the proposal | a brief outline

The first thing you want to look at is how many copies the book can sell and how – so if you’re doing a book on Shakespeare, you’ll want right up front how often he is quoted each year, how many copies sell of his or her collected works, etc etc why he or she is big in the collective conscious or unconscious. This is really the first part of the proposal where the author should persuade you with every marketing reason why you should publish this book and stay in the black if you do so; simply saying it's a "good book" is not enough.

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  A marketing section to detail the B&N ranking you expect – where you will help promote this book, which areas you feel you can sell it in, amazon sales ranking, websites that the book can be marketed to, stores, people the author knows who can blurb or help – this sort of thing is important.
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  A table of contents with each chapter and what it will be called (rough title) and a synopsis of that chapter.
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  Production: your author should have information such as how many pages they expect the book to have, how many illustrations, the sort of rights and permissions they anticipate for images in the book (because as the publisher, you will be the one responsible for paying for this.) The author needs to, as much as possible, realistically assess what they expect the rights for any images in the book.
  
  A full bio, third person, complete with publications and any awards etc.
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• A complete outline of the book with chapter heads and a synopsis of each chapter - so you're looking at the book as the author expects it to play out. Each chapter should be no more than two or three sentences long and indicate where illustrations will possibly go or if appropriate, any sidebars and the like.
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• Finally, you want to give the publisher:
• a total estimate of page-count
• number of illustrations
• due date when you think the book will be done etc.
• word count (which should be part of your page count)
• categories this book might fit into - which genre
• names of authors (generally well-known and and with authority, who would back this book by giving a blurb for the back-ad.) This helps more than you know in terms of lending legitimacy to a book.
  
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• This is what you are looking for in a proposal.