How to Write Chapter Summaries for Your Book Proposal

One of the key elements required by most publishers when you’re submitting a book proposal is an annotated table of contents, also known as a set of chapter summaries or abstracts for each chapter that will appear in your proposed book.

You might also want to create a set of chapter summaries as a map of your book that you include in your introduction chapter.

If you find yourself faced with this task and at a loss for how to do them, Chapter 7 of The Book Proposal Book can help.

But if you haven’t gotten your hands on The Book Proposal Book yet, here’s a quick break-down of what I suggest you include in your description of each body chapter within your prospectus:

• The working title of the chapter. If you’re at the proposal stage, don’t worry about the title changing later, it’s fine.
• The topic of the chapter. You just need a few words to answer the question, “what’s this chapter about?”
• The argument you make about the chapter’s topic. If it’s more of a context or history chapter, you might not exactly have an argument but you will still have a main purpose or point you want readers to understand. Don’t assume the chapter topic speaks for itself — people will want to know why they should read the chapter and the argument or purpose tells them why.
• The objects you analyze in the chapter and the methods you use. What this looks like will vary by field. It might be the sources you drew on in your analysis, the texts you read, the people you talked to, the sites you observed, the data set you’re using as evidence, etc.
• The relationship between your chapter’s main point or argument and your book’s overall purpose or thesis. If you can explain this, it’ll solidify the reader’s sense that the chapter is a necessary component of the book and worth the reader’s time.
• The chapter’s relationship to the other chapters or its place in the overall arc of the book. This can be a sentence or less. It might simply be some transitional words at the start of the summary explaining how we’re progressing from the previous chapter or shifting directions in this part of the book, or why we’re starting or ending the book’s narrative in this specific place.

I know this sounds like a lot, but it can actually be accomplished in one paragraph per chapter with some effort.

If you’re writing a proposal, you do want the book to feel substantial and fleshed out (versus overly speculative), so it’s ok to take more than a paragraph per summary if you need it in order to explain your evidence and analysis. But do try to be concise out of respect for your reader’s time.

If you find that it’s taking you several paragraphs to say what needs to be said about a particular chapter, consider whether maybe that chapter itself needs to be split up into multiple chapters within the book.

Remember that each chapter should have one core argument or purpose it’s trying to convey to readers. Secondary arguments and purposes are ok (there’s room for nuance and layers), but you risk muddling the main argument if you try to do too much at once.

As a developmental editor, I can also tell you that the chapter will be a hell of a lot harder to write if you’re not clear on the main thing you want readers to take away from it.

I hope this little formula helps if you find yourself wondering whether you really need to write chapter summaries. You may think that you don’t need them when submitting a full manuscript to a publisher, but I still recommend you write them and include them with your book proposal.

Many of the people looking at your proposal and making decisions about your project will not have time to read the whole manuscript. Your chapter summaries also give you a chance to talk in a meta way about what purpose each chapter serves in the book, and they can show that you’ve been thoughtful about structure. The case for the book can be won or lost in the chapter summaries (in my opinion anyway).

Even if your publisher tells you that you don’t need the summaries, I think the exercise of writing them (especially those last two bullet points) can still be extremely clarifying. It may even save you time and suffering in your book-writing process overall, and heaven knows we could all do with more time and less suffering!