Howgate Publishing
The Military Publisher
How to Prepare your Proposal
Printable pdf version
All proposals are fully reviewed by The Publisher and the full manuscript is reviewed by both a Practitioner and an Academic.
The very first step to good writing practice is identifying your target reader. Considering your audience’s needs will determine your content, tone, style, wording and the frequency with which you define terminology. Visualizing your audience can help you to decide what to write and avoid the risk of being generic and ineffective. This information is important to us also because it affects our marketing strategy for your book. In order to assist you with preparing your proposal for this review, we have put together some key points for you to consider.
Identifying the problem
In order to determine what kind of audience would be interested in your book, please identify what type of problem they are facing and how you intend to solve it.
Existing research
We are interested to know how your work furthers research in this field and what you intend to do differently to appeal to your audience. Please list books already available, their strengths and weaknesses, and what distinguishes your book from them.
What is your book’s unique selling point (USP)?
Type of reader
Will your target reader be interested in your book for their own research, their academic course, their training programme or their career development?
Manuscript structure
Please provide a draft Table of Contents.
Please also provide a synopsis of each of the chapters.
If the book is an edited collection, please submit a tentative list of the anticipated authors together with their affiliations and indicate whether they have agreed to contribute.
Manuscript format and time frame
Please provide details of the length of the work in thousands of words.
You should also provide details of your schedule for writing and delivery.
Will the text contain diagrams, illustrations, tables and/or figures? If so, please provide details.
Please also include:
A Curriculum Vitae for the principal author(s) and, for contributed volumes, editor(s) plus a short bio for each contributor.
Three Referees who are qualified to provide an opinion on your proposal.
As a guideline, proposals should be 8 to 10 pages in length. Should you have a draft manuscript or sample chapters available, we would be delighted to receive this with your full proposal.
Please note, we will proceed to an external review only if your manuscript is with us on an exclusive basis. By this we mean only if it is not being considered by another publisher.