My first free gift, just for romance novelists!

Jan 20

Today, my first-ever free gift at my newsletter, a simple yet information-packed guide to writing a winning romance novel proposal

Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on June 13, 2023, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.

Oh my goodness, hello to all, and I'm so sorry I haven't updated this newsletter in so long! This is the problem with something like a newsletter that you're not directly making money from, but is just a fun hobby meant to help market and promote your main day job as a book editor; once things with the editing get busy, like they've been this spring, all of that must take priority, sometimes leaving little time for anything else. But oh, I have so many new projects by clients to share with all of you by now, and so many email chats to do with them about what has worked and not worked for them in their own publishing adventures, and I'm dying to have the time to sit down and complete that work and start getting regular issues out to all of you again about my various adventures in the self-publishing world.

For now, though, I'm happy to say that I have my first-ever "free gift" to offer through the newsletter, which I'll also now be sending out in the welcome letter anytime someone new now subscribes. My hope, in fact, is not just to offer one of these free downloads at any given time, but to basically have a whole series of downloads that will build up over time, so that someone subscribing a year from now might get six different free publications the moment they come onboard. In this case, it's something very practical and geared very specifically to people in the romance genre, which as regular subscribers know is something I've found the opportunity to talk about a lot in the last year of my life, ever since getting hired more and more by self-publishing Kindle Unlimited romance authors and thus learning more and more about this fascinating semi-hidden part of the literary industry.

Thanks for reading Jason Pettus, Editor! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribed

One thing I've discovered in my work so far with publishers is that incoming proposals for new books display wildly different formats, word counts, and prose quality levels, and that there's a need for the serious publisher to be able to provide some guidelines and rules for those who wish to pitch book ideas to them. I've assembled the information I've now learned from rating and assessing close to a hundred of these kinds of romance proposals at this point, to arrive at a combination of information that gets across everything a publisher needs to know, while requiring as little work on the author's part as can be helped. If you're a romance publisher, I encourage you to adopt this format to your own submission process if you want; and if you're a romance writer who's thinking of submitting things to publishers, you give yourself a huge leg up by submitting your proposal in this kind of form, because you won't believe the kind of rambling, unreadable nonsense I sometimes see get pitched to my clients, and you automatically jump up above all these people simply from having a proposal that's tight and makes sense.

You can download the Word file from my Google Drive account by using this link (I think; let me know at ilikejason@gmail.com if you have problems), but I thought I'd go through its small amount of parts here today in this newsletter issue as well, which will also give me the chance to make additional comments about each section. We start with some simple information gathering:

Characters

List of every character in the book with a name, what their age is, and briefly how they relate to the other characters.

Tropes

Romance tropes you plan on using in this book. Please include no more than three.

One of the biggest mistakes I see both romance authors and publishers make is trying to cram in ten different tropes from the genre all into one overly stuffed 50,000-word manuscript. And I know why they do it too, because many guides to self-publishing romance overly emphasize using Big Data! to target Breaking Trends! so they can Search Engine Optimize! it and make sure to show up high in Amazon KU searches on specific kinds of romance novels. That's fine and good, but cramming too many of them together makes it nearly impossible to create a coherent storyline that both follows them all and makes any bit of sense. Don't forget, tropes are the big broad brushstrokes of the genre to begin with, so too many of them become way too much at once; once you have a mafia melodrama with young lovers who were forcibly separated then reunite when older, you don't then also need to add that the male lead character is an improbably young don, and that at a certain point they get locked in a small space together, and oh, did I mention the MLC is a billionaire as well? Oh yeah, and I forgot, the FLC is pregnant, did I not mention that?

Whew! A little of this stuff goes a long way, so just choose and pick well, and build your story around perhaps two major tropes and maybe a third weird one for comic or erotic effect. Hitting high in Amazon searches is important, but not at the expense of making the story incomprehensible.

Around 500 words, exact word count not important. Give enough background details for us to understand what the story is about (including genre and setting), then briefly mention every major story beat. This is a different thing than an Amazon description, so feel free to “reveal spoilers” and divulge other important information.

This is the time for the author to very plainly lay out what "happens" in this book. Whoever this is getting pitched to should be able to have a full understanding of the entire book's contents by the end of this, and for it to take no more than 500 words. You are not enticing the person into buying the book here in the same way you're doing so to customers at Amazon, so the summary should not actually sound like an Amazon book synopsis (which old-schoolers also call the "dust jacket copy"). This should instead be a straightforward, spoiler-heavy look at the page-by-page details of the book from start to finish. Don't forget to mention what genre your book is set in, and where and in what time period!

Outline

Around 1,000 words, exact word count not important. The same story beats as the summary, but now with more detail, showing us chapter by chapter what events will take place and when exactly they’ll happen. It’s important that the things happening in this outline are the same exact things happening in the summary, so please double-check before submitting a proposal.

Here's the other huge mistake I see in a lot of romance novel proposals, that the events that occur in their proposal's outline don't match the events that occur in the summary. It's the same story, people! The outline is simply the same thing as the summary but now twice as long, which means the author has the time to really detail the chapter-by-chapter rundown of how the entire book will play out, now not just covering story beats but showing us where exactly in what chapter the beat will occur, and how it will actually be described or explained. But the things that happen in the outline should be the same things that happen in the summary, so do yourself a favor and always double-check this before you send a proposal in to a publisher.

First Scene of the Book

Around 500 words, exact word count not important. The actual fully written-out final version of the book’s first scene.

Where we see if the proof is in the pudding. 500 actual words from what your final manuscript will look like, which means they better look good.

That's all I personally need as an assessor of romance novel proposals, other than knowing the word count; I don't think any of the other things that many other romance publishers ask for, or that freelance writers voluntarily send in their proposals, are really that necessary. I don't need to know what actors you had in mind when creating this; I don't need to see embedded images of the visual look you have in mind for each of these characters; I don't need a big special separate breakdown of setting and timeframe, as long as you briefly but adequately include it in the summary. That makes these proposals faster to write, faster to read, and faster to judge, which is good for everyone involved all around, and leads more quickly to great writers and great publishers working together for decent pay to produce a solid romance novel its readers will love. Get the wheat separated from the chaff quickly, I say, then spend the majority of your time working with your final choice for writer to produce the best book you possibly can.

Anyway, here again is the download link for the Word version of what you just saw me describe, although do please let me know at ilikejason@gmail.com if you have any problems with that link, since I'm basically just hosting this file at my Google Drive and using the "share" parameters they're claiming there I should use. This link will now also be sent in the welcome email every time someone new subscribes to the newsletter; so if a friend wants a copy for themselves, feel free to recommend they subscribe!

Book Reviews: Busy Spring Edition

Ooh, at least lots of book reviews to share with you since the last update, including:

Amy Schneider's Chicago Guide to Copyediting Fiction, which I found to be a good basic guide for someone who might not know the first thing about the subject, but not all that useful to someone like me already doing it 40 hours a week;
Ben Riggs' Slaying the Dragon, which wow, was just one of the more entertaining nonfiction reads I've had this year, detailing the endless trainwreck that happened at TSR (former owners of Dungeons & Dragons) in the ten years between forcing out Gary Gygax and a near-bankrupt company getting bought out by their rival, Wizards of the Coast;
J.G. Ballard's High-Rise, part of my completist look at this weirdo sci-fi/horror/erotic author who had such a huge influence over Postmodernism;
Alvin Toffler's 1970 Future Shock, in which I revisit this famous "futurist" fortune-telling book and see if his predictions about the coming "new world order" came true here in the 2020s, half a century later;
Bridget Collins' The Binding, an earlier and simpler novel by the author of the beguiling slipstream story The Betrayals I read and loved a year ago;
Jack Donovan's popular and widely shared alt-right masculinity guide The Way of Men, extra-interesting to look at now that Donovan has largely distanced himself from the alt-right movement;
M. Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, considered a classic but that I found disappointing, a novel supposedly about the young disaffected people of the 1920s Jazz Age, but written in the 1940s by someone who was already an old man even back when the '20s happened;
Lee Child's Jack Reacher story Running Blind, the opening salvo of this year's "Long Summer" reading challenge, in which I try to finish 52 books in 26 weeks and concentrate on "easy reads" like beach and airport novels;
Jim Thompson's 1963 ultra-black noir classic The Grifters, part of not only my summer reading challenge but my larger Great Completist Challenge;
This year's co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Hernan Diaz's Trust, which I had high hopes for but just turned out to be another RPB novel (that is, "Rich People Bad!!!!!!!1!!");
And Gregory Mcdonald's classic Fletch's Fortune, the third book in the long-running series about the wiseass investigative reporter who solves crimes, after being reminded of these novels by watching the great new Hollywood adaptation of the second book starring a pitch-perfect Jon Hamm.

I have only a couple of Reddit ESL questions to share with you at this point, so I think I'll just save them and include them in the next issue. That means I'm pretty much done with the updates this issue, except just to remind you as always that my shingle is open and I'm ready to be hired for your next project, if the details can be worked out. Remember, if you hire me directly through email (as opposed to a third-party service like Upwork) and remind me that you're subscribed to the newsletter, you automatically get 25 percent taken off your final bill -- any job, any bill. I'm also very happy to be hired through Upwork, so if you prefer that means of setting up our contract, by all means feel free to contact me over there!

In the next issue, the long-delayed talk with my client Jeff Rosen about his remarkable new '70s heavy-metal coming-of-age novel The Nothing Brothers, remarkable precisely because he wrote the first draft as an actual young man going through the events in the 1970s, then stuck it in a drawer and only got out again recently, almost fifty years later, to polish up and finally publish. It has the kind of crisp, startling verisimilitude that only comes from being written by someone who was a first-hand witness to the events, and it's turned out to be one of the most enjoyable books I've ever worked on as a freelancer. Please keep an eye out for that in another two weeks (fingers crossed), and of course let me know of your own upcoming project (or anything else you want to talk about) by dropping me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com. Hope your month is going better than the five-week case of the summer flu I recently caught here in Chicago! What a bummer way to celebrate the tiny little slice of the year here when we get perfect weather!

Jason Pettus