Question about proposals

This is an oddly small question to be asking, but I've been unable to answer it. When you start a new section of a book proposal--"the market," "the competition," etc.--if the current section ends mid-page do you start the next section on a new page, or just space and go for it?

Also, I wondered if anybody could help me in categorizing the topic of my book. It's on the derivations of Chinese characters and the unique insights they provide into the ideas they communicate. The insight stuff is most of the content, and that's my own so it's not meant to be a scholarly book, but unlike the other unscholarly books out there I use a very consistent and checkupable method for identifying the derivation itself, the basis for the insight stuff. So nothing exactly like my book has been written and the few that are something close I still don't know how to categorize. I went to Barnes and Noble for the purpose of finding the section in which my book would be if it were there, but there was nothing ANYTHING like my book. The closest two things were general Chinese language-learning resources and memoirs written by Chinese-Americans! I feel I ought to know before sending in a proposal what section of bookstore it would be in. (probably the discount section at the front. not bad for exposure.) Also, though I've found one agent I'm very interested in, if he turns me down the looking will be a bit hard after that since I don't know what categories to look under in the Writer's Market, so if anybody has any suggestions about finding agents/publishers for this sort of thing, I'd really appreciate that too.

Thanks,
Bonnie

Thanks. That's a surprise. The stuff I read gave me the impression that the best thing I could say was "this is a book that hasn't been written before." That IS a good thing to say, isn't it? I'm sure it makes them more comfortable for it to have a niche to fit into, but they will want something with a new slant, I'm assuming? So far, I've definitely seen nothing exactly like my book and I'm hoping that's good. There are a few books, and Swallowing Clouds would be one, that explain characters within the context of a particular topic, or make a list of characters relating to a topic, but mine is meant to be the 100 characters with the most interesting philosophical statements built into them, something nobody else seems to have done. Furthermore, I use a radical (I suppose you know what this means, but for anyone else reading this, a radical is one of the well-defined building blocks of Chinese characters) approach rather than a pictorial approach. Often I see these two approaches mixed in a way that offers no accountability: somebody will explain a character part either according to its radical meaning or, if that doesn't seem to make much sense (which it frequently doesn't), they'll make up something they think it looks like. From what I can see in the excerpt of Swallowing Clouds, the author doesn't do this, but she spends most of her time on the very basic characters that indeed require a pictorial explanation. There's enough out there on this sort of thing and it's not what I'm trying to write. So does this sound good? Some similar books but nothing exactly like it?

And can you share about your experience with what editors are weary of? Did you try to sell a book with no competition? I'd be interested to hear.

Oh, and you don't happen to have an answer about my first question about formatting, do you?

Thanks so much,
Bonnie

Thanks for the help. I have a better idea now of how I need to balance originality and context in my proposal.

May I suggest that you mention both a book like "Swallowing Clouds" and why you're different in your proposal?

Click to expand...

Yes, I was already going to but now I see I need to emphasize similars as a context instead of de-emphasizing them as competitors. Thanks a lot.

bonnie

Hi, sorry I haven't checked in here in a while. I thought this discussion was over but I appreciate Sliding Otter, Nomad, and smallthunder's help.

To Nomad--who would read my book? I think there would be plenty of readers, as all things East Asian (such as yoga and anime) are a huge fad right now, especially among college age kids, and there's plenty of well-meaning but uninformed interest in the characters specifically, what with the rash of kids getting tattoos of characters without knowing what they mean. My book would be very accessible to people who don't know much about this kind of thing but want to learn, and furthermore would like to learn really exciting things right away. The book will have 100 character entries, and will be the sort of book you can pick up, read one entry, and have one really fascinating new bit of information to think and talk about. I'll post a sample entry later today or tomorrow to give you an idea.

However, I think even people who have some language knowledge, even native speakers perhaps, might find this book interesting because, as I have been surprised to learn by talking to many native speakers (mostly of Japanese, not Chinese, but they use the same characters), people who grow up using the Chinese writing system pretty much NEVER pick apart the derivations because they learn the characters by rote. The number of native speakers who think about the composition of their characters appears to be about the same as the number of English speakers who pick apart word origins, which is very easy to do but which no one seems to ever think about (though I daresay more do in this forum than in the general population).

To smallthunder: I am not an exceedingly scholarly person and this is not a scholarly book. I had my introduction to the Chinese writing system when I studied Japanese for the past academic year at Kansai Foreign Language University in Osaka, Japan, and since I returned have continued to study Japanese and ancient Chinese on my own. I have many friends who are native speakers of Japanese and can offer opinions on linguistic issues from that point of view, and some of the entries in the book include stories about people I met and what they thought of these characters.

I will of course make note of the occasional small differences between Chinese and Japanese slants on the characters. I am using dictionaries of both.

So I need to figure out the best way to make myself sound perhaps more learned than I am, but another main point (don't know how to balance these two) is that not having several doctorates should be okay because everything I say is easily checkable in dictionaries. (and I am using very scholarly dictionaries as sources.) I break down the characters by radicals, already-well-defined character parts. I start each entry by saying something like...ok here's an example, a real character that's cute but not going in the book because it doesn't have the philosophical implications that are the main point: 'The character [ab] for "smell" is made of [a] meaning "nose" and meaning "dog." [Then my philosophical interpretations of this]...' According to every dictionary, this character quite irrefutably means smell, and parts a and b quite irrefutably mean nose and dog, and the philosophical interpretations are my own and not supposed to be anybody else's, so there should be no problems in accountability.

The thing is that most of the content of my book should be obvious but I've never heard anyone say it, so I figure I'd better say it myself. I do realize I am liable to be told I'm not learned enough. But soon I'll post a sample entry and see what you guys think about it.