Chris Webb

So, what’s your book about?

This section of the proposal is your chance to tell your editor that you really understand what you are working on. This is your “wow” section, and should be thought of as a sales pitch or marketing piece for your book. If it’s written properly, your editor should be able to use portions of this section in his or her presentation materials.

Here are 5 things I like to see in a proposal’s About the Book section:

1. Write this section as though it were your book’s product description at Amazon.com.
2. Refer to the book by it’s title in its first reference. I don’t particularly like reading “this book” or “The book” over and over. This is a personal preference, but it goes to point #1.
3. Include references to the target readership and what they will learn, or why they would want to buy the book – what problems does it solve?
4. Write about the book in present tense. Again, this is probably a personal preference, but it goes to point #1 above.
5. Use active words that speak to the approach of your book. If you are writing a tutorial you would be “teaching” or “guiding.”

Here is an excerpt from the proposal for the recently published Flickr Mashups:

Flickr Mashups is a nuts and bolts guide to building applications that use the Flickr API. With a very hands-on approach it guides the reader through a series of connected projects, each one introducing new aspects of Flickr and highlighting various techniques to get the most out of the API. By providing clear, well-structured examples, Flickr Mashups shows the reader how to quickly and easily construct real-world applications.

While most readers are likely to have some familiarity with the Flickr web site, the book starts by looking at Flickr from a user’s perspective and walks the reader through the different aspects of the site. In doing so, it identifies the different Flickr features that will be used in later chapters during the programming projects. Many of the common questions that are frequently asked in the FlickrHelp forum are also answered during this introductory tour, providing a common base from which all readers can then progress.

Readers then begin a series of projects; each one is designed to introduce new concepts or new aspects of Flickr functionality and builds upon the software built and lessons learned in the previous projects. The initial projects are straightforward tasks that allow the reader to quickly understand the basic mechanics of building a Flickr application whilst the later projects provide the groundwork for significantly more complex applications. There are a total of seven projects, which once completed, will provide the the reader with a fully functional application and a useful framework on which to build their own applications.

The projects all use PHP as the development language. PHP will already be familiar to many readers, and is very easy to learn. Syntactically, it is very similar to many other commonly used languages such as perl and Java, so translating the examples given in the book into other environments should be a straightforward task for any readers who have a specific interest in those languages and environments.