Let's look at the components of a solid outline. Naturally, we have to divide proposals into two categories: nonfiction books and novels.
Nonfiction
Nonfiction is both easier to outline and easier to sell from outline. A nonfiction work lends itself to easy encapsulation because its subject is finite and usually defines itself. A war, a biography, a history of a period, a murder case, seventeenth-century Dutch art, Greek cooking, traveling through Japan—all are limited by the factual information available, at which point it becomes a matter of selection and arrangement of that information. It is relatively easy to convey in an outline an author's familiarity with the subject, their enthusiasm for it, their authority, the uniqueness of the proposed work, its organization, and so forth. It is even possible to convey in an outline how good a writer the author is. A good nonfiction outline is a pleasure from the viewpoint of publishers. It is the complete book in microcosm, takes five or ten minutes to read, requires little imagination to grasp, and enables an editor (or anyone else at a publishing company) to make their minds up quickly and decisively. It is hard for most writers to imagine the joy it gives an editor to be able to reach a clean, fast decision thanks to a beautiful and well-made synopsis.
A solid nonfiction outline should follow these basic precepts:
Establish your authority. At the very outset you must show the publisher your credentials. It has become extremely difficult to sell medical or self-help proposals by writers who do not have a Ph.D. or M.D. after their names or cannot otherwise demonstrate long and vast experience in the field in which they are writing. As you might do with any other resume, if you have great bona fides, pile them on; if you don't, then stress the next best thing, to wit: "Although I am not an M.D. I have written about medical subjects for leading national magazines for the last twenty years." And if you cannot even boast that much, I strongly advise you to write a large piece of the book so that your authority and familiarity with your subject shine through by virtue of the writing itself.
Present your thesis dramatically. The best outlines read like the best short stories, and like great stories should have a beginning, a middle and an end. In enunciating the subject, you should present a disturbing problem that cries out for resolution: "The teenage suicide rate has tripled in the last ten years." "As the First Continental Congress convened, the American colonies seemed very far from the unification we take for granted today." "Although there are many books available on Jewish cooking, to date there is no comprehensive work on cheese blintzes."
You now have the editor worried: how did the teenage suicide rate get to be so bad, what is the profile of a potential teen suicide, what can parents do about it? Here is where you display your intimacy with your subject, for as these questions occur to the editor considering your presentation, one by one your outline answers them satisfyingly and, if possible, entertainingly.
Like a good short story, your outline should rise to a satisfying climax, and here is where your writing skills must be displayed in all their splendor, for editors know that an author's interest and energy tend to flag in the final stages of a book and they want to see whether you can sustain the same level of intensity in the finale as you did in the opening stages of the work. You should therefore describe in vivid detail the culmination of your book. Whatever it was that originally inspired you to write it (Henry James called it “the divine principle”) must be communicated here. Whether you're writing a biography, history, medical self-help book, or even a blintz cookbook, you must demonstrate in these final passages of your synopsis your intense absorption in your material. Depict in full dress that final battle, that cure, that turning point in the life of your biographical subject. Let your editor know you're in love with this idea and will live in a constant state of torment until you have communicated it to a vast audience.
Furnish a table of contents. Each chapter of your proposed book should be summarized in a short paragraph. Although a table of contents would appear to go over the same ground as your synopsis, it actually serves a different purpose. A synopsis is a narrative summarizing the topic and exhibiting the author's grasp of the material and writing skill. A table of contents demonstrates the author's organizational abilities and conveys the "feel" of the final book. It may seem redundant, but editors demand it. Don't leave home without one.
Anticipate a publishing committee's questions. However masterfully you have synopsized your book, some important questions will probably linger in the editor's mind, and others will be raised by non-editorial staff members of the publishing committee. What competitive books exist or are in the works? What is the potential audience, and how can a publisher be sure that that audience will buy the book? Could a Big Name be induced to write an introduction or endorsement? Can you state with assurance that this organization or that society will approve the book, recommend it to members, purchase a minimum number of copies?
It is unfortunate that authors must do the sort of research that is the rightful province of publishers, but because publishing people have so little time and money to spare for market surveys, library searches, legal investigations, profit-and-loss evaluations, and the like, any author who does the publisher's homework for them will definitely raise the chances of landing a sale. So go the extra mile. You've always said you could do a better job than a publisher: here's your chance to prove it.
Fiction
The outlining of fiction is an entirely different ball game. None of the criteria that enable editors to make quick and easy decisions about nonfiction book proposals applies to fiction outlines, for almost everything is subjective. Although it is even more important for a novel outline than it is for a nonfiction book outline to read like an enthralling short story, even wonderful novel outlines don't necessarily demonstrate convincingly that the writer is a good storyteller, has fine descriptive abilities, is capable of capturing subtleties of emotion, or knows how to build character and relationships. And, paradoxically, any attempt to portray such elements in an outline often results in a long and tedious one that is excruciatingly dull.
Furthermore, nothing in an outline can demonstrate whether the author can go the distance or will falter or lose energy or inspiration during the writing of the novel. It is far more common for novelists to slump in the midst of a book than for nonfiction writers, whose inspiration derives from already existing material rather than from anything they have to create out of their imagination. And while editors who have the novelist's track record to go by can say, "See? She finished six novels, what makes you think she isn't going to finish his seventh?" a novel proposal must be judged by a lot of non-editorial people at a publishing company. Many of them are a little skeptical of, or even downright hostile to, the creative process, and therefore unconvinced that a novelist will be able to stay the course. What is worse, they can relate many unfortunate experiences bearing out their skepticism. Resistance to fiction outlines runs extremely high at most publishers, and that's why one finds prodigious piles of them in so many editors' inboxes.
There are important exceptions, of course. The well-established novelist can land a contract on the basis of an outline, and often a brief one that resembles a book jacket blurb. And writers doing novels in a series or proposing books for a particular line, will of course have to do outlines. But authors who have no solid fiction track record are going to get nowhere in their quest to raise funds to complete their books. Or if they do, miraculously, get an offer, it will undoubtedly be a stingy one, because the publisher is being asked to invest risk capital, and the costs of risk capital are extremely high. It is the difference between telling someone you’ve found a gold mine and showing them a bagful of gold nuggets.
I therefore advise anyone in that position to write a long, boring, detailed outline of his or her novel-to-be, place it beside their keyboard and sit down and write the book. Not a third; not a half; all of it. Shift the risk from the publisher to yourself—because it means shifting the rewards as well. Give an agent a finished novel that they love and watch them do their thing: they can auction it, set a tight deadline for decisions, get a high price, break the author out.
What's that you say? You can't afford to write that novel on speculation? I'm afraid you'll have to do what the novelists of yore did: they begged, borrowed, stole, got day jobs, married into money, or starved to death.
Richard Curtis's books on publishing are available at Open Road https://openroadmedia.com/search-results/books/Richard%20Curtis
Listen to a podcast interview with Richard introduced by a robot! https://tinyurl.com/5d3ken9e