Your Short Bio: More popularly known as “About the Author” at the back of books, this is where you market yourself in your proposal. Unlike those brief bios in published paperbacks, your book proposal gives you the chance to talk about yourself at length. However, be sure that you cover only the highlights of your career that point to your credentials in writing your nonfiction book. The use of the third person is advisable in this section. The first person tends to sound like you are blowing your own horn, no matter how humble you try to make yourself sound. But if you are more comfortable with the first person or you want to retain the consistency in your proposal’s POV, then go ahead. In this section, the essential information includes why you are qualified to write this type of book, your credentials or expertise, and if you have any previous works published in the same vein. Experience adds credence to your proposal. Just be honest and do not exaggerate. Tell them everything they need to know. 

Target Audience: Make sure that your target market is well-defined. What is the demographic that you are trying to reach? Consider your audience in terms of their age, gender, ideology, affiliations, ethnicity, educational background, economic status, and so on. This gives the publisher a clear idea of how to position your book in the market. This requires some research. You do not need to be a statistics expert to measure the range of audience that your book will appeal to. Backing up your claims with facts and figures is more convincing compared to a generic presentation of what type of people will read your work. Traditional publishers are aware that there are certain books for certain people. Suze Orman’s books, for example, target people who want to have financial freedom. Mark Manson targets an audience in need of self-help. For new authors, backing up your demographic target with specific numbers helps to convince publishers that there is a market out there for their book.

Competition: This is where you name-drop popular books that run on the same topic as your work. Do be creative with this one. If the market is saturated by the same type of book such as yours, explain what makes your book different. What new insights do you offer, and what can your audience learn from it? For example, let us say that you read a popular bestseller about the easy way to grow investments through binary options. Your book, on the other hand, is a cautionary tale about the high risks involved in just choosing up and down in binary trading. Back it up with interviews with people who lost money in binary options. Here readers get the opposite side of the coin type of information from your book. If your book, on the other hand, is running along the same line of a popular niche, cite the books and include their sales. The rationale here is convincing the publisher that there is a specific market for the kind of book that you wrote. Make comparisons, but of course, do not forget to point out what makes your book unique, and why your target market needs to read it.