Or, more accurately, a “proposal” for A Wizard’s Work Book Two. What? A proposal?
One of the things I enjoyed about the Marketing Workshop I went to at the end of March was how writing a proposal forced me to consider the whole story. While I don’t need to write proposals for my books, the exercise of writing it allows me to think through the whole thing, and perhaps find a theme, characters, setting, and the major plot points before writing the story.
A proposal will also help me decide if that particular version of the story is worth writing, or if I should “try again” and see what comes out. During the workshop, on a couple days, we had to write different versions of the same proposal. This ended up showing to me the opportunities for creating multiple stories out of the same idea, allowing me to choose the best one to spend months of effort on.
I don’t know if this particular proposal will be the basis of the book, but I’m already sure writing it was a useful exercise.
You say “proposal”, I say “outline”… =)
-David
You could say outline and be correct in many ways, but there are differences since a proposal often includes more than just the outline. Examples of these additional items are blurbs, bios and marketing information.
I prefer the term proposal over outline for other reasons. Semantically, it leaves more room for changes than the term outline does. Yes, people say you don’t have to follow an outline, but the possibility of change is built in to the term proposal.
I wrote proposals for my nonfiction books.
It was writing my first proposal (for The Indie Game Development Survival Guide) that finally showed me what a completed outline looked like. The proposal needed a completed table of contents. It also needed a target market, overall summary, et cetera.
-David