Drafting a Letter of Inquiry for my book

Back in April I started posting updates on a quest to publish my second book. You can read about it here. My latest step is to draft a letter of inquiry to send to editors. The letter of inquiry is a pitch. It contains all the important information a publisher will want to know about my book project. Here's an except of what I've written so far:

Dear Editor:

I am writing to submit a proposal for my book Funding for Preachers in the New Testament: Rethinking paid Christian work in the First Century and Today. Using a historical and theological approach I argue that the dominant assumption about how early church ministry was funded, that early church leaders lived off the generosity of Christian members, is misguided. Rather, most leaders, including Jewish leaders and early Christian leaders, used manual labour as a means of self-support. This has implications for how we think about paid congregational ministry today.

Drawing on material from the New Testament, biblical commentaries, the Didache, and books on the social context of the early centuries A.D., I reveal how manual labour coincided with Torah teaching and Christian preaching by turning my attention first to Jesus as carpenter-builder. I then examine Paul’s perspective and practice of tent-making alongside Jewish teachings about work, and continue to follow the thread of concern over teaching for money in the post-apostolic church and early centuries. The book concludes by answering the “so what?” question in contemporary culture.

I go on to describe other works that have been published in this field, outline my credentials for writing, and highlight how much of my manuscript has been completed. One of the most difficult parts of this step has been finding comparable titles, titles that have similar content and audiences as my books. Since I cannot find anyone else that has recently published on ministry funding in the New Testament, I have gone looking for titles that are related but not necessarily the same. I'll say more about this process in an upcoming blog post. For now, this gives a taste of my