As a book development editor, I help writers’ books take flight. In order to do that, I ask potential author clients to answer a list of questions that an agent or publisher wants to know about a book project before they read one word of a manuscript. The questions are about your book, about your audience, and about you. Your answers to these questions provide the foundation for writing your book proposal and give me the necessary information to determine where an author is most in need of help. The Swenson Book Development LLC team — shoutout of gratitude to Claire Webber, Ruth Chlebowski — have packaged those questions as a workbook you can download. For free. Really.
We’d especially love to get your feedback. Let us know what you think of this workbook as you begin to plot out your next book project.
In coming weeks, we’ll offer more free downloads: Getting Started with Google Analytics: Basics for Authors is a guided tutorial for writers and another workbook, Recording Your Google Analytics Baseline.
Please let us know what tutorials or workbooks you’d like to make your writing life more organized, efficient, and simple. We’re developing an inexpensive series of workbooks on How to Write Your Non-Fiction Book Proposal.
Writing and Listening — an Interview with Brooke Randel
As a young girl Brooke Randel knew little about the Holocaust—just that it was a catastrophe in which millions were murdered, and that her grandma Golda Indig barely escaped that fate. But her Bubbie never spoke about what happened, and the two spent most of their time together making pleasant memories: baking crescent roll cookies, playing gin rummy, and watching Baywatch. Until an unexpected phone call when Golda said, out of the blue: “You should write about my life. What happened in the war.” What results is a fascinating memoir—about one woman’s harrowing survival, and another’s struggle to excavate theRead more…