter. This was probably the toughest part, because we wanted to create something as final as possible, but we knew we’d need to allow ourselves some wiggle room here. We ultimately did a lot of adding and subtracting of chapters on this list between the submitted proposal and the eventual final text of the book.
Sample Chapters: Our agent recommended including at least one sample chapter, which would give potential publishers a sense of our writing style beyond what they could read on the blog, with some sample photography to give a sense of how the text and imagery would flow together. We did two sample chapters; I tackled the “How to Make a Thicc Snack Board” chapter and Beau wrote a stellar guide to “Three Easy & Affordable Planter DIY’s to Make Your Indoor or Outdoor Space Shine.” Even though this was a book that was heavy on interior design, we wanted to show its value beyond that and so included a chapter from both the DIY and Entertaining sections. Funny enough, these two chapters stayed remarkably intact during the following two years, and will be in the book for you!
Because we’re easily distracted and chronically chaotic, we decided the best way for us to tackle this whole proposal writing process would be to book a trip out of town for a week and just write, write, write, and write some more. It was a pretty great strategy, to be honest, and I think well worth the expense just to make sure that we wouldn’t be sidetracked by any regular life stuff. We hopped on a plane to Santa Fe in January of 2020 with bags full of office supplies and inspiration books and, okay, some cute clothes because we did do a few fun things (that’s a link to the blog post about that trip, where we hint that we were there to work on “a super secret project”—this book proposal lol).
The Santa Fe trip was wildly productive. We stayed at the gorgeous Hotel St. Francis in the center of the historic downtown and set up shop at our favorite little coffee spot in New Mexico, Iconik Coffee Roasters. The coffee shop doubles as a book store, which was perfect for us to peruse whenever we hit a roadblock in our writing. Our strategy for fleshing out the book proposal was to create a Google Doc for each of the proposal sections we mentioned above, organize them all into one Drive folder, and then just float from one to the next as we had ideas to fill in.
While writing the proposal, we established our flow for how the whole book would be written. It was going to be a lot different from the way we collaborate on this blog, which is usually just that one of us writes a post and the other edits it for readability and occasionally grammar. The book needed to be much more collaborative, with each of us contributing to every element of the text. The process went like this: one of us worked on either a concept or chapter while the other worked on a different item; then when each of us were at a stopping point (even if that stopping point was just hitting a wall) we’d switch and be a second pair of eyes, but also add material where we saw the need for jokes, extra steps, clarifying statements, etc. It worked!
Printing out our first proposal draft at the hotel office :) Also obviously the title and subtitle changed!!!!!
On our last night of the Santa Fe writing trip, we tricked the hotel front desk into letting us borrow their office printer, strategically failing to mention that we would be printing out 80 pages—yes, we managed to fill up eighty entire pages with thoughts from our little monkey brains. It’s wild to think that when we first arrived to write the proposal, we still weren’t sure about major factors, like whether we’d write as one unified “we” voice or take turns with different chapters (we went with a “we” voice to keep it simple), and other stuff like whether we’d include recipes (we do!) or how often we’d say “fuck” (technically only once—just in the title of a Spotify playlist we like!).
We felt so accomplished that we almost forgot there was still an entire book to write, but that’s a story for another day. In the following weeks we sent the proposal over to Nicole for her thoughts. We made a few tweaks by her suggestion and redesigned the document to be a little prettier than the standard Google Doc file so that potential publishers would be enticed and ideally not yawning.
And, well, this lil proposal piggy was ready to go to the market.
The next installation in this series will be all about shopping the proposal around to publishers and meeting with them, a process that ended up being a hell of a wild ride. That will be out next week! Thanks for stopping by, and as always, please feel free to comment, DM, or email with any questions, thoughts, or general life advice! If you aren’t yet subscribed to our weekly email, oh you should really do it so you don’t miss anything. If you want to grab a copy of Housewarming you can pre-order it now! Pre-orders are super important for the success of a book so if you’re gonna grab it, now’s the time!
Love you heaps.
XOXO
Matt & Beau
