#1 Rule for Pitching Nonfiction

When you prepare your book proposal or article query, how can you avoid one of the the top reasons pitches get rejected? Learn how to think like a publisher: know what will draw readers to spend money to read it.

Sounds straightforward, right? When we think about products in a different part of the marketplace, we easily understand how to show buyers why they need what we’re selling: Have a hard time seeing the football when you watch sports? Buy this huge, new, extra-high definition television. Feel stressed trying to cook dinner in the middle of driving one kid to piano lessons and the other to soccer? Ignore the stove, oven, microwave, and slow cooker you have, and buy the new Instant Pot.

But convincing readers to buy intellectual property—ideas—has a few more complexities. The #1 Rule for Pitching Nonfiction
Answer the question: Why will someone want to spend money on this product?

The #1 Problem of Nonfiction Pitches
Authors answer why readers should buy/read this product instead of why they want to.
Even when I discuss this point with authors before they build their proposals, I find their first drafts still present some form of “Readers should read this book because…” As writers, we seem to have significant difficulty flipping from the author’s point of view to the reader’s. That’s a problem. (And if we have an ideology, such as a biblical worldview, that says absolute truth exists and everyone should follow it, then we feel even more justified pushing the “should” angle. That, too, is a problem.)

But I get it. Especially with books, we writers have spent months, if not years, researching and developing content. We care passionately about our topics and want to defend their merits in terms of the insight we argue for inside the book. We have been long convinced of the public’s need for this tome, or else we would never invest so much time and money writing it. We fear that if we appeal to the audience’s felt needs rather than the objective truth behind our issue, we will water down our argument to mere selfish preference.

But books we browse in a bookstore or online marketplace differ from the books teachers once required us to read: we have no outside incentive to turn the pages of a work judged “good for us to know.” I don’t have to eat my peas if I don’t want to.

The Should Factor
Daily life encounters many shoulds: We should brush our teeth twice a day. We should eat plenty of fruits and vegetables. We should keep our smartphones out of the bedroom and away from the dinner table. We should honor our parents, reserve energy and tenderness for our spouses, and play with our children. We should vote.

Just because we should doesn’t mean we will.

But most of us will endure challenge, pain, or sacrifice if we recognize it will get us something we desire more than avoiding that pain. People will wrestle with hard truths and shoulds—and even read that one book they read a year—if they think it might lead them where they want to go.
Let’s look at a few bestselling titles to see what desires they engage:

Wild at Heart. John Eldridge wants men to step up and pursue God’s calling, so he appeals to what he understands men long for: to fight for something good, to have adventure, and to restore or rescue beauty in this world. This title says to men with these longings, “I understand you and why you feel bored in current church culture. Here’s how to change how you experience the church.”

How Happiness Happens. Who doesn’t want to be happy in some form or another? Max Lucado offers the secret to finding it by showing how modern research backs up Jesus’s teachings. Consider the difference between this title and Count It All Joy, which tells us what we should do rather than offering to explain how to get what we want.

Jesus Calling. In the Christian culture, we often hear admonitions to read your Bible, have your quiet time, and pursue the Lord (all shoulds). Sarah Young flipped this idea around for her bestselling devotional. Rather than us convincing ourselves to pursue God, her title reminds us that God is pursuing us. We love him because he first loves us. Her devotional books have sold sixteen million copies! If you want to sell books, pay attention to the spark of longing she connected with.

Leverage the Seesaw
As you look at your topic and main message, think of the want/should problem like a seesaw. You sit on one side and you want your reader to sit on the other so you can raise them up to new understanding. You will never get them up there if you can’t get them to sit on the other side.

You invite a seesaw partner by raising your side and lowering theirs near ground level. You go up for a bird’s-eye view to understand the wider perspectives of your target audience and offer them a seat relevant to where they, not you, stand. When they get on, you can then go back to your ground level and raise them up to see your point of view.

The process after the reader engages with the book is even more important. We know what happens when we convince someone to get on the seesaw, raise up their side, and then we promptly get off, right? They plummet back to the ground, hard. And they don’t want to play with us anymore. Neither can we propose to meet a felt need as a selling gimmick and then fail to engage with it. We must work together with the reader through the entire book in an ongoing symbiosis, regularly returning to that felt need and showing the reader how our ideas fill it.

Pastor and writer Tim Keller excels at this approach. His audience can see that he truly sees and cares about the values that bring dissenters to the discussion table, even while disagreeing with their conclusions. He seesaws between “I respect your intention” and “Consider this approach” throughout his books. Some might see Keller as a master logician; I see him as a master reader of hearts.

Inviting the Other Team, an Example
To truly leverage the seesaw, you must search for relevance to your target audience in the beginning stages of your book and adjust your angle to allow your reader a seat in the ongoing discussion. This relevance requires you to narrow your audience. Your topic may apply to the whole world, but the way you write about it cannot. The unknown kid sitting on the seesaw calling to the whole playground to join him or her will sit alone, but the kid who looks in the eye of the lonely child passing by on the way to the swing and says, “Don’t I know you? You live on my street and you create lovely sidewalk drawings,” will find a seesaw friend.

Reaching into felt needs you don’t share need not contradict or water down your truth. It merely acknowledges that we all have varying motivations for why we do things. Respecting motivations is essential if you want to speak to those outside your particular playground gang. So you need to know whether you are writing primarily for your own “idea friends” or someone else. Consider this example:
Let’s say an author wants to write a business leadership book arguing for increased engagement with, payment to, and advocacy of employees, and she especially wants to appeal to conservative-leaning business leaders. For her, running a business with these values is merely the right thing to do. And the justice of it motivates her. But if she writes her book with an assumed definition of rightness and justice, she won’t reach her target audience.

Instead, she needs to look at how her proposed ideas will benefit the longings of the audience, and she needs to respect those longings as well-intentioned, even if opposed to her perspective. So she might argue that if CEOs themselves change the plight of the common worker and their lack of stability, mobility, opportunity, and flourishing by changing their business models (her primary values), then they might also short-circuit the current push for socialist redistribution measures while meeting their company’s long-term responsibility to shareholders, reducing the need for government oversight, and expressing compassion (the reader’s values).

Will writing such arguments betray her own position of the rightness of what she proposes? Only if she thinks businesses that flourish while caring for workers are a problem or if her true agenda is convincing people that a socialist government is the only solution. If that’s her agenda, then she’s writing the wrong book and needs to adjust her topic and audience.

Preparing the Proposal
If you leverage the seesaw well from the beginning, your proposal will write itself. You can tell publishers and agents, “These particular people will want to buy this book because they long for ABC and I reach into that longing with them and give them XYZ as an answer in a way they can embrace it.” You will already know your target audience and your unique selling proposition. And you will be steps away from the perfect elevator pitch, the invitation to sit on the seesaw.

So follow the rule. And enjoy the playground—and your profits.