News and Notes

I’m finishing up the book proposal course I teach today, and it’s been great. These courses always have quite a few lurkers (which is fine!); this time the group is very active, and I’ve been watching books on crypotology, ecology, Title IX, Judaism, biomedicine, and the TVA and other topics emerge over the past two weeks, and having a blast. Might you or someone you know benefit for two intense weeks learning about and workshopping a proposal? I’m doing it again in July.

Speaking of book proposals, internally at Belt we’ve decided to become bigger hard-asses about them. In the early days, I set the bar low for proposals, because let’s face it: the genre can kill off excitement to write a book. But we’ve learned why it’s important to have a strong proposal—not the 60 page behemoths you need for many agents, but a good 4-5 pages—before offering a contract. It helps prevent the problem we’ve had over the past year or so of authors bailing on contracts they signed, as well as authors se…