One chilly Thursday in December 2023, I was volunteering in my local nature reserve, Sydenham Hill Wood. Over lunch round folding tables, I confessed to my friend Chris, fellow volunteer and writer, that I was working on a proposal for a book celebrating urban nature and the people who care for it. He told me he thought his agent, Tom, might like it and that Tom and I would get on with each other. Chris suggested that I should send him the proposal which he would then forward to Tom.

By this point, I’d:

  • thought of a title – Wild Pavements – which I hoped would catch people’s attention and give a feel for the book’s subject matter.
  • spent some time working up the premise for the book which would celebrate urban nature and the people who care for it;
  • walked in eight directions from the City toward the London suburbs, recording urban nature I found in an audio diary and photographs, as a proof of concept;
  • visited several cities elsewhere in the British Isles for comparison; and
  • paid for some invaluable and detailed advice from an experienced writer/editor friend, Anita, on my draft book proposal.

The draft book proposal was a single document made up of the following five elements:

1/ A title page, with a title, sub-title and collage of photos I’d taken of urban nature on my walks;

2/ A one-page overview, which I had tried to write in the style of back-cover blurb with a quote from the introduction chapter;

3/ A one-page author bio, with a photo, and a quote from my lovely friend and guru Stephen Moss endorsing my nature writing;

4/ A set of chapter summaries, each of around 75-100 words; and then most importantly

5/ Sample chapters totalling just over 15K words.

Back home after our volunteering session, I took a deep breath, and then emailed Chris my draft book proposal. I was aware that I’d been lucky to have had this conversation around a table in the woods, but I was also realistic about the outcome.

Wild Pavements wasn’t the first book idea I’d invested time in. A couple of years before my conversation with Chris, I’d written a proposal for a book about the benefits of learning in later life in the context of teaching myself plant identification. I’d found an agent, and the proposal was sent round a long list of publishers. We received positive feedback on my writing, but sadly none of the commissioning editors felt it had enough of a hook to make it worth taking on. And my first agent had decided to bring his agenting career to an abrupt end. I was painfully aware that finding a new agent would be great, but was only the first rung on the book publishing ladder.

I was very pleased to hear back from Chris a couple of weeks later that agent Tom was interested in Wild Pavements and Tom and I met online to chat about it. It was very positive conversation – I immediately warmed to him – and I had no hesitation in signing up with Tom when he offered to represent me.

Over spring 2024, Tom’s expertise helped me strengthen the book proposal, and I added in some market analysis before the sample chapters, picking five titles that linked to my urban nature idea and then explaining why Wild Pavements would stand out from these.

After lots of redrafting of the sample chapters, by early summer 2024 Tom agreed that the proposal was now ready to go out to publishers. It was time to find out what the rest of the world made of Wild Pavements.