I have just sent off to my agent a draft of a book proposal for my book tentatively entitled Brains, Genes, and the Universe: the Technological Future of Humanity. The notion is that she will use that to approach publishers, trigger a bidding war, and the book will end up a New York Times bestseller. I'm not holding my breath.
It has taken quite a while to get here. I finished a draft of the book, 120,000 words, last November after two Covid years of regular effort. My agent then had me prepare an Author Questionnaire with all sorts of information about me, the book, and how we might sell it. That took me a couple of months of steady work, an hour or so a day, with iterations with my agent. That then led to filling out a template for the formal book proposal, making judicious use of the material from the Author Questionnaire. One portion of the proposal calls for an annotated Table of Contents that was forbidden from using any actual text from the book. I confess, I cheated and pulled some text from the book in my first pass through summarizing 15 chapters, but then I went back and edited to remove any self-plagiarizing. I'm not sure what the point is, but rules is rules.
The proposal also called for three sample chapters. I have to pick only three chapters from 15, each my precious baby? I picked the introductory chapter and two on brains, one on artificial brains, and one on the real thing.
I'm sure there will be more iteration with my agent, but we are getting closer to making the pitch and maybe getting out of the extensive spec work phase.