Writing a Novel Synopsis is Hard
So I wrote, edited, edited, than edited again my manuscript. And now it’s “done.” Hurray!
Now I just need to get it published. How hard could that be, really? I’ve heard the classic advice of ‘be ready for rejection’ just in the course of being a person who’s alive and interested in writing. I’m ready for that bit -at least, I’m pretty sure I am, I haven’t gotten that far yet. At any rate, rejection is easy. It’s passive. I just have to shoot my best shot, and if it misses the mark I just clean up what I’m doing and try again with someone that’s hopefully more into what I’m pitching.
Easy!
The less easy part is figuring out how to even approach publishing. Luckily google was there to save me. A handful of reddit posts, writing blogs, and publisher pages later, and I realized that going straight to a publisher with a manuscript is probably not ideal. What I probably need is an agent.
Of course that led me to the next question - how do I get one of those?
Once again goggle came to my rescue, sending me to a series of blogs and agent querying sites.
It got pretty overwhelming pretty quickly, but after the initial “oh no, paperwork” reaction subsided I buckled down and started puling together what looked like the most common elements of a query to an agent.
1) A Query letter. Pretty straight forward, and I found plenty of examples to get a feel for the skeleton. Its a bit like a cover letter for a resume, maybe a little redundant given what else goes into most queries, but hey that’s the nature of the game.
2) Author Bio: This one was a little weird for me since I don’t have any publishing history - and I did have to be a little less flippant than I am in my author bio on the site. But this still wasn’t too big of a hurdle.
3) Pitch / Hook: This is basically what I wrote on the Projects page. Had to wrack my brain a bit, but not a big deal.
4) Sample Chapters: Oh thank god, something I've already finished.
5) Similar Books: This makes sense, but I did not see this question coming. Queue me texting friends:
“Realize it's been a while sense you read it, but did my book vibe check similarly to anything else you've read recently?
It turns out that agents often ask for books comparable / similar to what your submitting, and I've somehow forgotten every book I've ever seen in my entire life”
- Me, in a slight panic
6) Novel Synopsis: Oh dear. oh dear. This is simply a summary of your novel.
Realistically, this is not a big ask. I wrote 100K+ words, surely I can muster together a ~500 word recap of the same. This is not a difficult task, but it is a very different skill and one that I’m not used to, so there will be a learning curve. I know that I’m overdoing it right now, I’m overthinking what needs to be included and have no idea what the balance between listing events and noting internal character motivations is supposed to be. I have my manuscript open in half my screen and a word doc in the other for me to summarize the key events. The problem is that I’m 1/3 of the way through the text, but ~1,800 words into a synopsis and that is not going to work. Not even a little.
I know eventually I’ll find an example of what to include or cut from the synopsis, and I’ll get there eventually. But in the mean time, there is something unreasonably difficult about it.
Alright, that’s my vent disguised as a blog post. Hopefully I’ll sort this out over the weekend.
