The Hook

Recently, I began drafting my book proposal (a sort of Reader's Digest version of my cookbook) that I will send out to literary agents and publishers before the manuscript. The first step of book proposal drafting is to write a book overview or synopsis. My research tells me that it should be between 1 and 2 pages in length and summarize the main idea of the book. Well, that's fine, I think I should be able to do that. It's only a cookbook after all, what is there to say?

But as I continued to research the topic, I learned that really literary agents and publishers are only interested in one particular sentence of that overview. That's right – one sentence out of a page or two. The special sentence is referred to as “the hook” - perhaps because all it takes is one sharp hook to land a fish (or in this case a book deal). But this hook is something that has me stressing. How does one sell a book in a single concise sentence?

Unfortunately I don't have an answer for you at the moment. I'm still thinking. But so far I've come up with the following:

• CELEBRATE: Food for Life's Special Occasions is a great book, and you should publish it because I want you to.
• CELEBRATE: Food for Life's Special Occasions is a humorous cookbook, and you don't see many of those, now do you?
  and
• CELEBRATE: Food for Life's Special Occasions has a dead sexy cover photo, and that's reason enough.

Yeah... Somehow, I don't think any of those will work. (Although I think they should. How's that old adage go – always judge a book by its cover?) Well anyway, I guess I'll just have to continue my research tomorrow in the hopes of honing my hook to a literary agent-landing sharpness.