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How to Write a Book with Fieldstone Alliance
You've helped many people. Maybe you set up a neighborhood bank,
led a community development initiative, or mastered the art of nonprofit management. Perhaps
you've written about your work in newsletters and journals. You may be training and teaching.
People frequently turn to you for your professional expertise, and you've decided its time
to share that expertise with a larger audience. Fieldstone Alliance may be the place for
you to do just that.
What We're Looking For
Fieldstone Alliance is looking for book proposals from experts in
community issues, nonprofit management, organizational development, and human services.
We want manuscripts that identify “best practice” and make it easy to understand. We feel
our publications are successful if a reader can pick one up and put it to work immediately.
Thus our publications emphasize practical experience and step-by-step directions. Some of
our successful formats include:
- Workbooks that explain a process and provide worksheets to guide the reader through that process.
- Brief workbooks (our Nonprofit Field Guide series) on specific topics such as teambuilding.
- Research reports and literature reviews that sift through many studies to distill basic trends in such a way as to be useful to practitioners and policy makers.
- Curricula that human services professionals can easily follow and adapt for their programs.
We're especially interested in the following topics as they apply to nonprofits: leadership, management, and planning; organization development; ethics and legal issues; marketing; communications and public relations; human resources, technology, and infrastructure; finances and resource development; community involvement and advocacy; and evaluation.
Our publications are used by nonprofit managers, board members, community organizers, grassroots groups, policy makers, consultants, trainers, funders, and human service professionals. We seek proposals that appeal to one or more of these audiences.
How to Submit Your Proposal
Send your proposal double-spaced on white paper. Do not send a
computer disk. You need not send an entire manuscript. If you want the proposal returned,
send a self-addressed envelope with the correct amount of postage attached. Otherwise,
we will not return the proposal.
Your proposal should specify the following:
- Audience—Who you see as the users of your information.
- Objective—One paragraph that describes the impact your book will make on its readers.
- Market—Types of organizations that are most likely to purchase the book, and your estimate of the number of such organizations.
- Competing publications—Competing or similar titles, if any.
- Unique selling points—Those aspects of your book that make it different from all other books on your particular topic.
- Contents, including:
- A chapter outline with paragraphs or lists of all topics to be covered in each chapter.
- A sample worksheet if worksheets are to be part of the book
- Appendix headings, partial bibliography, and headings for other back matter.
- A description of any illustrations you feel are necessary.
- One to three sample chapter(s).
- Process—A brief description of the sources and process you will use as you write.
- Author qualifications—A brief description of yourself, your experience, any previous publications, your conference presentations, and why you are qualified to write this book.
We encourage you to look through our publications descriptions on this web site before sending us a proposal. Detailed information on outlining and planning to write is available (call Tim Brostrom at 651.556.4514 or e-mail him at tbrostrom@FieldstoneAlliance.org).