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That pesky contest synopsis, part IV: hold the phone!

phone-3-1.gif phone-3-1.gif phone-3-1.gif

What a day this has been! What a rare mood I’m in! No, it’s not almost like being in love — it’s exactly like living in a caucus state the day before the big event. My telephone hasn’t rung this much since the days when my phone number was one digit off from my hometown’s most popular bar.

Why all the ringing? Why, so the recorded voices of people I have heard of and the live voices of people I haven’t may urge me to spend half a day tomorrow arguing with my neighbors at my local caucus, of course. All of a sudden, everyone in the other Washington can find Seattle on a map unassisted.

Heck, representatives from both major campaigns offered not only to give me directions to the elementary school where I will be caucusing; they offered to DRIVE me there.

To be fair, a certain amount of nagging is warranted in my neck of the woods — to attend my caucus is to take one’s life, and certainly one’s blood sugar, into one’s hands. Unlike a primary, where all the voter is asked to do is fill in a few bubbles, drop a form into a box, and go, caucus goers are expected to spend several HOURS holding forth on the relative merits of their chosen candidates.

While actual fisticuffs seldom occur, bullying often does; the last time I attended, my views on environmental preservation were challenged by a 6’5″, 400-pound ex-Marine willing — indeed, eager — to throw his considerable bulk in the direction of anyone who contradicted the views of the party leadership.

Since he was of the opinion that the merest discussion of any plank of the state’s platform, however minor, was tantamount to treason, a certain amount of physical intimidation was inevitable. I’ve seen him send entire salmon preservation leagues scurrying to the other side of the elementary school auditorium.

All the while, party volunteers proffer cookies, coffee, candy, coffee, hot dogs, coffee, Danish, coffee, brownies, coffee, and sometimes, in my neighborhood, a gigantic cake emblazoned with the iced likeness of our local baking maven’s choice for president. You should have seen it the year she went for Jesse Jackson.

Oh, heavens, there goes the phone again.

I’m back — now back to work.

It may seem odd that I hammered so hard yesterday about the importance of a finely-crafted synopsis to a contest entry’s overall chances of winning, but you would be astonished at how often a well-written chapter is accompanied by a synopsis obviously dashed off at the last minute, as though the writing quality, clarity, and organization of it weren’t actually being evaluated at all.

I suspect that this is a fairly accurate reading of what commonly occurs. All too often, writers (most of whom, after all, have full-time jobs and families and, well, lives to lead) push preparing their entries to the very last minute.

Frustrated at this crucial moment by what appears to be an arbitrary requirement — it’s the writing in the chapter that counts, right? — it’s tempting just to throw together a synopsis in a fatal rush and shove it into an envelope, hoping that no one will pay much attention to it.

Trust me on this one: judges WILL pay attention to it. Many a fine entry has been scuttled by a slipshod synopsis.

I won’t go so far as to say, of course, that if you do not expend careful consideration over the crafting of the synopsis for a book-length category, you might as well not enter at all. It is entirely fair to say, however, that if you have a well-written, well thought-out synopsis tucked into your entry packet, your work will automatically enjoy an edge toward winning.

I have a few more tips on how to increase that edge, of course — but while that darned phone keeps ringing every few minutes, I think my powers of concentration will be best spent on issues of format, rather than content.

I hadn’t realized it until reader Sheri asked a question about synopses the other day, but back in December, when I was posting examples of standard format, I somehow managed to neglect to include what a synopsis should look like. Today, I’m going to rectify that, for both contest and submission synopses.

First, let’s look at the first page of a synopsis one might submit to an agent:

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For the most part, as you may see, it simply adheres to standard manuscript format: one-inch margins all the way around, slug line in the top left margin, page number in the slug line, indented paragraphs, the works. (If you’re unclear on the hows and whys of standard manuscript format, or were unaware that such a thing existed, please see the STANDARD FORMAT BASICS category at right.)

Note, too, that the first time a character is introduced to the story, her name appears entirely in capital letters. That makes it easier for skimming eyes to follow — and if that seems like an invitation to screener laziness, bear in mind that Millicent and her compatriots are reading literally hundreds of pages per day. Their eyes are TIRED.

Do you want to be the writer who makes those eyes’ little lives easier or harder?

The title of the work is on the first line of the page, with the information that it is a synopsis on the second double-spaced line. Why state up front that it’s a synopsis? Well, remember a few months back, when I described that catastrophic collision between two interns in an agency hallway? Does “Hey, you got memoir in my thriller!” “No, you got thriller in my memoir!” ring a bell?

Since submitted manuscripts are unbound in any way, individual pieces of them tend to wander off on field trips of their own. Slug lines can go a long way toward allowing those hapless interns to piece the manuscripts back together.

Guess what? So can clearly labeled synopses.

For this reason, I like to label subsequent pages of the synopsis as such as well. It’s not strictly required, but hey, the subsequent pages are every bit as likely to go wandering as the first, right? The result looks like this:

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All clear on the format for the submission synopsis? May I suggest that this would be a dandy time to bring up questions, if not?

Okay, on to the contest synopsis. The primary difference is — anyone? Anyone?

Yes, that’s right: in a blind-judged contest (i.e., in the respectable ones that are worth your time and money to enter), the writer’s name cannot appear on any page of the entry. Not the first, and certainly not the last.

Obviously, this is going to affect the slug line, but it’s easily resolved. Lookee:

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See? Very simple. Notice any other differences?

If you are looking for purely cosmetic differences, there aren’t any, other than the slug line. However, on the content level, I did tighten up the synopsis a bit for the benefit of the contest judge.

Why, you ask? Because I happen to know (having read the contest rules as closely as I urge you all to do) that this contest accepts entries up to fifty pages long. Almost everything that happened within the first two pages of the submission synopsis occurs during the first fifty pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY.

The judge will most likely read the chapters before turning to the synopsis — that way, if the writing in the chapter is not good, they can skip the synopsis altogether. So why recap more than is necessary, especially if including a 4-page contest synopsis will allow Aunt Jane to include another page of text?

Seem rules-lawyerish? Exactly; contests are run by people who just adore rules. Go with the flow.

Next time, phone conditions permitting, I shall polish off the hot topic of contest synopsis-polishing. Happy caucusing, Washingtonians, Louisianans, and Nebraskans, and everybody, keep up the good work!

Posted on - No Comments on That pesky contest synopsis, part II, or Synopsis #1 ? Synopsis #2

That pesky contest synopsis, part II, or Synopsis #1 ? Synopsis #2

Or, to put it graphically:
01_01_53-vulture_web.jpg is not the same fowl as 01_01_7_thumb.jpg

What, you ask, am I talking about? Well, last time, I began talking about the differences between a synopsis that an aspiring writer might submit along with a query or requested pages and one that works well in a contest submission. Although they are called by the same name, they actually serve different purposes, so it’s in your best interests to craft them differently.

Hey, both vultures and peacocks are birds, but you don’t expect them to move from Point A to Point B precisely the same way, do you? Would you feed a peacock Vulture Chow?

Of course not. You’d feed it Peacock Yummies.

Because I had gone over the ins and outs of constructing the former type fairly recently (a series of posts gathered for your reading pleasure under the HOW TO WRITE A SYNOPSIS category in that long list at right), I leapt right into the contest version last time with nary a backward glance. But perhaps that was a tad abrupt.

Let me back up for a moment and define synopsis, for those of you new to the term:

SYNOPSIS, n.: A brief exposition in the present tense of the plot of a novel or the argument of a book. Typically, synopses run from 1-5 pages (double-spaced), depending upon the requirements of the requesting agent, editor, or contest.

In other words, it’s our old bugbear, a coolclips_wb024789.gif

That’s going to be true, incidentally, no matter the context in which it is requested. But, unlike many of the other hoops through which aspiring writers need to jump through on the way to landing an agent, the ability to write a strong synopsis is a skill that’s going to serve you well for your entire literary career.

That’s right, folks: even the long-agented and often-published still need to write ‘em occasionally. Might as well learn to do it well.

Because, after all, no one likes a synopsis that just lies there like a dead trout. Except, perhaps, our friend the vulture.

Now, obviously, it’s a tough task to summarize a 400-page book in just a few pages — no one contests that. You’re going to need to cover that plot with dispatch. But that doesn’t necessarily mean being vague or leaving out eye-catching details.

In both types of synopsis, most fiction writers make the mistake of summarizing the plot in generalities, rather than giving a brief overview of the major conflicts of the plot through a series brief, vividly described scenes redolent with juicy concrete details. The latter is definitely more memorable — which is definitely a great trait in a synopsis.

Not clear on the difference? Let’s take a gander at a fairly typical opening paragraph for a synopsis:

JACQUELINE (42) is experiencing severe problems in her life: a boss who alternately seems to hate and praise her, a father who calls all the time to grill her about her love life, and a wacky neighbor who is constantly knocking on her door to borrow things. She feels like she’s going out of her mind until she meets the man of her dreams, an architect whose bedroom eyes make her swoon, but who may already have a wife. After a series of disturbing “chance” meetings with Josh, she finds that it’s easier to accept a temporary demotion than to keep on fighting battles on all fronts.

Okay, let me ask you: how many lines into that summary did your attention start to wander? How many lines before you started to become confused about what was going on? And if you made it all the way to the end, did you find yourself wondering whether Josh was the architect, the boss, or the neighbor?

Good; you’re thinking like an agency screener. And like a contest judge.

The primary reason that this excerpt doesn’t hold the attention is that it’s stuffed to the gills with generalities and clichés. But a synopsis does not need to present a story with either. Take a look at the same story, summarized with a bit more pizzazz and a lot more specifics:

Freshly-divorced graphic designer JACQUELINE (42) is finding it hard to sleep these days. Staying awake isn’t much of a picnic, either. Her boss, ALBERT (87) cannot seem to make it through a staff meeting at the magazine without criticizing her layouts while running a warm, greasy hand up her stockinged thighs under the conference table.

You already want to read this book, don’t you? That’s because the details are compelling and unusual. Let’s see where else dialing back the vague helps us:

Every morning at precisely 9:24, her habitually-marrying father (OWEN, 67) telephones her at work to see if she met Mr. Right the night before — and when she sheepishly says no, he regales her with tales of his latest paramour. Even her nights are disturbed by her lonely neighbor, CLIVE (24), who can’t seem to make it past midnight without scratching on her door to ask to borrow something — her milk, her hairdryer, her cat.

She manages to run carefully-balanced chaos of her life runs with relative smoothness until dreamy, suspender-wearing architect JOSH (48) comes to measure her office for long-overdue renovations. But is does that untanned line on his left ring finger mean that he, too, is recently separated, or that he’s the kind of rat who slips his wedding ring into his pocket every time he comes within smoldering range of an attractive woman?

Yes, this second synopsis is a trifle longer, but aren’t those few extra lines worth it, when they give the story so much more oomph?

Oomph is, after all, important in a contest entry. A contest judge, like our old friend Millicent the agency screener, typically reads quite a few entries within a single sitting. If you want yours to end up in the pile with the finalists, you’re going to want that judge to remember the STORY of your book, as well as the quality of the writing.

Remember them for positive reasons, that is. If your synopsis doesn’t make the judge make a mental note to rush out and buy that book the nanosecond it hits the shelves, it may be lacking in the oomph department.

Do I see a raised hand or two out there? “But Anne,” I hear some of you asking, “wouldn’t everything you’ve just said be applicable to either a submission OR a contest synopsis? I thought we were talking this week about contest synopses specifically.”

Good point, ethereal questioners. Yes, these principles would apply equally well to either type of synopsis. However, for a contest synopsis, since you will also be submitting the opening of the book — even if the rules merely say that you should include A chapter, rather than Chapter 1, you’re pretty much always going to be better off submitting the beginning — you can get away with covering those early pages only very lightly in the synopsis.

Actually, since those opening 10 pages (or 15, or 25) are all that the judges are going to see of the book, it is justifiable to streamline the plot more than you might for a regular synopsis. If you can make a better, more vivid story by sticking to only the book’s primary plotline (which, in a short synopsis of a long novel, is often the case), go ahead. The point of the contest synopsis, after all, is to wow the judges with what a great storyteller you are, not to reproduce every twist, turn, and minor character’s angst.

This may feel a touch misleading, but after you are wearing the first place ribbon, no one is going to come running up to you crying, “Hey! Your synopsis left out three major plotlines, and didn’t mention the protagonist’s sister! Foul! Foul!”

Trust me on this one.

For memoir, it’s especially important to streamline the story, since the number one problem that most memoir entries present is a tendency to include a little too much information extraneous to the primary plotline. For the synopsis, hit only the dramatic high points — and make sure to give some indication of how the main character grows and changes throughout the book.

Oh, and avoid making the common mistake of mentioning in either a contest or submission synopsis that the story being told is TRUE. Actually, you should eschew it in a query, too: in publishing circles, all nonfiction is assumed to be based upon truth.

Just ask James Frey.

Seriously, the true memoir is as much of an industry pet peeve as the fiction novel or the nonfiction how-to book. To the ears of the industry, all of these terms are redundant.

For other non-fiction entries, you’re going to want to reproduce the basic argument of the book in the synopsis. Starting with a thought-provoking question (“In a society as complex as America’s, why isn’t there more social acceptance of squirrel-lovers?”), then moving on to why the question is important enough to answer is often a good start. Present the essential planks of your argument in logical order, and give some indication of the kind of evidence you intend to use to back it up.

But again, remember to be SPECIFIC in your overview, not vaguely general.

I hear some throat-clearing out there. “Um, Anne? Again, dandy advice for either kind of synopsis, but how should I handle NF in a contest synopsis in particular?”

Tenacious, aren’t you? I can refuse you nothing, so here goes.

In a contest synopsis, it is usually a good idea to include some brief indication of the target market and why your book will serve that market better than what is currently available — essentially, a free taste of the argument that you will be making in your book proposal.

Do keep it short and to-the-point, though. Hyperbole does not work well in this context, so steer clear of grandiose claims (Everyone in North America will want to buy this book!) and stick mostly to saying what the book is ABOUT.

But most of all, make sure that the synopsis makes the book sound like a great read.

As with a novel, the way to achieve this in just a few pages may well involve leaving out some of the less important planks of your argument. Do not feel compelled to give the chapter-by-chapter summary as you would in a book proposal. Just because you have a chapter on the spiritual life of tadpoles in your book on frogs doesn’t necessarily mean than a description of it will read well in a contest synopsis.

Here again, we see that a single book may benefit from having one version of the synopsis that goes out to agents, and another, more streamlined one that gets tucked into contest entries. Different contexts — and sometimes even different contests — may call for different approaches.

Flexibility, after all, is as important a part of the writer’s tool bag as the ability to write an eye-catching opening paragraph. Don’t worry that a judge is going to assume that you don’t understand how to write a submission synopsis — this is a bird of another color, and everyone concerned understands that.

No one familiar with the vulture and the peacock would expect them to flap their wings in exactly the same manner or emit the same sounds, right?

Next time, I shall give a few more pointers on how to make that synopsis appeal a bit more to contest judges — and for those of you who are visually-oriented, I shall be showing examples of how a synopsis should be formatted later in the week. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

Posted on - 4 Comments on Book marketing 101: at long last, the end of the synopsis trail!

Book marketing 101: at long last, the end of the synopsis trail!

I am plagued with a nasty cough today, my friends, but I am determined nonetheless: I am going to wrap up my synopsis-writing series today, so we may move on to other matters. How to format a title page, for instance, and how to come up with a hefty list of agents to query between now and Thanksgiving. And I notice that it’s been a while since I’ve gone through a list of common submission problems.

So this is no time to be hacking up a storm. Back to my list of questions to ask yourself after you have completed a solid draft of your synopsis:

(5) Are its pages numbered?

Even after years of reading synopses intended for submission, I remain perennially shocked at how few of them identify either themselves or the author, due no doubt to a faith in the filing systems of literary agencies that borders on the childlike.

Why do I attribute this to faith? Well, like everything else in a manuscript or book proposal, the synopsis should not be bound in any way; like pretty much everything else on earth, paper responds to gravity.

Translation: things fall; pages get separated, and some luckless soul (generally, the person under Millicent the screener on the agency’s totem pole, if you can picture that) is charged with the task of reordering the tumbled pages.

Place yourself in that unhappy intern’s Doc Martens for a moment: given the choice between laboriously guessing which page follows which by perusing content, and pitching the whole thing (into what we devoutly hope is the recycling bin, but is probably merely the overloaded wastepaper basket) and moving on to the next task, which would YOU choose?

Okay, so maybe you’re ultra-virtuous. What if you were Millicent, and had 20 other submissions to screen before lunch?

Don’t rely upon the kindness of strangers. Especially busy ones who have been trained to believe that unnumbered pages are unprofessional in a submission. Make it easy to put the pages back in the proper order.

(6) Does the first page of the synopsis SAY that it’s a synopsis? Does it also list the title of the book, or does it just begin abruptly? And does every page of the synopsis contain the slug line AUTHOR’S LAST NAME/TITLE/SYNOPSIS/#?

Standard format for a synopsis dictates that the title (either all in caps or bolded) is centered at the top of the first page of the synopsis, with “Synopsis” on the line below it. Then skip one double-spaced line, and begin the text of the synopsis.

And if it seems a bit silly to tell the nice people who asked you to send a synopsis that what they’ve got in their trembling hands is in fact a synopsis, remember that in a largish agency, the person who requests a submission is often not the person who subsequently reads it. (Not the first person, anyway.) Even if it were, from the envelope-opener’s perspective, being expected to recall one request for further materials from — how long? Perhaps a month? — before is tantamount to being asked to guess how many fingers the author is holding up.

In Nebraska. Don’t make ‘em guess.

(7) Is the synopsis absolutely free of errors of any kind? Not just what your word processing software tells you is an error, but an actual error?

Naturally, you should both spell-check and read the ENTIRETY of your synopsis IN HARD COPY, ALOUD, before you send it anywhere. Period. No excuses.

95% of writers — and 99% of non-writers — fall into the trap of thinking that if a document passes muster with their computers’ spelling and grammar checkers, it must therefore be spelled correctly and grammatically sound. That is, alas, generally not true.

Word processing programs’ dictionaries are NOTORIOUSLY inaccurate — and often suprisingly outdated. I am fascinated by the fact that mine evidently does not contain any words that relate to the Internet or computer operations. Should I really have had to introduce “blogger” into its vocabulary, for instance?

And don’t even get a professional editor started on the chronic inadequacies of most word processing programs’ grammar checkers. Mine disapproves of gerunds and semicolons, apparently on general principle, strips necessary accent marks off French words, leaving them obscenely naked, and regularly advises me to use the wrong form of THERE. (If anybody working at Microsoft does not know the ABSOLUTELY IMMUTABLE rules governing when to use THERE, THEIR, AND THEY’RE, I beg you, drop me an e-mail, and I shall make everything clear.) Once, when I was not looking, it incorrectly changed a word in this very blog from “here” to “hear.”

Grammar checkers also typically butcher dialogue, especially if it contains necessary slang. Suffice it to say, most standard word processing spelling and grammar checkers would condemn the entirety of Mark Twain’s opus outright.

My point is, like a therapist who doesn’t listen well enough to give good advice, a poor grammar checker cannot be sufficiently disregarded. Even in the unlikely event that your grammar checker was put together by someone remotely familiar with the English language as she is spoke, you should NEVER rely solely upon what it tells you to do.

Read the manuscript for yourself.

And if you’re in doubt on a particular point, look it up. In a well-regarded dictionary, not on the Internet: contrary to popular opinion, most search engines will list both the proper spelling of a word and the most common misspellings. There is no gigantic cosmic English teacher monitoring proper spelling and grammar on the web. So get up, walk across the room, and pick up a physical dictionary. After so much time spent sitting in front of a monitor, the walk will do you good.

(8) Are all of the proper nouns spelled correctly?

Triple-check all character and place names — believe it or not, misplaced cities, states, and even character names are rife in synopses.

Why? Because these are words that are generally omitted from standard spell-checkers — or are entered with a number of possible variations. So unless you have inserted all of the proper nouns in your work into your spell-checker’s memory, it will often overlook the difference between your elegant heroine, Sandy, and that trollop who wandered into your synopsis unbidden, Sandie.

(9) Does the synopsis read as though I am genuinely excited about this book and eager to market it, or does it read as though I am deeply and justifiably angry that I had to write it at all?

Yes, I’ve talked about this one before, and recently, but this is a subtlety, a matter of tone rather than of content, so it bears repeating. It’s often not as visible to the author as it is to a third party.

As I mentioned earlier in this series, writerly resentment shows up BEAUTIFULLY against the backdrop of a synopsis, even ones that do not breathe an overt word about marketing. The VAST majority of synopses (particularly for novels) simply scream that their authors regarded the writing of them as tiresome busywork instituted by the industry to satisfy some sick, sadistic whim prevalent amongst agents, a hoop through which they enjoy seeing all of the doggies jump.

If you have even the vaguest suspicion that your synopsis — or, indeed, any of your marketing materials — may give off a whiff of that attitude, hand it to someone you trust for a second opinion.

Made it through all of the questions above? After you have tinkered with the synopsis until you are happy with all of your answers, set your synopsis aside. Stop fooling with it. Seriously — there is such a thing as too much editing.

Then, just before you send it out, read it again (IN HARD COPY and OUT LOUD, naturally), and ask yourself a final question:

(10) Does my synopsis support the image of the book I want the requesting agent or editor to see? Would it be worth my while to modify it slightly in order to match more closely to what I told this sterling individual my book was about?

“Wait!” I hear some sharp readers out there cry. “Is Anne saying that it’s sometimes a good idea to tailor the synopsis to the particular agent or editor?”

Well caught, those of you who thought that. If you heard an agent or editor expresses a strong personal preference for a particular theme or style in her speech at an agents’ and editors’ forum or during a pitch meeting, isn’t it just common sense to tweak your already-existing synopsis so it will appeal to those specific likes? If your dream agent let slip in your meeting that she was really intrigued by a particular aspect of your story, doesn’t it make sense to play that part up a little in the synopsis?

A word of warning about pursuing this route: do NOT attempt it unless you have already written a general synopsis with which you are pleased AND have saved it as a separate document. Save your modified synopsis as its own document, and think very carefully before you send it out to anyone BUT the agent or editor who expressed the opinions in question.

Why? Well, as I have been pointing out for over two years now in this very forum, agents and editors are not a monolithic entity with a single collective opinion on what is good and what is bad writing. They are individuals, with individual tastes that vary wildly, sometimes even moment to moment — and certainly over the course of a career.

Think about it: was your favorite book when you were 13 also your favorite book when you were 30? Neither was any given agent’s.

And isn’t your literary opinion rather different on the day you learned that you were being promoted at work and the day that your cat died? Or even the moment after someone complimented your shirt (it brings out your eyes, you know, and have you lost a little weight?), as opposed to the moment after you spilled half a cup of scalding coffee on it?

Again, what’s true for you is true for any given agent, editor, or screener: a LOT of factors can play into whether they like the pages sitting in front of them — or the pitch they are hearing — right now.

Bear this in mind when you are incorporating feedback into your synopsis — or, indeed, any of your work. Just because one agent has given you feedback to tweak your story this way or that, it doesn’t necessarily mean everyone in the industry will greet that tweak rapturously.

Use your judgment: it’s your book, after all. But by all means, if you can modify your synopsis for eyes of the individual who expressed the particular opinion in question, do it with my blessings.

Keep up the good work!

Posted on - 2 Comments on Book marketing 101: the return of that pesky synopsis checklist

Book marketing 101: the return of that pesky synopsis checklist

Welcome to day two of my list of questions to put to your synopsis before you send it on its merry way. Rather than regarding the synopsis as a tedious bit of marketing trivia, yet another annoying hoop for the aspiring writer to jump through on the way to landing an agent, I would encourage you to regard it as an opportunity to encapsulate your writerly brilliance in capsule form.

Okay, so it’s still probably going to be tedious and annoying to produce. But addressing these questions will help it show off your talent more effectively.

Back to the checklist:

(4) Does my synopsis make the book sound just like other books currently on the market, or does it come across as original?

When agents specialize in a particular kind of book (and virtually all of them do limit themselves to just a few types), you would obviously expect that they would receive submissions within their areas of specialty, right? So it’s reasonable to expect that an agency screener at an agency that represents a lot of mysteries would not be reading synopses of SF books and NF books, and romances and westerns, mixed in with only a few mysteries. Instead, that screener is probably reading 800 mystery synopses per week.

Translation: Millicent is seeing a whole lot of repetition across plots.

This may seem self-evident, but it has practical ramifications that many aspiring writers do not pause to consider. That screener is inundated with plots in the genre… and your synopsis is the 658th she’s read that week… so what is likely to happen if your synopsis makes your book sound too much like the others?

The application of Millicent’s favorite word: next!

“Wait just a cotton-picking second!” I hear some of you out there cry, the ones who have attended conferences before. “I’ve heard agents and editors jabbering endlessly about how much they want to find books that are like this or that bestseller. They say they WANT books that are like others! So wouldn’t an original book stand LESS of a chance with these people?”

Yes, you are quite right, anonymous questioners: any number of agents and editors will tell you that they want writers to replicate what is selling well now. Actually, though, this isn’t typically what they mean in practical terms.

Since it would be completely impossible for a book acquired today to hit the shelves tomorrow, and extremely rare for it to come out in under a year — and that’s a year after an editor buys it, not a year from when an agent picks is up — what is selling right now is not what agents are seeking, precisely. They are looking for what will be selling well, say, a couple of years hence.

Which no one can predict with absolute accuracy.

So when an agent or editor tells writers at a conference that they are looking for books that resemble the current bestseller list, they really mean that they want you to have anticipated two years ago what would be selling well now, have tracked them down then, and convinced them (somehow) that your book was representative of a trend to come, and thus had your book on the market right now, making them money hand over fist.

I’ll leave you to figure out the statistical probability of that scenario’s ever happening by yourselves.

Or, to put it in terms of the good joke that was making the rounds of agents a couple of years back: a writer of literary fiction reads THE DA VINCI CODE, doesn’t like it, and calls his agent in a huff. “It’s not very well written,” he complains. “Why, I could write a book that bad in a week.”

“Could you really?” The agent starts to pant with enthusiasm. “How soon could you get the manuscript to me?”

Given how fast publishing fads fade, the same agent who was yammering at conference crowds last month about producing book X will be equally insistent next months that writers should write nothing but book Y. You simply cannot keep up with people who are purely reactive. Frankly, I don’t think it’s worth your time to get mixed up in someone else’s success fantasy.

The fact is, carbon copies of successful books tend not to have legs; the reading public has a great eye for originality. What DOES sell quite well, and is a kind of description quite meaningful to agents, is the premise or elements of a popular work with original twists added. So you’re better off trying to pitch LITTLE WOMEN MEETS GODZILLA than LITTLE WOMEN itself, really.

Which is why, I suspect, that much-vaunted recent experiment where someone cold-submitted (i.e., without querying first, and without going through an agency) a slightly modified version of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE to an array of major publishers, only to have it summarily rejected by all.

At the time, there was much discussion of how this outcome was evidence that editors wouldn’t know great literature if it bit them, but actually, [my] first thought was, how little would you have to know about the publishing industry to think that an unsolicited, unagented novel would NOT be rejected unread by the big publishers? Mightn’t this have actually been a test not of how literature fares, but what happens to submitters who do not follow the rules?

My second thought, though, was this: at this point in publishing history, wouldn’t even an excellent rehashing of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE seem old hat? After all, it’s been done, and done brilliantly — and re-done in many forms, up to and including BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY. I can easily imagine pretty much any English-speaking editor’s taking one look, roll her eyes, and say, “Oh, God, here’s somebody ripping off Jane Austen again.”

She really does turn up everywhere these days, you know. (If you are curious about how often and where, the completely charming Austenblog tracks such matters.)

My point is, agents and editors tend to be pretty well-read people: a plot or argument needs to be pretty original in order to strike them as fresh. The synopsis is the ideal place to demonstrate how your book differs from the rest.

And what’s the easiest, most direct way of doing that? By including surprising and unique details, told in creative language.

Even if your tale is a twist on a well-known classic (which can certainly work: THE COLOR PURPLE is a great retelling of the Ugly Duckling, right?), you are usually better off emphasizing in the synopsis how your book deviates from the classic than showing the similarities. Here again, vivid details are your friends.

The rest of the checklist follows on Monday. (You didn’t think you were going to get away with only four questions, did you?) Keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: synopses, part IX, or, it’s time to trot out those highlighting pens again

It turned out that yesterday’s nagging feeling that I was about to produce a checklist of common synopsis mistakes to avoid was 100% accurate. Kind of predictable, actually, as I am addicted to such lists and synopses vary so much that there honestly is no single reliable formula for producing the perfect one.

But you can steer clear of the problems agents and their screeners see every day, right?

Okay, let’s assume that you have completed a solid draft of your synopsis, and are now in the editing phase. (Let us further assume that you have launched upon the synopsis-creating process long enough before you need one that you have time for an editing phase.) Print it out, ensconce yourself in the most comfortable reading chair you can find, and read it over to yourself OUT LOUD.

Why out loud, and why in hard copy? And why does that question make my long-time readers chuckle?

I freely admit it: this is one of my most dearly-held editing rules. It is INFINITELY easier to catch logical leaps in any text when you read it out loud. It is practically the only way to catch the redundancies that the space constraints of a computer screen virtually guarantee will be in the text, and it will make rhythm problems leap off the page at you.

Don’t even think of cheating and just reading it out loud from your computer screen, either: the eye reads screen text 75% faster than page text, so screen editing is inherently harder to do well.

(And don’t think that publishing professionals are not aware of that: as an editor, I can tell you that a text that has not been read in hard copy by the author usually announces itself with absolute clarity — it’s the one with a word missing here or there.)

After you have read it through a couple of times, clearing out repeated words and ungraceful phrases, ask yourself the following questions. Be honest with yourself, or there is no point in the exercise; if you find that you are too close to the work to have sufficient perspective, ask someone you trust to read the synopsis, then ask THAT person these questions.

(1) Does my synopsis present actual scenes from the book in glowing detail, or does it merely summarize the plot?

You want the answer to be the former, of course. Why? Well, if you’ve been following the entire Book Marketing 101 series, you should be hearing the reason in your sleep by now, but allow me to repeat it: the synopsis is, in fact, a writing sample that you are presenting to an agent or editor, every bit as much as the first 50 pages are.

Make sure it demonstrates clearly that you have writing talent. Not merely that you had the tenacity to sit down and write a book, because tens of thousands of people do that, but that you have writing talent and sharp, clearly-delineated insights. It is far, far easier to show off your writing in detailed summaries of actual scenes, rather than in a series of generalities about the plot and the characters.

And if your favorite line or image of the book does not make a guest appearance in the synopsis, why not?

(2) Does the story or argument make sense, as it is told in the synopsis? Is more specific information necessary to make it work?

This is another excellent reason to read the synopsis out loud: to make sure it stands alone as a story. Since part of the point of the synopsis is to demonstrate what a good storyteller you are, flow is obviously important.

If you have even the tiniest reservations about whether you have achieved this goal, read your synopsis out loud to someone unfamiliar with your project — and then ask your listener to tell the basic story back to you. If there are holes in your account, this method will make them leap out at you.

Insofar as a hole can leap, that is.

(3) Does the synopsis make the book sound compelling? Does it make me eager to read it?

This is where most synopses stumble, frankly, because it is hard for a writer to notice about his own work: most synopses summarize plot or argument adequately, but in the rush to fit everything in, the telling becomes a bit dry. The goal here is not to provide a laundry list of major plot points, after all, but to give an overview of the dramatic arc of the book.

The easiest way to tell if the synopsis is holding together as a good yarn is to hand it to someone who has NOT been around you while you have been writing the book (trust me, you’ve been talking about your plot or argument, if only in your sleep). Ask her to read it over a couple of times.

Then chat with her about something else for half an hour. At the end of that time, ask her to tell you the plot of the book — WITHOUT looking at the synopsis again. Don’t comment while she does it; just write down the points that fell out of her account.

After you have thanked this kind soul profusely and sent her on her way, highlight the missed points on the synopsis pages. Read through the synopsis, omitting the highlighted bits: does the story hold together without them? If so, are those bits really necessary?

If the storyline suffers from the omissions, go back over the individual sentences that depict those plot points. Chances are, your reader found these points unmemorable because they were summarized, rather than enlivened with specific details.

If you’re too shy (or too rushed) to try this experiment, there are a couple of pretty good structural indicators that a synopsis has fallen into laundry-list mode. Once again, your trusty highlighting pen is your friend here. Go through the synopsis and mark every use of the word AND, as well as every instance of the passive voice.

Then revisit each marked sentence with an eye to revision. Both of these phenomena tend to be symptomatic of rushed storytelling.

Of course, it’s perfectly understandable that a writer trying to crush an 80,000 word story or argument into three pages might conceivably feel a mite rushed. But trust me on this one: that is not the primary impression you want to give an agency screener.

More checklist items follow tomorrow, of course. Keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: the query synopsis vs. the submission synopsis

Yesterday, in the midst of a discussion about how to banish annoyance about having to summarize your beautifully complex plotline or subtly nuanced argument in just a few pages from your synopsis — because nothing frames resentment better than a synopsis, unless it’s a query letter or pitch — I suggested working out your (completely legitimate) aggressions in other, more constructive manners. Like screaming at your imaginary friend or jousting with the end of your couch.

Don’t keep it inside, festering in your guts, but for heaven’s sake, don’t loose it on an agent or editor until after you’ve signed a contract with ’em.

Instead, show that you are professional enough to approach the synopsis as the marketing necessity it is. Remember, agents do NOT ask writers for synopses because they are too lazy to read entire books: they ask for synopses because they receive so many submissions that, even with the best of wills, they could never possibly read them all.

The synopsis, then, is your chance to make your work jump up and down and scream: “Me! Me! I’m the one out of 10,000 that you actually want to read, the one written by an author who is willing to work with you, instead of sulking over the way the industry runs!”

Mind you, I’m not saying that you SHOULDN’T sulk over the often arbitrary and unfair way the industry runs: actually, it would be merely Pollyannaish NOT to do that from time to time. Vent as often as you please.

But it simply is not prudent to vent anywhere near an agent or editor whom you want to take on your work — and certainly not in the tone of the synopsis. The synopsis’ tone should match the book’s, and unless you happen to be writing about deeply resentful characters, it’s just not appropriate to sound clipped and disgruntled.

Sorry. As I believe I have mentioned before, if I ran the universe, not only would manuscripts be judged purely upon the quality of their writing by book-loving souls who would read every submission in full, but there would be free merry-go-rounds in every schoolyard, college tuition would cost nothing, lions and tigers would want nothing more than to cuddle up to humans and purr — and my schedule would permit me to post before the wee hours of the morning.

However, as a glance at the clock clearly tells me, I do not, in fact, run the universe. Unfortunate.

After you have thrown a well-deserved tantrum or two at how difficult it is to catch an agent’s attention, remind yourself that that maddening-to-prepare synopsis DOES serve a couple of legitimate purposes.

However — and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but how else are you going to find out? — a synopsis that a writer might choose to send with a query letter actually serves a slightly different purpose than one that an agent asks you to send along with your first 50 pages. You might want to come up with different versions to suit the different occasions.

Take some nice, deep breaths, and that dizzy feeling will pass in a few seconds.

If a query letter is a verbal hallway pitch, the synopsis destined to be tucked into a query envelope is the surrogate for the book itself, enabling you to lay out the plot at greater length than a paragraph in a query letter permits. Its primary purpose is to prompt the agent or editor to ask to see the first 50 pages — or, if you’re lucky, the entire manuscript.

Let me repeat that, because it’s important: the purpose of the query synopsis is to garner a request for pages, not to cause the agency screener to set it down with a sigh and say, “What a beautiful story. Now I don’t need to read the book.”

As with any good seduction, you’re going to want to leave a little to the imagination — but PLEASE don’t make the very common mistake of not explaining how the plot is resolved.

A synopsis is the place to show off what a clever plotter or argument-monger you are, not to tease with vague hint about what might happen. This is not the time to conceal your favorite plot twist, as a delightful surprise for when the agent requests the entire book. Revealing it now will SUBSTANTIALLY increase the probability that the rest of the book will get read, in fact.

Why? Well, agents and editors tend not to be very fond of guessing games — or, as they like to call them, “those damned writer tricks that waste my time.”

So ending your synopsis on a cliffhanger on the theory that they will be DYING to read the rest of the book to find out how it all ends seldom works. Remember, agency screeners are suspicious people: if you don’t show how the plot works itself to a conclusion, they may well conclude that you just haven’t written the ending yet.

Next!

And realistically, there tends to be a fairly large time gap between when an agent or screener reads a query synopsis and when our Millicent can expect to be holding the manuscript in her hot little hands to find out what’s going to happen next. It’s not a profession that attracts the type of person who automatically skips to the last page of a murder mystery to find out who dunnit, after all.

Even if it did, trust me, anyone who is going to be reading a synopsis in an agency is going to be aware of the probable time lag before the suspense can possibly be relieved. If she scans the mail eagerly every day and pounces upon the submission the instant it appears, it’s still bound to be at least a few weeks.

Tell me, cliffhanger-lovers: when’s the last time that you set a book down at an exciting point and walked away for a month?

It doesn’t really work that way. In a query synopsis, you will want to make the book sound well-rounded and satisfying, providing enough detail to pique Millicent’s interest, but not so much that the screener begins to wonder if you’ve sent the synopsis or the first few pages of the book. When in doubt, stick to the strongest dramatic arc.

Within your submission packet, on the other hand, a requested synopsis serves a different function: from the requesting agent’s POV, it is the substitute for the rest of the book.

Repeat that last sentence like a mantra while you are constructing your synopsis. In a packet of requested materials, the synopsis has a different goal than the query synopsis: to convince the agent or editor that the rest of the book is every bit as interesting and action-packed as your first 50 pp.

In other words, it is a marketing tool, intended to get the agent or editor to ask to see the rest of the book. Since the agent already has your partial in hand, however, your submission query can gloss over the premise much more quickly than in a query synopsis.

I hear some of you out there grumbling. “But Anne,” you cry, “isn’t it the job of the first 50 pp. to inspire such interest in the reader that she wants — nay, longs — to read the rest of the book?”

In a word, yes, but not alone.

Usually, agents (and their screeners; remember, even if an agent asks you to send pages, she is usually not the first person in the building to read them, even if she REALLY liked you in a pitch meeting) will read the requested chapter(s) first, to see if they like the authorial voice, THEN turn to the synopsis.

Thus, it is relatively safe to assume that Millicent doesn’t need you to spend a page of the synopsis setting up the premise and introducing the protagonist: remember, her eyes, like most agents’ and editors’, have been trained to spot and regard repetition as one of the seven deadly sins.

It’s right up there with Boring, Incorrectly Formatted, Rude, Confusing, Been Done, and Vague.

The synopsis is where you demonstrate to their hyper-critical eyes that you are not merely a writer who can hold them in thrall for a few isolated pages: you have the vision and tenacity to take the compelling characters you have begun to reveal in your first chapter through an interesting story to a satisfying conclusion.

The synopsis, in short, is where you show that you can plot out a BOOK.

For this reason, it is imperative that your synopsis makes it very, very clear how the first 50 pp. you are submitting fits into the overall arc of the book, regardless of whether you are submitting fiction or nonfiction. But don’t forget to make the rest of the book sound interesting, too.

If your head is whirling from all of this, or if it’s starting to sound as though your synopsis will need to be longer than the book in order to achieve its goals, don’t worry. Tomorrow — or actually, my clock tells me, later today, I shall cover some tips on how to avoid the most common synopsis bugbears, as well as how to slim it down if it becomes overlong.

Keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: synopses, part VIII, or, the long and the short of it

For the last week or so, I’ve been going over prepping a synopsis for tucking inside a query envelope, adding to the partial an agent has requested that you send, plopping into a contest entry, or having at the ready in anticipation for such a request at a pitch meeting. As with the author bio, I strongly recommend getting your synopsis ready before you anticipate needing it.

Especially if you are intending to query or pitch at a conference anytime soon. You will be SUBSTANTIALLY happier if you walk into any marketing situation with your synopsis already polished, all ready to send out to the first agent or editor who asks for it, rather than running around in a fearful dither after the request, trying to pull your submission packet together. Then, too, giving some serious thought to the overarching themes of your book is an excellent first step in pulling together a pitch.

Even if you think that both of the reasons I have just given are, to put it politely, intended to help lesser mortals less talented than your good self, whatever you do, try not to save writing your synopsis for a contest for the very last moments before you stuff a submission or entry into an envelope. That route virtually guarantees uncaught mistakes, even for the most gifted of writers and savviest of self-promoters.

If you take nothing else away from the synopsis-writing part of the Book Marketing 101 series, please remember this: writing a synopsis well is hard; be sure to budget adequate time for it.

If the task feels overwhelming — which would certainly be understandable, faced with the daunting task of summarizing a 400-page book in just a few well-written pages — remind yourself that even though it may feel as though you effectively need to reproduce the entire book in condensed format, you actually don’t. The synopsis shouldn’t depict every twist and turn of the plot — just strive to give a solid feel of the mood of the book and a basic plot summary.

Show where the major conflicts lie, introduce the main characters, interspersed with a few scenes described with a wealth of sensual detail, to make it more readable.

Remember, too, that you should be shooting for 3 — 5 pages, unless you are SPECIFICALLY asked to produce something longer or shorter. If your draft persists in being less, and you are synopsizing a book-length work, chances are that you are not including the plot or argument in sufficient detail.

So go back and reread it: is what you have hear honestly a reader-friendly telling of your story or a convincing presentation of your argument, or is it merely a presentation of the premise of the book and a cursory overview of its major themes? For most too-short synopses, it is the latter.

If you really get stuck about how to make it longer, print up a hard copy of the synopsis, find yourself a highlighting pen, and mark every summary statement about character, every time you have wrapped up a scene or plot twist description with a sentence along the lines of and in the process, Sheila learns an important lesson about herself.

Go back through and take a careful look at these highlighted lines. Then ask yourself for each: would a briefly-described scene SHOW the conclusion stated there better than just TELLING the reader about it? Is there a telling character detail or an interesting plot nuance that might supplement these general statements, making them more interesting to read?

I heard that gasp of recognition out there — yes, campers, the all-pervasive directive to SHOW, DON’T TELL should be applied to synopses as well. The fewer generalities you can use here, the better, especially for fiction.

I’ll let those of you into brevity in on a little secret: given a choice, specifics are almost always more interesting to a reader than generalities. Think about it from an agency screener’s POV, someone who reads 800 synopses per week: wouldn’t general statements about lessons learned and hearts broken start to sound rather similar after awhile? But a genuinely quirky detail in a particular synopsis — wouldn’t that stand out in your mind?

And if that unique grabber appeared on page 1 of the synopsis, or even in the first couple of paragraphs, wouldn’t you pay more attention to the rest of the summary?

Uh-huh. It’s very easy to forget in the heat of pulling together a synopsis that agency screeners are readers, too, not just decision-makers. They like to be entertained, so the more entertaining you can make your synopsis, the more likely Millicent is to be wowed by it.

Isn’t it fortunate that you’re a writer with the skills to do that?

If your synopsis has the opposite problem and runs long, you should also sit down and read it over with a highlighter gripped tightly in your warm little hand. On your first pass through, mark any sentence that does not deal with the [primary] plot or argument of the book.

Then go back through and read the UNMARKED sentences in sequence, ignoring the highlighted ones. Ask yourself honestly: does the shorter version give an accurate impression of the book? If so, do the marked sentences really need to be there at all?

If your synopsis still runs too long, try this trick of the pros: minimize the amount of space you devote to the book’s premise and the actions that occur in Chapter 1. Yes, you will need this information to appear prominently in a synopsis you would send with a cold query letter, but as I mentioned yesterday, once you have been asked to submit pages, your synopsis has different goals.

You might want to consider minimizing the premise-setting section regardless; the vast majority of synopses spend to long on it. Here’s a startling statistic: in the average novel synopsis, over a quarter of the text deals with premise and character introduction.

Try trimming this down to just a few sentences and moving on to the rest of the plot.

If this seems dangerous to you, think about it: if the agent or editor asked to see Chapter 1 or the first 50 pages, and if you place the chapter BEFORE the synopsis in your submission packet, the reader will already be familiar with both the initial premise AND the basic characters AND what occurs at the beginning in the book. So why be repetitious?

Let me show you how it works (and yes, long-term readers, I have used this example before). Let’s say that you were Jane Austen, and you were pitching SENSE AND SENSIBILITY to an agent at a conference. (You should be so lucky!)

The agent is, naturally, charmed by the story — because you were very clever indeed, and did enough solid research before you signed up for your agent appointment to have a pretty fair certainty that this particular agent is habitually charmed by this sort of story — and asks to see a synopsis and the first 50 pages.

See? Advance research really does pay off.

Naturally, you dance home in a terrible rush to get those pages in the mail. As luck would have it, you already have a partially-written synopsis on your computer. In it, the first 50 pages’ worth of action look something like this:

ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) are in a pitiable position: due to the whimsical will of their great-uncle, the family estate passes at the death of their wealthy father into the hands of their greedy half-brother, JOHN DASHWOOD (early 30s). Their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40), soon offended at John’s wife’s (FANNY FERRARS DASHWOOD, late 20s) domineering ways and lack of true hospitality, wishes to move her daughters from Norland, the only home they have ever known, but comparative poverty and the fact that Elinor is rapidly falling in love with her sister-in-law’s brother, EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s), render any decision on where to go beyond the reach of her highly romantic speculations.

Yet when John and his wife talk themselves out of providing any financial assistance to the female Dashwoods at all, Mrs. Dashwood accepts the offer of her cousin, SIR JOHN MIDDLETON (middle aged) to move her family to Barton Park, hundreds of miles away. Once settled there, the Dashwoods find themselves rushed into an almost daily intimacy with Sir John and his wife, LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s) at the great house. There, they meet COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), Sir John’s melancholy friend, who seems struck by Marianne’s musical ability — and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

Marianne’s heart is soon engaged elsewhere: she literally falls into love. Dashing and romantic WILLOUGHBY (26) happens to be riding by when Marianne tumbles down a hillside, spraining her ankle. Just like the romantic hero of her dreams, he sweeps her up and carries her to safety. Soon, the pair is inseparable, agreeing in every particular: in music, in poetry, in the proper response to life, which is to ignore propriety in favor of expressing unrestrained feeling. When Col. Brandon is abruptly obliged to cancel a party in order to rush off to London to attend to mysterious business, the lovers are perfectly agreed that stuffy old Brandon made up the urgency in order to spoil their pleasure.

All too quickly, however, it is Willoughby’s turn to be called away by mysterious duties, leaving a weeping Marianne courting every memory of their happy days together while Elinor wonders why the pair have not announced their evident engagement.

Edward comes to visit the Dashwoods, but he is sadly changed, morose and apparently afraid to be left alone with Elinor, despite Marianne’s continual and well-meaning efforts to allow the lovebirds solitude in which to coo. Edward is wearing an unexplained ring, human hair set in metal: he claims it is his sister Fanny’s but the Dashwoods are sure it is Elinor’s.

Now, all of this does in fact occur in the first 50 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, at least in my well-worn little paperback addition. However, all of the plot shown above would be in the materials the agent requested, right? So, being a wise Aunt Jane, you would streamline your submission synopsis so it looked a bit more like this:

At the death of their wealthy father, ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) and their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40) are forced to leave their life-long home and move halfway across England, to live near relatives they have never seen, far away from Elinor’s beloved EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s). At the home of their cousins SIR JOHN (late 30s) and LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s), melancholy COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), seems struck by Marianne’s musical ability — and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

Dashing WILLOUGHBY (26) happens to be riding by when Marianne tumbles down a hillside, spraining her ankle. Just like the romantic hero of her dreams, he sweeps her up and carries her to safety. Soon, the pair is inseparable, much to Col. Brandon’s chagrin. He rushes off to London to attend to mysterious business. All too quickly, however, Willoughby’s is called away, too. Marianne spends her days courting every tender memory of him, while Elinor wonders why the pair has not announced their evident engagement.

Elinor’s love life is less successful: when Edward comes to visit, he seems afraid to be left alone with her, despite Marianne’s continual and well-meaning efforts to allow the lovebirds solitude in which to coo. Does his silence mean he no longer loves Elinor?

See what space-saving wonders may be wrought by cutting down on the premise-establishing facts? The second synopsis is less than half the length of the first, yet still shows enough detail to show the agent how the submitted 50 pp. feeds into the rest of the book. Well done, Jane!

I feel another one of my pre-flight checklists welling up with me, but that will have to wait until tomorrow. Keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: synopses, part VI, or, when and where primal screaming is and is not constructive

I’ve been reading over what I’ve said about synopsis-writing over the last week, and I have to say, it doesn’t sound too appetizing, does it? No wonder aspiring writers so often push producing one to the last possible nanosecond before it is needed: it genuinely is a pain to summarize the high points of a plot or argument in a concise-yet-detail-rich form.

As it is such a different task than writing a book, involving skills widely removed from observing a telling moment in exquisite specificity or depicting a real-life situation with verve and insight, the expectation that any good book writer should be able to produce a great synopsis off the cuff actually isn’t entirely reasonable. In fact, the very prospect of pulling one together can leave a talented writer feeling like this:

the-scream-detail.tiff

Since we cannot change the industry’s demand for them, all we writers can do is work on the supply end: by taking control of WHEN we produce our synopses, we can make the generation process less painful and generally improve the results.

Okay, so these may not sound like great motivators to take a few days out of your hard-won writing time to pull together a document that’s never going to be published before you absolutely have to do it. Unless you happen to be a masochist who just adores wailing under time pressure, though, waiting is an exceedingly bad idea.

But you don’t need to take my word for it. For those of you who are still resistant to the idea of writing one before you are specifically asked for it I have two more inducements to offer you today.

First — and this is a big one — taking the time to work on a synopsis BEFORE you have an actual conversation with an agent (either post-submission or at a conference) is going to make it easier for you to talk about your book. It helps you think of your baby as a marketable product, as well as a piece of complex art and physical proof that you have locked yourself away from your kith and kin for endless hours, creating.

Even writers desperate to sell their first books tend to forget that it is a product intended for a specific market. In the throes of resenting the necessity of producing a query letter and synopsis, it is genuinely difficult NOT to grumble about having to simplify a beautifully complicated plot, set of characters, and/or argument.

Yet any agent who signs you is going to HAVE to summarize the book in order to market it — there is just no way around that.

By having labored to reduce your marvelously complex story or argument to its basic elements, you will be far less likely to succumb to that bugbear of pitchers, the Pitch that Would Not Die. When you are signed up for a 10-minute pitch meeting, you really do need to be able to summarize your book within just a few minutes — harder than it sounds! — so you have time to talk about other matters, such as whether the agent wants to read the book.

As anyone who has ever sat down for coffee or a drink with a regularly conference-attending agents can tell you, pretty much all of them have at least one horror story about a pitch that went on for an hour, because the author did not have the vaguest conception what was and was not important to emphasize in his plot summary.

Trust me, you do not want to be remembered for that.

The second inducement: a well-crafted synopsis is something of a rarity, so if you can produce one as a follow-up to a good meeting at a conference, or to tuck in with your first 50 pages, you will look like a star.

You would be astonished (at least I hope you would) at how often an otherwise well-written submission is accompanied by a synopsis obviously dashed off in the ten minutes prior to the post office’s closing, as though the writing quality, clarity, and organization of it weren’t to be evaluated at all. I don’t think that sheer deadline panic accounts for the pervasiveness of the disorganized synopsis; I suspect resentment.

I’ve met countless writers who don’t really understand why the synopsis is necessary at all, and thus hate it. All too often, the result is a synopsis that gives the impression not that the writer is genuinely excited about this book and eager to market it, but rather that he is deeply and justifiably angry that it needed to be written at all.

Believe me, to an experienced eye, writerly resentment shows up BEAUTIFULLY against the backdrop of a synopsis. The VAST majority of novel synopses simply scream that their authors regarded the writing of them as tiresome busywork instituted by the industry to satisfy some sick, sadistic whim prevalent amongst agents, a hoop through which they enjoy seeing all of the doggies jump.

Frustrated by what appears to be an arbitrary requirement, many writers just throw together a synopsis in a fatal rush and shove it into an envelope, hoping that no one will pay much attention to it. It’s the first 50 pages that count, right?

Wrong. In case you thought I was joking the other 47 times I have mentioned it over the last couple of weeks, EVERYTHING you submit to an agent or editor is a writing sample. If you can’t remember that full-time, have it tattooed on the back of your hand.

While frustration is certainly understandable, it’s self-defeating to treat the synopsis as unimportant or (even more common) to toss it out in a last-minute frenzy. Find a more constructive outlet for your annoyance — and make sure that every page you submit is your best writing.

Caught your attention with that constructive outlet quip, didn’t I? Realistically, it’s not going to help your book’s progress one iota to engage in passive-aggressive blaming of any particular agent or editor (or, even less sensible, their screeners and assistants). They did not make the rules, by and large.

And even if they did, let’s face it — in real life, almost nobody is actually brave enough to say to an agent or editor, “No, you can’t have a synopsis, you lazy so-and-so. Read the whole damned book, if you liked my pitch or query, because, as any fool can tell you, that’s the only way you’re going to find out if I can write is to READ MY WRITING!”

Okay, so it’s satisfying to contemplate. Picture it as vividly as you can, then move on.

I’m quite serious about this. My mental health assignment for you while working on the synopsis: once an hour, picture the nastiest, most aloof agent in the world, and mentally bellow your frustrations at him at length. Be as specific as possible, but try not to repeat yourself; the goal here is to touch upon every scintilla of resentment lodged in the writing part of your brain.

Then get back to work.

I know, it sounds silly, but it will make you feel better to do it, I promise. In fact, I think it would be STERLING preparation for either the querying process or a conference to name your least-favorite sofa cushion the Industry and pound it silly twice a day. I’m all in favor of venting hostility on inanimate objects, rather than on human ones.

Far better that your neighbors hear you screaming about how hard it all is than that your resentment find its way into your synopsis. Or your query letter. Or even into your verbal pitch.

Yes, I’ve seen all three happen — but I’ve never seen it work to the venting writer’s advantage. I’ll spare you the details, but trust me, these were not pretty incidents.

Tomorrow, I shall delve into the knotty issue of how a synopsis folded up behind a cold query letter might differ from one that is destined to sit underneath a partial. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: synopses, part V, or, everybody loves me — what’s the matter with you?

Yesterday, I suggested that if you write nonfiction, you might want to use part of your synopsis to establish — gently — your platform, to make it pellucidly clear to agency screener Millicent in even her worst moods that you are indeed uniquely qualified to write the book you are summarizing. While that is a pretty good idea, it occurred to me in the dead of night that before I proceed with more synopsis-writing advice, I might want to warn you about tumbling into the rather common opposite trap.

I refer, of course, to synopses that sound not just like back jacket blurbs for the book, all premise and puff, without a serious overview of the plot, but like the speech the MC makes before handing the author his or her Lifetime Achievement Award. Not only is this book’s author brilliant, talented, and the best person in the universe to write this book, but a great humanitarian and a close personal friend of the MC as well.

It’s funnier if you picture Sammy Davis, Junior saying it.

If you are writing a synopsis for a novel, PLEASE avoid the temptation to turn the synopsis into either a self-praise session (“My writing teacher says this is the best comic novel since CATCH-22!”) or an essay on why you chose to write the book (“Wrenched from the depths of my soul after seventeen years of therapy…”). Neither tends to work well, because neither is really about the book.

Yet both are rather common, you may be surprised to hear. If I had a dime for every novel synopsis or query I’ve seen that included the phrase, “it isn’t autobiographical, but…” I would own my own island in the Caribbean.

And if I had a dime for every time I’ve heard it in a pitch, I’d just buy the five major North American publishing houses outright and make their policies more writer-friendly. But it seems that the repetition fairy isn’t giving out spare change to editors like me anymore, no matter how many aspiring writers I stuff under my pillow.

The frequency with which synopsizers attempt these approaches is precisely why these techniques are so often turn-offs for Millicent. When you’re reading 800 submissions per week, commonalities can get pretty darn annoying. At minimum, they can make the synopses that contain them all start to blur together.

Trust me, however true any of the phrases above may be — not knowing your writing teacher and her relationship to Joseph Heller, I cannot say — they comes across as clichés. Besides, a good fiction synopsis is NOT a justification for having written the book in the first place: properly, it is one hell of a good story, presented well. Period.

For nonfiction, as I mentioned yesterday, you will want to do some gentle self-promotion, to give an indication of why your book is uniquely marketable and you are the most reasonable person in the universe to write it (platform, platform, platform!) but again, try not to get sidetracked on WHY you chose to write it or boasting about how generally necessary this book is to the betterment of humanity.

A LOT of NF synopses go off on these tangents, to their own detriment. Given a choice, use the space to flesh out your argument.

There are very few contexts in the publishing world where launching on a lengthy disquisition why you wrote the book is even appropriate. First, within a nonfiction book proposal, it is sometimes a necessary component to making the argument that you are uniquely qualified to write the book you are proposing, to establish your platform.

Second, within the context of an interview AFTER the book is released, writers are free to ramble on about it as long as they like. Interviewers LOVE hearing about writers’ motivations — which, I suspect is why aspiring writers so often want to tell everyone they see what is and is not autobiographical in their novels; we’ve all seen it in a million literary interviews.

Third — and here is where talking about it will genuinely help you in your professional progress — when you are chatting with other writers, or if you become very, very good friends with your agent or editor after the contract is signed. Then, talking about it until you’re blue in the face is an accepted part of the creative process.

Other than that, however interesting your motivations may have been, they tend not to be anywhere near as interesting to other people as the book itself. At least if the book is any good.

And if you doubt that, start attending book readings for tomes you are unlikely to read. 99% of the time, the author will speak at length about why s/he chose to write this particular book. Watch the audience’s reaction: it’s rare that eyes don’t glaze over at this point. After you have attended three such readings within the course of a week without yawning once, THEN let’s talk.

I know it’s hard to accept, but actually, in a business sense, why you wrote the book is not very important to the industry. In their eyes, unless you are a celebrity cashing in on your name recognition, you wrote your book for one very simple reason: because you are a writer. Writers tend to do that.

From that rather cold POV, a writer who goes on and on about the psychological impulses to tell a particular story (unless the book in question is a memoir) comes across as not very professional.

I hate this, because in my experience, most aspiring writers tend to blurt out their reasons for penning a book primarily because they feel so isolated during the writing process. It is a positive relief to be able to talk about it to someone, isn’t it, especially when that someone is empowered to get the book published at long last? It’s natural, it’s understandable, and it’s probably even healthy. Go with that impulse.

But please, please take my word on this one: you should not do it in your platform, or indeed, in the presence of anyone employed in the publishing industry until after a contract is signed, unless you are responding to a direct question from an agent or editor. Publishing types tend to regard it as a sign of writerly inexperience, a symptom of unprofessionalism.

In other words: back into the pond, fish.

As usual, there are a couple of exceptions. Obviously, if the agent of your dreams asks, “So, where did you get the idea for this book?” you may give an honest answer. Or if someone stands up at a book reading and asks the same question — although as a rule, I would discourage planting your significant other or other crony in the audience to ask that particular question. (Yes, I’ve seen it happen.)

Also — at the risk of repeating myself — if you have some very specific expertise that renders your take on a subject particularly valid, feel free to mention it in your pitch or query letter. And in your synopsis, if you are summarizing a NF book. But in fiction, that information does not really belong in the synopsis.

But I can feel already that some of you are not going to believe me on this point. So here is a bit of advice for those of you who are planning to, well, ignore my advice: if you are writing a novel, and you feel that you have an inside perspective that simply must be mentioned in the synopsis, stick it at the end, where it won’t be too intrusive.

On that logically convoluted note, I leave you for the day. Keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: nonfiction synopses, part II, synopses, part IV, and platform, part I

I ended yesterday’s post with a cliffhanger: no matter how large the prospective market for your book, I told my wide-eyed readers gathered around the campfire, is you can’t legitimately assume that an agent or editor will be aware of just how many potential readers inhabit it. When you are crafting a synopsis — or query letter, or book proposal — it’s prudent to assume that they will underestimate it… and thus the market appeal of your book.

This is particularly true if you are pitching a book about anything that ever occurred west of, say, Albany to a NYC-based agent or editor, or any story set north of Santa Barbara or east of Los Vegas to an LA-based one. The news media are not the only folks who think that little that happens to anyone outside of their own city limits is worth reporting, alas.

If those of us who lived outside of the major urban centers thought this way about, say, New York City or London, we would be called provincial.

It seems silly in the age of lightning-fast electronic communication and swift travel across time zones, but regional prejudices still run strong enough that you might actually find yourself explaining to a charming, urbane agent with an MA in American Literature from Columbia or a law degree from Yale that yes, the inhabitants of Boise CAN support a symphony, and indeed have for many years.

And schools. And indoor plumbing.

I know: depressing. But being aware that agents may not be hip to your market means that you, savvy marketer that you are, can compensate for it by coming right out and saying in your synopsis — and perhaps in your cover letter as well — just how big your target market actually is.

This isn’t a bad idea for novelists, either: it’s very, very easy for a book to be labeled as appealing to a niche market. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, niche market is industry-speak for “Well, no one I know would buy this book…”

Okay, okay, so I’m exaggerating a trifle: it technically means that the pros think that a book would only be marketable to a tiny demographic. Trout fisherfolk, for instance, or people with cerebral palsy.

I think my definition is closer to what they actually mean, however, because I’ve seen too many agents and editors dismiss books without bothering to find out just how many people there actually ARE who habitually angle for trout or who have cerebral palsy. I’ve never seen a guesstimate that wasn’t low, sometimes by a factor of millions.

The same often holds true for regional interest. Due to the perversity of where books get published in the United States, a story set in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or San Francisco will often be deemed of national interest, meaning that book buyers in other parts of the country (and world) might well flock to the bookstores for it.

Because, obviously, readers the world over are sitting on the edges of their seats, wondering what’s going on in Brooklyn.

But let that SAME story be set in Minneapolis, Shreveport, Olympia, or Halifax, and NYC, LA, Chicago, and San Francisco-based agents and editors tend to dismiss it as appealing only to audiences in the region where it was set. If THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA hadn’t been set in Manhattan, I seriously doubt that any major publishing house would have given it a second glance.

Over the years, I’ve heard many agents and editors tell writers of so-called regional works that they’d be better off submitting their NF and even novels to regional publishers, but in recent years, I’ve begun to wonder to whom they are referring. The publishing industry isn’t like theatre — not every major city will spontaneously see a publishing house spring up out of the ground.

It’s a lovely fantasy, though. Can’t you just picture it? “I’ve got a barn,” a would-be publisher pants breathlessly, “and you have a mimeograph machine. Let’s publish some books!”

Doesn’t happen very often, alas. Even for nonfiction, it is definitely trickier to interest agents at the big agencies in subject matter unfamiliar to denizens of the Eastern seaboard. So it’s a stellar idea to use your marketing materials to make the case that your subject matter IS of national interest.

Here, as in the pitch, statistics can be your friend — and they needn’t be statistics about just how many people have already bought books on your subject matter, either. If you’re writing a blistering exposé of bear abuse in Montana, for instance, it would a VERY good idea to mention in your synopsis just how many visitors Yellowstone sees in a year, because chances are, Manhattanites will have no idea. (For more hints on how to find statistics to back up your book, please see the YOUR BOOK’S SELLING POINTS category at right.)

In a NF book synopsis, you not only need to establish the importance of the subject matter — you need to demonstrate that you are an expert in it. If “Why are you the best person to write this book?” seems secondary to the subject matter, you probably haven’t pitched a NF book lately.

Seriously, it’s the first question almost anyone in the industry will ask after you mention casually that you are writing a NF book. “So,” they’ll say, reserving comment about the marketability of your topic until after they hear the answer to this particular question, “what’s your platform?”

Platform is industry-speak for the background that qualifies you to write the book — the array of credentials, expertise, and life experience that qualifies you as an expert on the topic.

Put another way, platform is the industry term for why anyone should trust a NF author enough to want to read her book, as opposed to any of the other similar books on the market. The platform need not consist of educational credentials or work experience — in fact unless you write in a technical, scientific, or medical field, it generally has less to do with your educational credentials than your life experience.

But by all means, if you happen to be a former Secretary of State or NBA superstar, do mention it. Don’t be downhearted if you haven’t yet held a cabinet post in your field of expertise, however. The platform is ANY reason, or collection of reasons, that you are the best person in the universe to write this particular book.

Give some serious thought to your platform before you begin to market your book. All of you NF writers out there should not only be prepared to answer questions about your platform BEFORE you have ANY contact with an agent or editors — your synopsis should contain at least passing mention of your expertise.

This is true, incidentally, even if your book happens to be a memoir.

“Wait just a memory-picking minute!” I hear the memoirists out there cry. “Isn’t it pretty darned obvious that I would be the single best authority upon my own life?”

Not necessarily, from the industry’s point of view. As someone whose memoir’s publication process has been plagued by legal threats over whether I had the right to tell the story of my own life or not, I am here to tell you: not everyone may agree with you that your personal experience is yours to discuss in print.

Yes, I know: it seems self-evident that a memoirist would be an expert on the story he tells, because it’s his own life. But a memoir is always about something in addition to the life story of its author, and your platform should include some reference to why you are qualified to write about that other subject matter as well.

If your memoir is about spending your teenage years in a foreign country, for instance, take a sentence or two of your synopsis to talk about how being an outsider gave you a unique perspective on it. If your memoir rips the lid off the steamy secrets of a cereal factory, you’ll be better off if you use your decade’s worth of experience filling those boxes as evidence that you are a credible expert on flakes. And if your childhood memoir deals with your love affair with trains, make sure you include the fact that you spent 17 years of your life flat on your stomach, going “woo, woo” at a dizzying array of model trains.

You get the picture. It’s not enough to make your subject matter sound fascinating: in your synopsis, your account needs to come across as both fascinating and credible.

For what it’s worth, novels are generally about something other than the beauty of their writing, too. They have settings; characters have professions. For instance, the novel I am writing now is set at Harvard, where I got my undergraduate degree: think that is going to make my novel more credible in the eyes of the industry? You bet.

I can feel fiction writers’ blood pressure going up right now, but don’t panic: technically, a novelist doesn’t NEED a platform. It’s always a nice touch, though, if a fiction writer can mention a platform plank or two in her query letter. But for fiction, keep your platform out of your synopsis; in the eyes of the industry, self-promotion in a novel synopsis tends to be regarded as compensation for some heretofore-unsuspected weakness in the plot or the writing.

Before anyone points out to me that other sources give different advice about crafting synopses, I’m going to be brutally honest with you here: very few writing teachers will advise you to include your platform in your synopsis, even for a NF book. That’s material for the author bio, they will tell you.

Many writers include a background paragraph in their query letters — a great place to present your platform, eh? — but personally, I think it makes a whole lot of sense to give a quick nod to the platform in the NF synopsis as well, if it makes your work sound more credible. It’s not uncommon for a synopsis to end up in different hands than the query letter, after all.

They’re not going to know if you don’t tell them, I always say. Go ahead and state your qualifications, but keep it brief, and make it clear how those qualifications, well, qualify you to write this book.

More wit and wisdom on the synopsis follows in the week to come. Keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: the nonfiction synopsis, or, believe me when I tell you…

Welcome back to my ongoing series on how to craft an attention-grabbing synopsis BEFORE you need it, so you will not be thrown into forty-seven kinds of panic the instant an agent or editor asks you to send one. Last time, if you will recall, I went on (and on and on) about the importance of a novel synopsis’ demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that its writer is a gifted storyteller. For nonfiction, the task is a trifle more complicated.

Don’t worry — I have a LOT of experience writing both types, as it happens: I’ve sold two memoirs to publishers, and my second novel is just starting to make the rounds. Not to mention all of the synopses I see as a frequent contest judge and even more frequent freelance editor. So yours truly has spent quite a bit of time in the last few years hunkered over the odd synopsis, let me tell you. I know whereat I speak. Kindly imagine the following words of wisdom booming from the mouth of Oz, the Great and Terrible:

oz-the-great-and-terrible.tiff

In a NF synopsis, your goal is threefold: to give the argument of the book in some detail, along with some indication of how you intend to prove your case; to demonstrate that the book will appeal to a large enough market niche to make publishing it worthwhile, and to show beyond any reasonable question that you are the best-qualified person in the universe to write the book.

In 3-5 pages. I’m not entirely sure that I proved half that much in my master’s thesis.

The argument is the most important element here — in the synopsis, you should not only show the content of the argument, but also that you can argue coherently.

Yes, yes, I know: this seems counterintuitive. Wouldn’t the best way for an agent or editor to check out your argumentative style be to, you know, read your book?

I could shoot that one down right away, but first, let’s all take a mental holiday and picture how much easier all of our lives would be people in the publishing industry actually thought that way. Ah, that’s nice: a world where writers’ talent was judged solely by thoughtful, well-paid, prose-loving agents and editors, lounging on comfy sofas in sun-drenched lofts, languidly turning over page after page of entire manuscripts sent to them by aspiring authors.

And look, outside that massive loft window — do I see a pig flying by, with Jimmy Stewart on his back?

Okay, back to the real world: realistically, a nonfiction synopsis does indeed need to encapsulate the argument that it takes an entire book to make in just a couple of pages — or at least to establish the central question and indicate how you’re going to go about answering it.

Think of it as a tap-dancing audition, your two-minute chance to show your fancy footwork: if you argue well enough here, the agent will ask to see the argument in the book.

Did I just hear some gasps out there? “Two minutes?” a few of you squeak. “How closely can they possibly read my synopsis in that short amount of time?”

I didn’t mean to startle you — but yes, that’s roughly how long your synopsis will have under an agent’s (or, more likely, an agency screener’s) bloodshot, overworked eyes. This isn’t a lot of time to establish an argument much more complicated than the recipe for your sainted mother’s cream of tomato soup, even if your mother’s methodology consisted primarily of opening a can of Campbell’s.

It is enough time, though, to demonstrate that you have the writing skills to make an argument where each sentence leads logically to the next. It’s also enough time to show that you have a coherent plan for proving your propositions, and for indicating what evidence you intend to use.

If I seem to be harping on the necessity of making a COMPLETE, if skeletal, argument here, it is because the single most common mistake NF synopsizers make is to give only PART of the argument, or still worse, only the premise, with no indication of how they intend to make their case. Instead, they use the space to go on a rant about how necessary the book is, essentially squandering precious argumentative space with marketing jargon and premise.

But a solid underlying argument is the sine qua non of the NF synopsis. Period.

To make it appear as solid as I’m sure it is, don’t forget to mention what kind of evidence you will be using to support your claims. Have you done extensive research? Exhaustive interviews? Hung out with the right people?

If you have a professional with the subject that makes you an expert, or personal experience that gives you a unique insight into the subject, try to mention that in your opening paragraph, or at least in the second. Otherwise, stick to the subject matter, and explain what the book is going to teach people about it.

I use the term teach advisedly, because it is often quite helpful for synopsis writers to think of the task as producing a course overview for the lesson that is the book’s content. How will this book help readers, and what kind of readers will it help?

Obviously, a good professor would not try to cram an entire semester’s worth of material into the first lecture, right? Neither would a good NF synopsizer. Instead, both outline their work in general, try to convince their audiences that it is worthwhile to sign up for the class or buy the book in order to learn more about the topic.

Your first task, then, is to make your subject matter sound absolutely fascinating. To achieve this successfully, you will need to show how your take on it is original — and to do that, you are going to have to spell out your argument.

(Have I convinced you yet that you really do need to present a cohesive theory here? And did I mention the importance of its being cohesive?)

Easier said than done, of course. In the author’s mind, the argument often lies the details, not in the larger, more theoretical points. How can you narrow it down? It’s helpful to have an outline of your proposed chapters in front of you, so you can use the synopsis to demonstrate how each chapter will build upon the next to make your overall case.

If you’re writing a NF book, you are going to need to pull together a chapter-by-chapter anyway, of course, to include in your book proposal: it’s called the annotated table of contents. This moniker is a tad misleading, because it brings to mind the simple chapter title + page number tables of contents we’ve all seen in published books. An annotated table of contents consists of the titles in order, yes, but it also contains a paragraph or two about the argument or material to be presented in that chapter.

Don’t get so caught up in reproducing the argument in the synopsis, though, that you do not include a BRIEF explanation of why the world needs your book, and why you are the best person imaginable to write it, the second and third goals on our list. If you are writing on a subject that has already been well-trodden by past authors, this is even more important. Make it plain why your book is different and better than what’s already on the market.

There is no need to be heavy-handed in your own praise to achieve this, either. To prove it to you, I’m going to give you a sample opening, modest enough that it would strike no one as overbearing. Read carefully, as there will be a pop quiz afterward to see if you can spot the ways that this brief paragraph achieves Goals #2 and #3:

Have you ever wondered what goes on underneath the snow while you are skiing on top of it? Although there are many books currently on the market for the US’s 1.3 million snowboarding enthusiasts, MOUNTAINS MY WAY is the first to be written by a geologist. Seen through the eyes of a professional rock hound with thirty years of experience in the field, the reader is introduced to mountains as more than an array of cold, hard rocks: mountains emerge as a historical document, teeming with life and redolent of all of the stages of human history.

How did you do? Give yourself points if you noticed that the opening question grabbed the reader, showing immediately how this book might relate to the reader’s practical life; a rhetorical question for which the book itself provides an answer is a great way to establish a book’s appeal at the very beginning of the synopsis.

Also, pat yourself on the back fifty times if you zeroed in on the subtle way in which this paragraph dissed the competition — the implication here is that the authors all previous books on the subject were such boneheads that THEY thought mountains were just collections of rocks. No one is naming names here, but those authors know who they are.

Still more points if you noted the clever (if I do say so myself) use of demographic information. (Which I made up for the example, so please don’t quote them elsewhere.) If you have statistics on your prospective market, this is the place to mention them — here, and in your query letter, and in your pitch. As in:

There are currently 2 million Americans diagnosed with agoraphobia, yet there are few self-help books out there for them — and only one that is actually written by an agoraphobic, someone who truly understands what it feels like to be shut in by fear.

Why is it so important to hammer home the statistics in every conceivable forum? Well, no matter how large the prospective market for your book is (unless it is an already well-covered market, such as golf fans), you can’t ever, ever assume that an agent or editor will be aware of its size. ALWAYS assume that they will underestimate it — and thus the market appeal of your book.

On that stirring statement, I think I shall end for the day. More on NF synopses follows tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Book marketing 101: synopses, part II, or, surprise me, please. Please?

Yesterday, I launched into a discussion one of the more frustration-generating tasks a writer faces on a routine basis, compressing a deliciously complex, breathtakingly nuanced 400-book into a 5- or 3-page summary in standard format. Unlike the — let’s see, how shall I describe them? — fulfilling parts of writing a book, a synopsis is unlikely to spring into your head fully-formed, like Athene; most writers have to flog the muses quite a bit to produce a synopsis they like.

To quote the late, great Billie Holiday: the difficult/I’ll do right now./ The impossible/will take a little while.

Yes, your synopsis does need to be ultra-polished, but then, so does everything you place under a prospective agent’s nose. Synopses are marketing materials, and should be taken as seriously as anything else you write.

No matter how good your book is, your best strategic move is to take some time to make your synopsis gorgeous; Miss America may be beautiful au naturale, for all any of us know, but you can bet your last pair of socks that at even the earliest stage of going for the title, she takes the time to put on her makeup with care.

On the bright side, since almost everyone just throws a synopsis together, impressing an agent with one actually isn’t as hard as it seems at first blush. Being able to include a couple of stunning visceral details, for instance, is going to make you look like a better writer — almost everyone just summarizes vaguely.

My readers, of course, are far too savvy to make that mistake, right?

Even if you are not planning to send out queries or submissions anytime soon (much to those sore-backed muses’ relief), I STRONGLY recommend investing the time in generating and polishing a synopsis BEFORE you are at all likely to need to use it. That way, you will never you find yourself in a position of saying in a pitch meeting, “A 5-page synopsis? Tomorrow? Um, absolutely.”

There was a reason that I introduced you to that Billie Holiday song; it’s the mantra of the working writer.

Actually, if you can bear it, it’s a great idea to pull together a couple of different lengths of synopsis to have on hand, so you are prepared when you reach the querying and submission stages to provide whatever the agent in question likes to see.

What lengths might you want to have in stock? Well, a 5-page, certainly, as that is the most common request, and perhaps a 3 as well. As clever readers Cindy and Dave pointed out in the comments on yesterday’s post, it’s getting more common for agents to request — you might want to make sure your heart medication is handy before you finish this sentence — a 1-page synopsis.

Tale a deep breath: if you’ve been working your way through the Book Marketing 101 series, you probably already have a 1-page synopsis floating around in your mind. You may know it by its other name: the 2-minute pitch. (For tips on how to construct one of these babies, please see the aptly-named 2-MINUTE PITCH category at right.)

Unfortunately, the 5- and 3-page versions are not sitting in my hat next to the 2-minute pitch and that rabbit, so I can’t pull them out as if by magic. So let’s hunker down and talk about constructing them from scratch.

It’s not absolutely necessary, technically speaking, but most professional fiction synopses CAPITALIZE THE ENTIRE NAME of each major character the first time it appears. Not every time, mind you; just the first. Why? To alert a skimming agent or editor to the fact that — wait for it — a new character has just walked into the story.

Because Millicent might, you know, miss ’em otherwise.

It is also considered pretty darned nifty (and word-count thrifty) to include the character’s age in parentheses immediately after the first time the name appears, resulting in synopses that look something like this:

ST. THERESA OF AVILA (26) has a problem. Ever since she started dating multi-millionaire GEORGE ARMSTRONG CUSTER (82), all of her friends have unaccountably decided that she is mercenary and hates Native Americans. Apart from JEANNE D’ARC (30), her wacky landlady-cum-bowling-partner, who uses every opportunity to pump Theresa for man-landing tips, none of the residents of Theresa’s swanky Upper East Side co-op are even speaking to her — at least until they start desperately vying for invitations to her exclusive wedding extravaganza, a lavish event to be held onstage at the Oscars, with THE REVEREND DOCTOR OWEN WILSON (44 if he’s a day, I would guess; Author! Author! hopes he feels better soon) officiating. How will Theresa find a maid of honor — and if she does, what will her jealous old boyfriend GOD (∞) do?

Should any of you out there think you’re up to rounding out the plot above into some measure of coherence and submitting it, please, be my guest. Really. I’d like to read it.

For the rest of you, please note what I have done here: in preparing a synopsis for a comedy, I have produced a — wait for it! — humorous treatment of the material.

And if I were creating a synopsis for a steamy romance novel with the same premise (although I tremble to think what a sex romp with that particular cast of characters would entail), you can bet your last wooden nickel [that] I would take some writerly steps to make my reader’s mouth go dry and his breath become short while perusing it.

Would I do this because I’m wacky? No, because — and brace yourself, because I’m about to divulge some serious words of wisdom here — the synopsis, like the first 50 pages, is a writing sample.

Oh, had I mentioned that before? Well, it cannot be said too often, in my opinion. The sensible writer’s primary goal in producing it is to demonstrate not only that it is a good (or at least marketable) story, an attention-grabbing yarn peopled with fascinating characters, but that the writer is a great storyteller.

Yes, yes, I hear you grumbling: from the POV of a novelist, 3 — 5 pages (or 1, heaven help us) hardly enough space to tell the story of a stoplight going from green to red with much panache.

But you know something? Agents and editors think so highly of writers’ talent that they expect you to do it anyway.

Bless them for their optimism, eh? You’d think, after reading hundreds of these things per week, that their faith would waver a bit, but no. Even the most hardened publishing type retains a belief in the possibility of the perfectly entertaining synopsis so intense that it makes the average 6-year-old’s belief in Santa Claus seem like positively Voltaire-ish levels of skepticism.

And that is pretty darned impressive, considering that all too often, writers just state the premise of the novel in a synopsis, rather than taking the reader through the plot, blow by blow. The results, alas, can be mind-bogglingly boring, even if the book itself is exciting.

“But Anne!” I hear you cry, and who could blame you? “My book is about a love affair between a bomb-defusing stockbroker who moonlights as a cat burglar and a former Olympic ice skater who now sits on the UN Security Council when she’s not designing speedboats or skeet shooting. How boring could a straightforward summary of THAT premise possibly be?”

Oh, my dear, you would be surprised. I read a LOT of synopses each year, and let me tell you, through sheer repetition, the plots of even the raciest potboilers can start sounding awfully similar after awhile.

And the average agent reads as many of them in a day as I do in six months. Under such an assault of plotting, even if the reader is armed with the best possible intentions and the greatest conceivable love of literature to begin with, the eyes begin to glaze, passing indifferently over massacres and heretofore-unknown sex acts alike.

So how, given that your synopsis is inevitably going to be read in the midst of an avalanche of others with similar claims to a reader’s attention, can you make yours stand out?

As any great storyteller can tell you (and will, at the slightest provocation), keeping the audience’s attention is largely dependent upon the storyteller’s skill in juggling a number of factors: pacing, character development, and detail, to name but a few. A storyteller who cannot surprise her audience from time to time is probably going to end up boring them, at least a little.

Work on cultivating the element of surprise. If the plot has twists and turns, so should the synopsis. Show the story arc, but do not merely summarize the plot as quickly as possible (as — sacre bleu! — most of the synopses any agent receives will). Try to give the feel of a number of specific scenes. Don’t be afraid to use forceful imagery and strong sensual detail, and try to make the tone of the synopsis echo the tone of the book.

Yes, yes, I know: it’s a tall order. But don’t forget that the synopsis is every bit as much an indication of your writing skill as the actual chapters that you are submitting. (Where have I heard [that] before?) And don’t you want YOURS to be the one that justified the agent’s heavily-tried faith that SOMEBODY out there can tell a good story in 3 — 5 pages?

Or — gulp! — 1?

Don’t worry; you can do this. There are more rabbits in that hat, and the muses are used to working overtime. Keep up the good work.

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Book marketing 101: what do you mean, I need a synopsis, too?

Did you notice yesterday that I began a subtle segue into synopses? Well, okay, not all that subtle — I just started saying that this or that piece of advice could also be applied productively to your synopsis. Which, in case you weren’t aware of it, you are going to need to market your book.

I do hope that wasn’t a terrible surprise to anyone.

Literally every writer in the world who deals with either an agent or an editor will need to produce a synopsis at some point — and since the first of those points is often immediately following a querying at a literary conference, I wanted to make sure to cover it before I ended the Book Marketing 101 series.

Actually, glancing back over my archives, I’m rather stunned at how long it’s been since I’ve devoted a post to ’em; like most unpleasant subjects, I guess we’ve all been gliding past this one with genteelly averted eyes. Since I haven’t talked about it in depth for a while, let’s start with the absolute basics.

For those of you new to the term, a synopsis is a brief exposition IN THE PRESENT TENSE of the entire plot of a novel or the whole argument of a book. Typically, professional synopses run from 3-5 pages (in standard format, and thus double-spaced, with 1-inch margins, in Times, Times New Roman, or Courier typefaces), depending upon the requirements of the requesting agent or editor.

Yes, Virginia, you read that correctly: agency guidelines and contest rules sometimes ask for much shorter synopses, 1 or 2 pages — and this is maddening, as it would obviously be INFINITELY easier on aspiring writers everywhere if we could simply produce a single submission packet for our work that would fly at any agency in the land.

As I have mentioned before, though, however much speakers at conferences, writing gurus, and agents themselves speak of the publishing industry as monolithic, it isn’t: individual agents, and thus individual agencies, like different things.

The result is — and I do hate to be the one to break this to you, Virginia — no single synopsis you write is going to please everybody in the industry.

Give each what she asks to see. Literally the only pressure for length standardization comes from writers, who pretty uniformly wish that there were a single formula for the darned thing, so they could write it once and never think about it again.

Why might an agency want a shorter one? Like so much else in the industry, time is the decisive factor: synopses are shorthand reference guides that enable overworked agency staffs (yes, Millicent really is overworked — and often not paid very much, to boot) to sort through submissions quickly. And obviously, a 1-page synopsis takes less time to read than a 5-page one.

As nearly as I can tell, the shorter synopses typically aren’t used for marketing outside the agency at all. Why not? Well, realistically, a 1- or 2-page synopsis is just a written pitch, not a genuine plot summary, and thus not all that useful for an agent to have on hand if an editor starts asking pesky follow-up questions like, “Okay, so what happens next?” (If you’ve never pitched your work verbally to an agent, and want to learn how to do it, please check out the PITCHING category at right. No matter how good a book is, learning to describe it in terms the entire industry will understand is a learned skill.)

Do I hear some confused murmuring out there? “Wait,” I hear some of you saying, “this makes it sound as though my novel synopsis is never going to see the light of day outside the agency. If I have to spend all of this time and effort perfecting a synopsis, why doesn’t the agent just forward it to editors who might be interested?”

Ah, that would be logical, wouldn’t it? But as with so many other flawed human institutions, logic does not necessarily dictate why things are done the way they are within the industry; much of the time, tradition does. So the argument against trying to sell a first novel on synopsis alone: fiction is just not sold that way, my dear.

Fiction is sold to publishing houses on the manuscript itself, not the summary. So for a novel, the synopsis is a marketing tool for landing an agent, rather than something that sticks with the book throughout the marketing process. (This is not true of nonfiction, where the synopsis is part of the book proposal.)

I’m not quite sure why agents aren’t more upfront at conferences about the synopsis being primarily an in-house document when they request it. Ditto with pretty much any other non-manuscript materials they request — indications of target market, author bio, etc.

Requiring this kind of information used to be purely the province of the non-fiction agent, who needed it to put together a book proposal. Increasingly over the last decade or so, however, fiction writers are being asked to provide this kind of information to save agents time. Since the tendency in recent years has been to transfer as much of the agents’ work to potential clients as possible, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if agents started asking for the full NF packet from novelists within the next few years.

But let’s not worry about that dread day until it happens, shall we? Today, in most cases, a 3 or 4 page synopsis is all a fiction writer will need.

But think about that for a moment: 4 pages in standard format is roughly 1000 words, enough space to give some fairly intense detail. By contrast, a jacket blurb is usually between 100 and 250 words, only enough to give a general impression or set up a premise.

I point this out, because far too many writers new to the biz submit jacket blurbs to agents, editors, and contests, rather than synopses: marketing puff pieces, rather than plot descriptions or argument outlines. This is a mistake. Publishing houses have marketing departments for producing advertising copy. In a synopsis from a heretofore-unpublished writer, what industry professionals want to see is not self-praise, or a claim that every left-handed teenage boy in North America will be drawn to this book (even it it’s true), but a summary of what the book is ABOUT.

In other words, like the query, the synopsis is a poor place to boast. Since the jacket blurb synopsis is so common, most agencies use it as — wait for it — an easy excuse to reject a submission unread.

Yes, it’s unfair to those new to the biz, but the industry logic runs thus: a writer who doesn’t know the difference between a blurb and a synopsis is probably also unfamiliar with other industry norms, such as standard format and turn-around times. Thus (they reason), it’s more efficient to throw that fish back, to wait until it grows, before they invest serious amounts of time in frying it.

With such good bait, they really don’t stay up nights worrying about the fish that got away. They know you’ll come swimming back.

I know: it’s awful to think of one’s own work being treated that way, or indeed, that of any dedicated writer. If I ran the universe, synopses would not be treated this way. Instead, each agency would present soon-to-query writers with a clear, concise how-to for its preferred synopsis style — and if a writer submitted a back jacket blurb, Millicent the agency screener would chuckle indulgently, hand-write a nice little note advising the writer to revise and resubmit, then tuck it into an envelope along with that clear, concise list.

Or, better yet, every agency in the biz would send a representative to a vast agenting conference, a sort of UN of author representation, where delegates would hammer out a set of universal standards for judging synopses, to take the guesswork out of it once and for all. Once codified, bands of laughing nymphs would distribute these helpful standards to every writer currently producing English prose, and bands of freelance editors would set up stalls in the foyers of libraries across the world, to assist aspiring writers in conforming to the new standards.

Unfortunately, as you may perhaps have noticed, I do not run the universe, so we writers have to deal with the prevailing lack of clear norms.

Because it’s so easy for a too-long or too-short synopsis to be dismissed, though, I would advise NEVER allowing your synopsis to run over 5 pages or under 2. Since 3-4 pages is industry standard, one that is much shorter will make you look as if your story is unable to sustain a longer exposition; if it is much longer, you will look as though you aren’t aware of the standard. Either way, the results can be fatal to your submission.

So what DOES work in a synopsis? It’s not going to sound sexy, I’m afraid, but here is the secret: for fiction, stick to the plot of the novel, include enough vivid detail to make the synopsis interesting to read, and make sure the writing is impeccable.

For nonfiction, begin with a single paragraph about (a) why there is a solid market already available for this book and (b) why your background/research/approach renders you the perfect person to fill that market niche. Then present the book’s argument in a straightforward manner, showing how each chapter will build upon the one before to prove your case as a whole. Give some indication of what evidence you will use to back up your points.

Well, so much for synopses. Tomorrow…

Just kidding; the synopsis is a tall order, and I’m going to walk you past its most common pitfalls. In a week or so, you’ll be teaching other writers how to do it — and you’ll have yet another formidable tool in your marketing kit.

In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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What was that again?

For the past week or so, I have been talking about ways to self-edit your work in order to pick up the pace. In pursuit of that estimable goal, I went on a tear yesterday about redundancy, particularly word and phrase repetition. Today, I shall shift gears a little, to focus on concept repetition.

I dealt with this obliquely a few days ago, in my posts on eliciting telling little details. Again and again in manuscripts, I see good narratives sidetracked by a compulsion to explain what has just occurred, as though the author did not believe that the specifics of an incident, exchange, or character revelation could possibly have conveyed his intention for the scene.

Or, less common but still worth mentioning, summarizing what is about to happen BEFORE the scene occurs, as in, “I had no way of knowing that the events of the next day would shatter my childish innocence forever.” Personally, as a reader, I like to be surprised when childish innocence is shattered — don’t warn me in advance.

At base, both of these kinds of summary are based in an authorial lack of trust in the reader, I think: to a professional reader’s eye, they demonstrate that the writer is having a hard time believing that his target reader can follow the prevailing logic.

Thus, he explains what is going on, just to be sure. As in:

Shuddering, Hermione turned her back upon the human sacrifice. It offended her sensibilities as a civilized person. Where she came from, people seeking celestial intervention merely scolded God in private for not helping them more swiftly.

I may be leaping to unwarranted conclusions here, but I would assume that the number of potential readers whose sensibilities would NOT be offended by the sight of a human sacrifice is small enough that a contemporary writer might safely regard their critique as negligible. Personally, I am apt to assume that my readers are not given to sacrificing human, goat, or anything else that wiggles, so I would trim this passage accordingly:

Shuddering, Hermione turned her back upon the human sacrifice. Where she came from, people seeking celestial intervention merely scolded God in private for not helping them more swiftly.

Has the passage genuinely lost meaning through this edit? I think not — but it has lost a line of text, and believe me, when your agent calls you up and tells you, “The editor says she’ll take the book if you can make it 5,000 words shorter!” you’ll be grateful for every single expendable line.

Sometimes, the author’s mistrust of the reader’s level of comprehension is so severe that he go so far as to recap a particular set of facts’ importance as if the paragraph in question were in the synopsis, rather than in the text. For example:

“I canb he-ah you vewy wew,” Doris said, wiping her nose for the tenth time. She was prone to allergies that stuffed up her nose and rendered her vision blurry; moving here with her husband, Tad, her two adorable children, Newt (6) and Stephanie (8), and their pet ocelot Rex into a house in the middle of a field of mustard flowers, then, had probably been a poor idea.

Such a paragraph might work very well in a synopsis, serving as an agent or editor’s first introduction to Doris and her family, but in a manuscript, it reads awkwardly. (Try reading it out loud.) Since so much information is crammed into so few lines, it does not flow very well, so this passage would be a poor choice for the opening of a novel, or even the beginning lines of a chapter.

Yet if it appeared later in the text, wouldn’t the reader already know that Doris was married, had two children and an ocelot, and had moved recently? Wouldn’t this information be redundant, in fact? Besides, as any comedian can tell you, nothing kills a good joke so quickly as too much explanation.

Such global statements pop up in mid-text more often than you might think in submissions, though. There’s a reason you wouldn’t think it, if you read a fair amount: editors at publishing houses tend to leap upon this particular species of redundancy with all the vim of Rex pouncing upon a nice piece of red meat; as a result, one doesn’t see it much in published books. All the more reason to excise similar passages from your submissions.

Look how much snappier poor Doris’ plight is with the background trimmed:

“I canb he-ah you vewy wew.” Doris wiped her nose for the tenth time, ruing the day she had bought a house in the middle of a field of mustard flowers. It doesn’t matter if the scenery is magnificent when your eyes are too blurry to discern either distant mountains or your own driveway.

Partially, I think, reiterative over-explanation turns up in manuscripts because our ears have been trained by movies and TV to EXPECT redundancy. Almost any important clue in a screenplay will be repeated at least once, and often more, just in case some poor slob in the audience missed it the first time.

There is a long theatrical tradition of this stripe of redundancy, I’m told: in ancient Greek drama, a chorus provided frequent recaps of what had happened so far in the play. My college classics professor opined that this handy service, a sort of 5th century BC Cliff Notes, made it easier for spectators to nip out to have compact affairs with temple dancers and their neighbors’ wives; they could always catch up on the plot when they returned.

It’s amazing what one retains from long-ago lectures, isn’t it? You should have heard what he thought those figures cavorting on the sides of vases were doing.

But readers have an important advantages over the audience of a play — or at least they did before TiVo and rewind-able videotapes: books are cleverly designed so you may turn pages forward OR backward. Thus, if a reader has forgotten a major fact already mentioned in the text, she can flip back and look for it, right?

The moral: trusting in your reader’s intelligence — or at any rate her ability to figure out where to find information revealed earlier, even if she cannot recall it in detail — is an important key to keeping your pacing tight. If your plot requires additional explanation here or there because you’ve moved too swiftly, believe me, an agent or editor will will be happy point it out to you.

More tips on weeding out insidious pace-slowers to come next week. In the meantime, try not to stress out too much about your income taxes, US-based readers; at least this year, they are not due on the anniversary President Lincoln’s assassination, as they usually are. Now THAT’s a decision that cries out for further explanation, isn’t it?

Keep up the good work!

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Increasing your chances: the niceties

Okay, we’re heading into the home stretch of the contest-entry process. I hope that all of you eager contest-entrants have improved your entries – and I hope that those of you who have no interest in entering any contest at all have not been bored to death. I don’t feel too guilty about the latter group, actually: most of these presentation tips work beautifully with query letters and manuscript submission, too.

Today’s installment should please both sides of the aisle: deals with the fun stuff, the last-minute touches that can give your entry an edge.

Do I see the bleary-eyed contest entrants out there waving feebly to get my attention? “Whoa there,” they say, “you’ve just spent weeks on end telling us about restrictions on what doesn’t work in a contest entry. How much fun stuff could there possibly be?

Well, okay, you have a point there: when you first read through contest rules, it may not seem as though they allow a great deal of leeway in how you package your work, but often, there is some wiggle room. Proportion, for instance, can make a difference in how your work is received. And I’m not just talking about how your text looks on a page.

Although while I’m at it, allow me to reiterate two points that sharp-eyed readers have asked me to clarify in comments: no matter what anyone tells you about how skipping two spaces after a period or colon makes your manuscript look “dated,” DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM. Printing standards have indeed changed on this point; standard format has not. Technically, periods and colons should have two spaces after them, not one. (If you’ve already sent in an entry with only one, you’re likely to elicit a nasty comment about it on your feedback form, but you’re unlikely to be docked points. Make sure to have those spaces doubled before you send those chapters out to agencies, though.)

Also, another point that had slipped my mind earlier: turn off your widow and orphan control (in Word, this is located under FORMAT/PARAGRAPH/LINE AND PAGE BREAKS. This is the annoying little feature that automatically hijacks a single line of a paragraph at the bottom of a page and sticks it on the next, with the rest of the paragraph. The result: uneven numbers of lines on pages.

Turn it off. In standard format, every page of full text is SUPPOSED to have the same number of lines. (A fringe benefit for those of you who, like me, are wordy: this will result in your being able to cram more words into your contest entry. Yippee!)

Okay, back to other proportionality issues. Take a look at your entry: does the synopsis seem disproportionately long? Is there good writing that you would be able to squeeze into the chapter if it were shorter?

If your synopsis runneth over its assigned page limit, try this trick o’ the trade: minimize the amount of space you devote to the book’s premise and the actions that occur in Chapter 1.

Yes, you will need this information to appear prominently in a synopsis you would show an editor or agent, but you have different goals here. If you are submitting Chapter 1 (or even beyond) as part of your contest entry, and if you place the chapter BEFORE the synopsis in your entry packet, the judges will already be familiar with both the initial premise AND the basic characters AND what occurs at the beginning in the book. So why be repetitious?

In the average novel synopsis, over a quarter of the text deals with premise and character introduction. Trim this down to just a few sentences and move on to the rest of the plot.

Allow me to use a practical example – and because I KNOW you don’t have time to read anything between now and the contest deadline, I’ll pick a storyline you probably already know. Let’s say that you were Jane Austen, and you were submitting the first 25 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY to a literary contest. (You should be so lucky!) For submission to an agent, your query synopsis might look something like this:

ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) are in a pitiable position: due to the whimsical will of their great-uncle, the family estate passes at the death of their wealthy father into the hands of their greedy half-brother, JOHN DASHWOOD (early 30s). Their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40), soon offended at John’s wife’s (FANNY FERRARS DASHWOOD, late 20s) domineering ways and lack of true hospitality, wishes to move her daughters from Norland, the only home they have ever known, but comparative poverty and the fact that Elinor is rapidly falling in love with her sister-in-law’s brother, EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s), render any decision on where to go beyond the reach of her highly romantic speculations. Yet when John and his wife talk themselves out of providing any financial assistance to the female Dashwoods at all, Mrs. Dashwood accepts the offer of her cousin, SIR JOHN MIDDLETON (middle aged) to move her family to Barton Park, hundreds of miles away. Once settled there, the Dashwoods find themselves rushed into an almost daily intimacy with Sir John and his wife, LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s) at the great house. There, they meet COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), Sir John’s melancholy friend, who seems struck by Marianne’s musical ability – and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

Now, all of this does in fact occur in the first 25 pages of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY, as the contest entry would clearly show. But after all this, you don’t have much room to go through the rest of the plot, do you? So, being a wise Aunt Jane, you would streamline the contest synopsis so it looked a bit more like this:

At the death of their wealthy father, ELINOR (19) and MARIANNE DASHWOOD (17) and their affectionate but impractical mother (MRS. DASHWOOD, 40) are forced to leave their life-long home and move halfway across England, to live near relatives they have never seen, far away from Elinor’s beloved EDWARD FERRARS (mid-20s). At the home of their cousins SIR JOHN (middle aged) and LADY MIDDLETON (late 20s), melancholy COLONEL BRANDON (early 40s), seems struck by Marianne’s musical ability – and beauty. But does his sad face conceal a secret?

Less than half the length, but enough of the point to show the judges how the submitted chapters feed into the rest of the book. Well done, Jane!

Placing character names in capital letters and indicating ages (as I have done above), is no longer absolutely standard for querying synopses – but not all contest judges seem to be aware of that. To old-fashioned eyes, a synopsis simply isn’t professional unless the first time each major character is named (and only the first time), HIS NAME APPEARS IN ALL CAPS (age).

You would be perfectly within your rights not to adhere to this quaint practice, but if your work happens to fall into the hands of a judge who thinks it’s mandatory, you’ll be far better off if you stuck to old-fashioned structure.

And naturally, you should read the ENTIRETY of your entry IN HARD COPY, ALOUD, before you send it anywhere at all. As regular readers of this blog are already aware, my professional editor hat gets all in a twist at the notion of any writer’s proofreading solely on a computer screen.

And don’t even get me started again on the chronic inadequacies of most word processing programs’ grammar checkers! Mine disapproves of gerunds, apparently on general principle, strips accent marks off French words, and regularly advises me to use the wrong form of THERE. (If anybody working at Microsoft does not know the ABSOLUTELY IMMUTABLE rules governing when to use THERE, THEIR, AND THEY’RE, I beg of you: drop me a comment, and I shall make everything clear.)

Like a bad therapist, a poor grammar checker cannot be sufficiently disregarded, but even in the unlikely event that your grammar checker was put together by someone remotely familiar with the English language as she is spoke, you should NEVER rely solely upon what it tells you to do. If you’re in doubt, look it up.

There is an especially good reason to read the synopsis out loud: to make sure it stands alone as a story. Since part of the point of the synopsis is to demonstrate what a good storyteller you are, flow is obviously important. If you have even the tiniest reservations about whether you have achieved this goal, read your synopsis out loud to someone unfamiliar with your project – and then ask your listener to tell the basis story back to you. If there are holes in your account, this method will make them leap out at you.

Insofar as a hole can leap.

Once you have perfected your entry, print it on nice paper. This may seem silly, but it sometimes does make a difference, believe it or not.

By nice paper, I’m not talking about hot pink sheets or pages that you have hand-calligraphed with gold leaf and Celtic designs. Either of those would get your entry disqualified on sight. No, I mean high-quality white paper, the kind of stuff you might print your resume on if you REALLY wanted the job. Back in my contest-winning days, I favored bright white 24-lb. cotton.

Yes, it’s a little more expensive than ordinary printer paper; live a little. Using good paper will make your entry stand out amongst the others. If this seems extravagant to you, ask yourself: have I ever walked into an interview wanting the job as much as I want to have my book published?

Nice paper is a pleasure to hold, but frankly, there’s more to this strategy than giving your judges visceral pleasure. The vast majority of contest entries are printed on very low-quality paper – and with printer cartridges that have seen better days. When multiple copies are required for submission, they generally show up on the flimsy paper so often found in copy shop photocopiers. It tears easily. It wrinkles as it travels through the mail. It’s dingy-looking.

Spring for something nicer, and your entry will automatically come across as more professional to the judges. It may not be fair, but it’s true, so it’s very worth your while to invest a few extra bucks in a decent ream. 20-pound paper or heavier will not wrinkle in transit unless the envelope is actually folded, and bright white paper gives the impression of being crisper.

Avoid anything in the cream range – this is the time for brilliant white.

For what it’s worth, I have observed over time that agents and editors, too, seem to treat manuscripts printed in Times New Roman on bright, heavy white paper with more respect than other manuscripts. The only drawback – and it was a significant one, I don’t deny it – was that when I printed up a draft of my memoir for my editor on lovely cotton 24-pound paper, it came back to me smelling like an ashtray. Turns out cotton paper soaks up ambient smoke like a sponge. My cats shied away from my desk for weeks afterward.

I’ve told this story before, so for the sake of those of you who have, ahem, already had the opportunity to laugh at the joke, I went back and sniffed the manuscript box again. (Ah, the things that I do to amuse my readers!) And you know what? More than 15 months later, the damned thing STILL smells like a smokers’ lounge.

And before you seal the envelope, GO BACK AND REREAD THE CONTEST RULES. Have you met each and every requirement? Have you included every needed element? Are your margins precisely what the contest specified?

It may seem anal-retentive to re-check this often, but as I have been telling you all throughout this series, judges are often looking for reasons to disqualify you. It is absolutely imperative, then, that you follow every rule to the letter. And in the average contest, a good 5% of entries show up with something really basic missing, like the check or a second title page.

Good luck with your entries. And everybody, keep up the good work!

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Increasing your contest chances: every word is a writing sample

Did it seem odd that I hammered so hard yesterday on the importance of a finely-crafted synopsis to a contest entry’s overall chances of winning? As a long-time contest judge, I am continually astonished at how often a well-written chapter is accompanied by a synopsis obviously dashed off in the final fifteen minutes before the post office closes on deadline day, as though the writing quality, clarity, and organization of it weren’t going be evaluated at all.

I suspect that this is a fairly accurate reading of what commonly occurs. All too often, writers (most of whom, after all, have full-time jobs, families, books to write, and, well, lives to lead) push preparing their entries to the very last minute — or at the very least, to the last few days. Imagine their chagrin when they realize that they can’t simply print up the first chapters they have readied for agents and send them in to the contest!

Aren’t you glad, dear readers, that you are never going to be in that unenviable position ever again? Now, you know better: every contest has some formatting restrictions that will require you to modify your manuscript. And that takes time.

But let’s step for a moment into the uncomfortably tight moccasins of a contest entrant who DIDN’T know that, shall we? Picture poor Rodney (after the famous commercialeer Rodney Allen Rippey, so you can picture his hair standing up with angst; as a fundamentally straight-haired person I always deeply admired his ‘do), running around in anguished circles, trying to meet all of his chosen contest’s strange regulations. Then, just when he thinks he’s finished, he realizes that he’s going to have to throw a synopsis into the packet, too — and it probably isn’t going to satisfy the rules if he just uses the one he’s developed for querying.

Frustrated at this crucial moment by what appears to be an arbitrary requirement — “It’s the writing in the chapter should count,” Rodney fumes, “not how well I can summarize a 350-page book.” — our Rodney falls prey to the insidious temptation that has felled many a good writer before him. He sits down at his computer, throws together a synopsis in a fatal rush, and shoves it into an envelope, hoping that no one will pay much attention to it.

Oh, Rodney, trust me on this one: judges WILL pay attention to it, and even a judge who loves every syllable of your chapter will be forced to deduct points from your score if your synopsis is not up to snuff. Many a fine chapter has been scuttled by a slipshod synopsis.

All of you Rodneys out there please take note of this, as it is a cardinal rule of winning literary contests — EVERYTHING YOU ARE ASKED TO SUBMIT TO A CONTEST WILL BE JUDGED FOR QUALITY.

Therefore, you should treat every comma of the entry as though it were a writing sample to be submitted to all nine Muses for approval. (I hear that Erato is, like the East German judges at the Olympics used to be, an exceptionally picky scorer.)

I won’t go so far as to say that if you do not expend careful consideration over the crafting of the synopsis for a book-length category, you might as well not enter at all. It is entirely fair to say, however, that if you have a well-written, well thought-out synopsis tucked into your entry packet, your work will automatically have an edge toward winning.

Did I just hear you ask why, Rodney? Because, my sweet, a truly great synopsis in a contest entry is such a rarity.

Effectively, in a contest situation, the synopsis is the substitute for the rest of the book. The synopsis is where you demonstrate to judges that you are not merely a writer who can hold them in thrall for a few isolated pages: the synopsis is where you show that you have the vision and tenacity to take the compelling characters you have begun to reveal in your first chapter through an interesting story to a satisfying conclusion.

To put it another way, here is where you show that you are something more than a talented chapter-writer: the synopsis is where you show that you can plot out a BOOK.

For this reason, it is imperative that your synopsis makes it very, very clear how the chapter or excerpt you are submitting fits into the overall arc of the book, regardless of whether you are submitting fiction or nonfiction. ESPECIALLY if you are submitting a chapter other than the first. Quite a few contests allow writers to submit any chapter you like, provided that it falls within the specified page restrictions, and if you elect to take them up on this offer, your synopsis had better make it absolutely plain where the excerpts will fall in the finished work.

Truth be told, though, in my experience it is seldom wise to submit either non-consecutive excerpts from a book or chapters other than the initial ones. Yes, even if the later chapters contain writing that is truly wonderful. Non-consecutive excerpts require the judge to make the logical connections between them — which the judge may not be inclined to do in a way that is in your best interest.

“Oh, God,” Rodney says, covering his eyes. “How?”

An uncharitable judge might, for instance, draw the unkind inference that you had submitted the excerpts you chose because they were the ONLY parts of the book you had written — a poor message to send in a category devoted to book-length works, where the prestige of the contest depends upon winners getting snapped up by attending agents. Another possible interpretation is that you simply can’t stand your introductory chapter — again, not the best message to send, as a weak first chapter generally equals rejection from agents and editors.

Or, a judge may reason, no agent or editor in the world is going to accept random excerpts from a book as an indication of the book’s quality : she is going to expect to see the first chapter, or first three chapters. Thus, a judge might conclude, the author who submitted this patchwork entry isn’t anywhere near ready to submit work to professionals. Next!

This is not, in short, a situation where it pays to rely upon the kindness of strangers, Rodney.

If you DO decide to enter non-contiguous excerpts, place your synopsis at the BEGINNING of your entry — unless, of course, the rules absolutely forbid you to do so — and make sure that the synopsis makes it QUITE clear that these excerpts are far and away the most important part of the book. Basically, the role of the synopsis in this instance is to make the judges EAGER to read these particular excerpts. Obviously, this means that your storytelling skills had better be at their most polished, to meet the challenge.

As for selecting a chapter other than the first for submission, effectively starting midway through the book, I would advise against it, too, even if when contest rules explicitly permit the possibility. In the first place, the judge may well draw the same set of uncharitable inferences as with the non-continuous excerpts, and dismiss your submission as not ready for the big time.

Why is this a problem? Well, as I have mentioned above, contest organizers LOVE it when their winners move on quickly to publication. If your work looks like it needs a couple of years’ worth of polishing to become market-ready, it is unlikely to win a contest, even if you are extremely talented.

In the second place, while your best writing may well lie later in your book, the advantage of starting at the beginning of the book is that the judge and the reader will have an equal amount of information going in. Judges like that. I’ve known a lot of contest judges who resent having to go back and forth between the synopsis and the chapters to figure out what is going on.

There IS a sneaky way to get around this — but I would have to scold you if you did it, Rodney: you could just enter your best chapter and submit a synopsis that implies that it IS the first. There is no contest in the world that is going to make you sign an affidavit swearing that your entry is identical to what you are submitting to agents and editors; if you win, no one is later going to come after you and say, “Hey, your book doesn’t start with the scene you entered in the contest!”

And even if someone did, so what? Professional writers change the running orders of their books all the time. Manuscript change is the norm in the industry, not the exception. Heck, the editor currently pondering the purchase of my novel asked me to change the running order twice before she showed it to anyone else at the publishing house.

Thus, if Rodney felt his best writing occurred fifty pages into his novel, it might behoove him, for the purposes of competition, to place his strongest scene first by starting the entry on page 50 (presenting it as page 1, of course). The synopsis would have to be revised, naturally, to make it appear that this is indeed the usual running order of the book, and Rodney would have to edit carefully, to make sure that there is nothing in the skipped-over pages that is vital to understanding what happens in the chapters presented in the entry.

The job of the synopsis, then, in the hands of this tricky writer, would be to cover up the fact that the entry starts in the middle of the book. It would be just our little secret, Rodney dear.

To put it in a less clever way: as a general rule, anything you can do to place your best writing within the first few pages of your entry, you should do. Judges’ impressions tend to be formed very fast, and if you can wow ’em before page 3, you absolutely should.

Actually, just as with work you submit to agents, the first page of your entry is far and away the most important thing the judges see. Unless there is a strong reason to place your synopsis first, put it at the end of your entry, so your first page can jump out at the judges. And if you can include some very memorable incident or imagery within the first few paragraphs of your chapter, that much the better.

So go ahead and submit your strongest chapter to a contest — but for heaven’s sake, do NOT label it as Chapter 8 in your entry. Label it as Chapter 1, and write a new synopsis for a book where Chapter 8 IS Chapter 1. Just make sure that your synopsis is compelling and lucid enough that it all makes sense as a story.

And whatever you do, try not to save writing your synopsis for a contest for the very last moments before you stuff the entry into an envelope. Synopsis-writing is hard; budget adequate time for it. And make absolutely sure that the synopsis you submit supports the image of the book you want your submitted chapter to send.

On to title pages tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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Increasing your chances: the synopsis that cinches the deal

Yes, I know: I revisited synopses fairly recently, but yesterday, I made a bold statement: a good synopsis for a contest and a good synopsis for submission are not necessarily the same thing. I could have dropped that hot potato into your lap and gone blithely on my way, but something tells me that some of you might like some explanation of HOW the two might conceivably differ.

You’re funny that way. It’s one of the things I love about you.

In the first place, contest synopses are often shorter. Unlike submissions to agents, where you are merely expected to produce a document that falls within industry standards for length and format, contests generally will specify the length of the synopses they want; sometimes, the rules merely set a maximum page limit for the entry, and allow the writer to decide how much of it to devote to the synopsis.

In either case, page space will be at a premium — but even if the contest rules specify an absurdly short synopsis (or make it sound shorter by calling it a plot outline), please do not give into the quite substantial temptation to fudge a little to stay within the specified parameters. Even if you have been asked to produce a 3-paragraph synopsis of a 500-page book, DO NOT single-space it, shrink the print size, or fudge the margins to make it fit within the specified limits, unless the contest rules say you may.

The reason is simple: you will get caught and penalized. Trust me, if the rest of your entry is in 12-point Times New Roman with 1-inch margins, double-spaced, almost any judge is going to be able to tell right away if your synopsis is presented differently.

Because judges are expected to rate entries for professional presentation, unless contest rules specify otherwise, NEVER allow a contest synopsis to run over 5 pages or under 2. A synopsis that is much shorter will make you look as if you are unable to sustain a longer exposition; if it is much longer, you will look as though you aren’t aware of the standard.

That’s right: if you have been asked to submit a synopsis, it, as well as your chapter, is subject to judging for clarity, coherence, marketability… and professionalism. Make sure that your synopsis reads like a SYNOPSIS, and not like a back-jacket blurb (“My writing teacher says this is the best novel since THE SUN ALSO RISES!”) or an exposition on why you chose to write the book (“It isn’t autobiographical, but…”)

Just make sure that the novel sounds engaging, marketable — and like the best yarn since TREASURE ISLAND. Make the pacing FAST.

To that end, it is justifiable to streamline the plot more than you might for a regular synopsis — trust me, after you are wearing the first place ribbon, no one is going to come running up to you crying, “Hey! Your synopsis left out three major plotlines, and didn’t mention the protagonist’s sister! Foul! Foul!”

For non-fiction entries, it is usually a good idea to include some brief indication of the target market and why your book will serve that market better than what is currently available — but do keep it short and to-the-point. Hyperbole does not work well in this context, so steer clear of grandiose claims (“Everyone in North America will want to buy this book!” All of these quotes are permutations of statements I have seen in actual contest synopses, by the way.).

Stick to saying what the book is ABOUT. Also — and this is for some reason hugely common in contest synopses — try not to get sidetracked on WHY you chose to write it. A LOT of contest synopses go off on these tangents, to the detriment of the entry, and it costs them a plethora of presentation and professionalism points.

“Wait just a minute!” I hear some of you out there saying. “Why is personal revelation regarded as a sign of a lack of professionalism? What if my entry is a memoir, for instance? Aren’t my reasons for writing my own life story worth mentioning in the synopsis?”

Not necessarily. In the eyes of the industry, there are only a few contexts where a lengthy discussion of why you chose to write a book is considered appropriate professional behavior:

(1) Within a nonfiction book proposal, where it is a necessary component to making the argument that you are uniquely qualified to write the book you are proposing.
(2) In a query letter or pitch, to show that you are uniquely qualified to write the book you are pitching.
(3) After you have signed with your agent, when she asks, “So, are there hidden selling points in this book that I should mention while I’m marketing it?”
(4) To your publisher’s marketing department just before your book is released, so they can include any relevant points in the press packet.
(5) Within the context of an interview AFTER the book is released. Interviewers LOVE hearing about writers’ motivations — which, I suspect is why aspiring writers so often want to tell everyone they see what is and is not autobiographical in their novels. So feel free to go to town after the book comes out.
(6) When you are chatting with other writers about why they wrote THEIR books.

Other than that, it’s considered over-sharing — yes, even for memoirists. In your synopsis, stick to the what of the book, and save the whys for later.

The only exception to this in a contest entry is if you have some very specific expertise or background that renders your take on a subject particularly valid. If so, make sure that information is stated within the first paragraph of your NF synopsis; if you are writing a novel, and you feel that you have an inside perspective that simply must be mentioned to the judges, stick it at the end of the synopsis, where it won’t be too intrusive.

In all other cases, for a synopsis to accompany a fiction entry, your goal is very, very simple: make it a terrific story. You would be AMAZED how few contest synopses-writers seem to realize that.

What do they do instead? All too often, writers just state the premise of the novel, rather than taking the reader through the plot, blow by blow. If the plot has twists and surprises, so should the synopsis. Show the story arc, and make it compelling enough that the judge will scrawl on the evaluation sheet, “Wow, I want to read this book when it comes out.”

Trust me, pretty much every contest winner and placer’s evaluation sheet has this sentiment, or something very similar to it, scrawled upon it in a judge’s hand. So make it your mission in the synopsis to evoke that wonderful response.

Yes, I know: it’s a tall order. But don’t forget that the synopsis is every bit as much an indication of your writing skill as the actual chapters that you are submitting.

The easiest way to get the judges involved is not merely to summarize the plot as quickly as possible, but to give the feel of a number of specific scenes. Don’t be afraid to use forceful imagery and strong sensual detail, and try to have the tone of the synopsis echo the tone of the book.

For nonfiction, your goal in a contest synopsis is threefold: to show the argument of the book in some detail, along with some indication of how you intend to prove your case; to show that the book will appeal to a large enough market niche to make publishing it worthwhile, and to demonstrate that you are the best-qualified person in the universe to write the book.

In 3-5 pages, no less. Piece o’ proverbial cake, right?

For the first, it is helpful to have an outline of your proposed chapters in front of you, so you can use the synopsis to demonstrate how each chapter will build upon the next to make your overall case. Even if you are writing a self-help book, history book, or memoir, you are always making a case when you write nonfiction, if only to argue that your take on the world around you is interesting, unique, and valid. Be certain that by the time a judge finishes reading your synopsis, s/he will understand very clearly what this argument is — and what evidence you will be bringing in to demonstrate it. (Statistics? Extensive background research? Field experience? Interviews? A wealth of personal anecdotes? Etc.)

If you are pinched for space, you need only devote the first paragraph to marketing information. Say why the world needs your book. If you are writing on a subject that is already quite full of authorial opinion, make it plain why your book is different and better. (“Have you ever wondered what goes on underneath the snow while you are skiing on top of it? Although there are many books currently on the market for snowboarding enthusiasts, MOUNTAINS MY WAY is the first to be written by a geologist.”)

If you have statistics on your prospective market, this is the place to mention them. (“There are currently 2 million Americans diagnosed with agoraphobia, yet there are few self-help books out there for them — and only one that is actually written by an agoraphobic, someone who truly understands what it feels like to be shut in.”)

The third desiratum is what is known in the industry as your platform. Admittedly, it is a trifle hard to explain why you are THE expert best qualified to write this book without saying a little something about yourself, so you may feel as though you are slipping into the realm of author bio, a potentially dangerous strategy in a contest entry where you might get disqualified for inadvertently mentioning your first name. But rest assured, no one is going to disqualify you for mentioning that you have a Ph.D. or went to a specific culinary school.

So go ahead and state your qualifications — just don’t slip up and mention yourself by name. “A well-respected Seattle area caterer for twenty years, the author has extensive experience in crafting meals for the pickiest of eaters,” for example, will only make you sound authoritative, not rule-breaking. As will, “SHELLFISH AND YOU is the fruit of many years of postdoctoral research. The author, a graduate of the prestigious Scripps School of Oceanography, is recognized worldwide as an up-and-coming authority on mollusk behavior.”)

If your head is whirling from all of this — and whose wouldn’t be, given the imminence of the PNWA contest deadline — don’t worry. I’ll go into some tips on how to simplify the contest-writing synopsis process tomorrow. In the meantime, keep up the good work!

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The short, short lifespan of the novel synopsis

As query season is about to descend upon us again – most agencies will have calmed down from the New Year’s Resolution Rush by the end of Martin Luther King, Jr. week – and the PNWA contest deadline approaches, I had intended to begin my promised series on prepping your entries for contest submission today. However, an excellent question from a longtime reader sidetracked me — and I’m pleased it did. Talented and insightful Soyim wrote in to ask:

“Did you have to write a synopsis for the publishing house for which you’re revising your novel? And if so, how long was it? I keep reading that the synopsis has to be as polished as the book itself, but the desired length varies. Some agents suggest 1-2 pages; others say 6 pages or longer.”

Soyim, this is a great question – and a topic, much to my surprise, I had not revisited since June, 2006! So I’m really glad you brought it up. One of the long-term problems of writing this blog is that I have SO much territory to cover that I sometimes forget time passes in between series. Never fear, those of you new to the synopsis-writing process: I’m going to deal with the issue quickly today, and then revisit it within the context of contest entries, to kill as many birds as possible with the few stones at hand.

And if that’s not a gratuitously violent analogy for an essentially positive situation, I should like to know what is.

A synopsis, in case you are unfamiliar with it, is a brief overview of the plot or argument of a book. Often confused with a back jacket blurb, which provides only the premise of the book, the synopsis goes over the entire plot and major characters. Written in the present tense, it provides an agent or contest judge with the essential story arc, demonstrating how the issues raised in the book are resolved.

I did write a synopsis for my novel, but purely for my agent’s eyes, not for the editor’s; as far as I know, the editor for whom I have been making pre-sale revisions has never seen it – of which, more below. It was 5 pages, but I probably could have gotten away with a touch less or a few paragraphs more.

5 pages is industry standard, but as my fair correspondent points out, some ask for longer and shorter. Unless an agent specifically states otherwise, though, you’ll never go wrong with 5 pages.

Yet, as Soyim points out, agency guidelines sometimes ask for much shorter synopses, 1 or 2 pages – and this is maddening, as it would obviously be INFINITELY easier on aspiring writers everywhere if we could simply produce a single submission packet for our work that would fly at any agency in the land. As I have mentioned before, though, however much speakers at conferences, writing gurus, and agents themselves speak of the publishing industry as monolithic, it isn’t: individual agents, and thus individual agencies, like different things.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: no single synopsis you write is going to please everybody in the industry.

Give each what she asks to see. Literally the only pressure for length standardization comes from writers, who pretty uniformly wish that there were a single formula for the darned thing, so they could write it once and never think about it again. I can’t say as I blame them for feeling that way, but the fact is, any given agency wants what it wants.

Why might an agency want a shorter one? Like so much else in the industry, time is the decisive factor: synopses are shorthand reference guides that enable overworked agency staffs (yes, they really are overworked — and often not paid very much, to boot) to sort through submissions quickly. And obviously, a 1-page synopsis takes less time to read than a 5-page one.

As nearly as I can tell, the shorter synopses typically aren’t used for marketing outside the agency at all, Why not? Well, realistically, a 1- or 2-page synopsis is just a written pitch, not a genuine plot summary, and thus not all that useful for an agent to have on hand if an editor starts asking pesky follow-up questions like, “Okay, so what happens next?” (If you’ve never pitched your work verbally to an agent, and want to learn how to do it, please check out the PITCHING TIPS category at right. No matter how good a book is, learning to describe it in terms the entire industry will understand is a learned skill.)

Do I hear some confused murmuring out there? “Wait,” I hear some of you saying, “this makes it sound as though my novel synopsis is never going to see the light of day outside the agency. If I have to spend all of this time and effort perfecting a synopsis, why doesn’t the agent just forward it to editors who might be interested?”

Ah, that would be logical, wouldn’t it? But as with so many other flawed human institutions, logic does not necessarily dictate why things are done the way they are within the industry. Fiction is just not sold that way.

Fiction is sold to publishing houses on the manuscript itself, not the summary. So for a novel, the synopsis is a marketing tool for landing an agent, rather than something that sticks with the book throughout the marketing process. This is not true of nonfiction, where the synopsis is part of the book proposal.

Thus, since my book is a novel, and I already had an agent, it was not necessarily a foregone conclusion that I would have to write a synopsis for it. I just told my agent about it verbally; she read it, then she began shopping it around. (To give you a sense of the timeline on a novel submission, she and I decided last February to start marketing it; I sent her copies in March, and the first round of submissions to editors went out in June. In September, one of the editors asked me to revise the book, pending passing it up the food chain at her publishing house; around Thanksgiving, I was asked if I would be open to a bit more tinkering. I received the second revision request just before Christmas, and I shall be sending the revised manuscript early next week. This, incidentally, was an unusually quick chain of events for the marketing of a first novel.)

Why did my agent have me write a synopsis, then, since I didn’t have to sell her on the book? So she would have an easy reference guide in front of her when she spoke on the phone about the book. Here again, we see the synopsis being used primarily as a tool within the agency, not as a document that markets the book directly to an editor.

And that, my friends, is almost certainly the last anyone will ever see of my novel’s synopsis. R.I.P.

I’m not quite sure why agents aren’t more upfront at conferences about the synopsis being primarily an in-house document when they request it. Ditto with pretty much any other non-manuscript materials they request – indications of target market, author bio, etc. Requiring this kind of information used to be purely the province of the non-fiction agent, who needed it to put together a book proposal. Increasingly over the last decade or so, however, fiction writers are being asked to provide this kind of information to save agents time. Since the tendency in recent years has been to transfer as much of the agents’ work to potential clients as possible, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if agents started asking for the full NF packet from novelists within the next few years.

But let’s not worry about that dread day until it happens, shall we?

And yes, it does need to be ultra-polished (which isn’t really fair, as summaries entail a completely different kind of writing than a book), as does everything you place under a prospective agent’s nose. Synopses are marketing materials, and should be taken as seriously as anything else you write. No matter how good your book is, your best strategic move is to take some time to make your synopsis gorgeous; Miss America may be beautiful au naturale, for all any of us know, but you can bet your last pair of socks that at even the earliest stage of going for the title, she takes the time to put on her makeup with care.

It should be polished because it’s a writing sample, another way to wow the agent. On the bright side, since almost everyone just throws a synopsis together, impressing an agent with one actually isn’t very hard. Being able to include a couple of stunning visceral details, for instance, is going to make you look like a better writer — almost everyone just summarizes vaguely.

My readers, of course, are far too savvy to make that mistake, right?

It’s also helpful if a synopsis gives the impression that the writer is genuinely excited about this book and eager to market it, rather than being deeply and justifiably angry that it needed to be written at all. Believe me, to an experienced eye, writerly resentment shows up BEAUTIFULLY against the backdrop of a synopsis. The VAST majority of novel synopses simply scream that their authors regarded the writing of them as tiresome busywork instituted by the industry to satisfy some sick, sadistic whim prevalent amongst agents, a hoop through which they enjoy seeing all of the doggies jump.

Show that you are professional enough to approach the synopsis as a marketing necessity it is. Remember, agents do NOT ask writers for synopses because they are too lazy to read entire books: they ask for synopses because they receive so many submissions that, even with the best of wills, they could never possibly read them all. The synopsis, then, is your chance to make your work jump up and down and scream: “Me! Me! I’m the one out of 10,000 that you actually want to read, the one written by an author who is willing to work with you, instead of sulking over the way the industry runs!”

Mind you, I’m not saying that you SHOULDN’T sulk over the often arbitrary and unfair way the industry runs: actually, it would be merely Pollyannaish NOT to do that from time to time. Vent as often as you please; it’s healthier than keeping it inside. But it simply is not prudent to vent anywhere near an agent or editor whom you want to take on your work, and certainly not in the tone of the synopsis. The synopsis’ tone should match the book’s, and unless you happen to be writing about deeply resentful characters, it’s just not appropriate to sound clipped and disgruntled.

Sorry. As I believe I have mentioned before, if I ran the universe, not only would manuscripts be judged purely upon the quality of their writing by book-loving souls who would read every submission in full, but there would be free merry-go-rounds in every schoolyard, college tuition would cost nothing, lions and tigers would want nothing more than to cuddle up to humans and purr – and I would have more than a week left before my revision deadline.

However, as my calendar informs me quite clearly every time I sit down to revise, I do not, in fact, run the universe. Unfortunate.

A lot of writers tell me that they find 5 pages a difficult target length for a synopsis. If your draft persists in being less, and you are synopsizing a book-length work, chances are that you are not including the plot or argument in sufficient detail. Remember, your goal here is not just to give the bare bones of the plot, but also to bowl that agency screener over with your incredible storytelling acumen: telling little asides and sensual details can go a long way toward making your synopsis stand out in the crowd.

If you really get stuck about how to make it longer, print up a hard copy of the synopsis, find yourself a highlighting pen, and mark every broad summary statement about character, such as “Bartholomew was a morose man,” as well as every time you have wrapped up a scene or plot twist description with a sentence along the lines of, “and in the process, Sheila learns an important lesson about herself.” These types of statements show up so often in synopses that agents tend to read them as clichés.

Go back through and take a careful look at these highlighted lines: would a 2- or 3-sentence scene SHOW the conclusion stated there better than just TELLING the reader about it? Is there a revealing character detail or an interesting plot nuance that might supplement these general statements, making them more compelling to read?

I’ll let those of you into brevity in on a little secret: given a choice, specifics are almost always more interesting to a reader than generalities. Think about it from an agency screener’s POV, someone who reads 800 synopses per week: wouldn’t general statements about lessons learned and hearts broken start to sound rather similar after awhile? But a genuinely quirky detail in a particular synopsis — wouldn’t that stand out in your mind?

If your synopsis has the opposite problem, and insists upon running over 5 pages (the naughty thing), you should also sit down and read it over with a highlighter gripped tightly in your warm little hand. On your first pass through, mark any sentence that does not deal with the primary plot of the book. Then go back through and read the UNMARKED sentences in sequence, ignoring the highlighted ones. Ask yourself honestly: does the shorter version give an accurate impression of the book?

If your synopsis still runs too long, try this trick of the pros: minimize the amount of space you devote to the book’s premise and the actions that occur in Chapter 1. Much of the time, extensive explanation of these is redundant within the context of the submission.

Why? Well, presumably, if you are sending the synopsis with a query letter, the query itself will state the premise of the book; if you have been asked to send chapters along with the synopsis, as commonly occurs, the agent will already have the actual chapters on hand.

Phew! That was a lighting-paced run through the topic, wasn’t it? Don’t panic, first-timers, if it went by a little fast: as I said, I will revisit the synopsis in my upcoming series on contest entries. If you would like a fuller explanation of the mechanics of the synopsis in the interim, check out the SYNOPSES category at right. And, of course, if you have any questions, feel free to drop me a note via the COMMENTS function.

Thanks, Soyim, for reminding me to come back to this important subject! And everybody, keep up the good work!

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Conference-gleaned wisdom, Part XII: reading from the other side of the envelope

I’m sitting in a Berkeley espresso place right now, surrounded by people who apparently stepped directly out of either my memoir (my parents were local beatniks) or the novel currently in editorial limbo (my protagonist’s parents were local hippies). Seriously, I could cast movies of either very comfortably without walking outside into the prevailing misty fog.

Why am I here? Well, I’m waiting to be interviewed for a documentary about Philip K. Dick. My mother is in front of the cameras right now, and since, as filmmakers and physicists agree, the process of being observed changes that which is being observed, I have taken myself off to blog. This is only the second time I’ve ever allowed myself to be interviewed about Philip (contrary to what the PKD estate claims on its fan forum), and the first on film, and I’m finding the process absolutely fascinating. Naturally, any procedure that encourages my mother to drive around Berkeley with a movie camera strapped to the hood of her truck gets my vote, but now I’m thinking that I should add a short chapter to the memoir about it, the observed observing the observers.

Okay, back to business, before I am called upon to reminisce again. I think taking on the Idol rejection reasons (see my post of October 31) one by one is being very fruitful, but heavens, there are a LOT of them, aren’t there? I’m moving through them as fast as I can. I’ve gotten a lot of great questions from readers while I have been going through them, matters about which I normally would have written a post right away, but I did not want to disrupt the Idol flow. I’m anxious to get back to them!

Today, I want to deal with the rejection reasons that did not fit comfortably into general categories — the odd ducks, as it were:

39. Too many generalities.
40. The character shown is too average.
41. The stakes are not high enough for the characters.
60. The details included were not telling.

Shaking your head over the practically infinite subjectivity of this set? There’s a good reason for that: just as one agent’s notion of fresh is another’s idea of weird, one agent’s Everyman is another’s Ho-Hum Harry.

And this is problematic, frankly, to most of us who have lived through Creative Writing 101. Weren’t we all told to strive for universality? (Which, until fairly recently, was code for appealing to straight, white men.) Weren’t we all ordered to write what we knew? (Which led to forty years’ worth of literary journals crammed to the gills with stories about upper middle class white teenagers.) Weren’t we implored to be acute observers of life, so we could document the everyday in slice-of-life pieces of practically museum-level detail? (Which left us all sitting in writing class, listening to aspiring writers read thinly-fictionalized excerpts from their diaries.)

I can’t be the only one who had this writing teacher, can I? A quick survey of my fellow espresso-drinkers here in Berkeley reveals that most of them received similar advice in their formative writing years.

Unfortunately, from an agent’s point of view, all of the good students following this advice has led to a positive waterfall of submissions in which, well, not a whole lot happens. (See #6, took too long for anything to happen, along with its corollary, the story’s taking time to warm up, as well as #7, not enough action on page 1.) These opening scenes may be beautifully-written, lyrical, human life observed to a T. But from a marketing professional’s perspective — and, despite the fact that agents are essentially the first-level arbiters of literary taste these days, they need to be marketers first and foremost, or they are of little use to those they represent — such an opening translates into
“hard to sell.”

And, to be perfectly frank, most of them simply do not have the time or the patience to read on to see what this story IS about. Remember that burnt-tongued unpaid intern whom I told you to channel last week? She might well be a few minutes late for her lunch date for the sake of a page of gorgeous prose, but if she doesn’t have an inkling of a plot by the end of it, she’s probably not going to ignore her stomach’s rumblings long enough to turn to page 2.

Sorry. As I believe I have mentioned before, this is not how it would work if I ran the universe. If I did, all good writers would be eligible for large, strings-free grants, photocopying would be free, and all of you would be able to share the particularly delicious pain au chocolat I am enjoying at this very moment. So gooey that the bereted gentleman (yes, really) at the wee round table next to me offered a couple of minutes ago to lick the chocolate off my fingers so I could readdress my keyboard in a sanitary manner.

The locals are very friendly, apparently. And very hygiene-minded.

This (the ordinariness of characters, that is, rather than licking chocolate off fingertips) is something that comes up again and again in agents’ discussions of what they are seeking in a manuscript. “An interesting character in an interesting situation” is in practically all of their personal ads on the subject, particularly if the protagonist is not the character one typically sees in such a situation. A female cadet at a prestigious military academy, for instance. A middle-aged stockbroker arrested for protesting the WTO. A veteran cop who is NOTA paired in his last month of duty with a raw rookie. That sort of thing.

So while a very average character may spell Everyman to a writing teacher, an average Joe or Joanna is typically a very hard sell to an agent. As are characters that conform too much to stereotype. (How about a cheerleader who isn’t a bimbo, for a change? Or a coach who isn’t a father figure? A mother who doesn’t sacrifice her happiness for her kids’?) An interesting character is surprising, at some level: could you work an element of surprise onto page 1, the best place to catch an agent’s eye?

One of the best ways of preventing your protagonist from coming across as too average is to raise the importance of what is going on in the opening for that character — which leads us nicely to critique #41, the stakes not being high enough. “Why should I care?” is an extremely common question for screeners to ask — and if the book opens with the protagonist in an emotionally-fraught or otherwise dangerous situation, that question is answered immediately.

Yet another reason, to revisit a topic from a few days ago, that too-typical teenage characters often fall flat for screeners: a character who is trying to be cool and detached from a conflict can often convey the impression that what is going on in the moment is not particularly important. But what’s more engaging than a protagonist who feels, rightly or wrongly, that what is going on before the reader’s eyes is the most important thing on earth right now? When the protagonist wants something desperately, that passion tends to captivate the reader.

It doesn’t always work to open with an honestly life-or-death situation, of course, but far too many novels actually don’t start until a few pages in. Seriously — it’s not at all uncommon to find a terrific opening line for a book on page 4 or page 10, or for scene #2 to be practically vibrating with passionate feeling, while scene #1 just sits there. (Again, I think this is a legacy of the heroic journey style of screenwriting, which dictates that the story open in the protagonist’s everyday reality, before the challenge comes.) Choosing to open with a high-stakes scene gives a jolt of energy to the reader, urging her to keep turning the pages.

Many, many writers want to keep something back, to play their best cards last, to surprise and delight the reader later on. But for very practical reasons, this is not the best strategy in a submission: if this Idol series has made anything clear, it is that you really do need to grab a professional reader’s attention on page 1.

#39, too many generalities, is a trap that tends to ensnare writers who are exceptionally gifted at constructing synopses. In a synopsis, it is very helpful to be able to compress a whole lot of action into just a few well-chosen words; it’s a format that lends itself to a certain amount of generalization. It is tempting, then, to introduce a story in general terms in the book itself, isn’t it?

So why do agents frown upon this practice? Well, it feels to them like the writer is warming up, rather than diving right into the story. The average fiction agent is looking for good, in-the-moment sensations on the first page, visceral details that will transport her quickly to the time and place your characters inhabit. The writer is the travel agent for that trip, and it’s your job to make the traveler feel she is actually THERE, rather than just looking at a movie or a photograph of the events described.

Long-time readers of this blog, chant with me now: too many writers rely too heavily on visuals. Sensual details sell. Or, to put it another way: doesn’t your protagonist have a NOSE?

Which segues very nicely into #60, the details included were not telling. The wonderful short-short story writer Amy Hempel once told me that she believes that the external world her characters inhabit is only relevant insofar as it illuminates the character’s mood or moves the plot along. I’m not sure I would put it quite so baldly, but I think there is a lot to this. If a protagonist is sad, I want to hear about the eucalyptus trees’ drooping leaves; if she is frenetic, my sense of her heartbeat will only be enhanced by the sound of cars rushing by her as she jogs. And, of course, if I’m going to be told about her shoes — which, I must confess, don’t interest me much as objects — they had better reveal something about her character.

Few good short story writers would think to take up space with unrevealing details, but even very good novelists frequently get bogged down in description for its own sake. (See the Idol list for abundant evidence that this is not the best strategy on page 1 of a book.) But if the description is peppered with revealing details, it is hard for it to feel extraneous to what is going on.

For instance, I could tell you that the café I currently inhabit is brightly-lit, with windows stretching from the height or my knee nearly up to the ceiling, small, round tables with red-varnished wooden chairs, and a pastry case full of goodies. A young and attractive barista is making the espresso machine emit a high-pitched squeal. I just held the door for a woman on crutches who was wearing a yellow rain slicker and a green scarf, and four of us here are working on laptops.

That description is accurate, certainly, but what did it tell you as a reader? I could be in virtually any café anywhere in the world; it is probably raining outside, but my reader does not know for sure; you don’t even know the sex of the barista.

But what if I told you that in order to work, I have had to turn my back to the glass doors that keep sending fog-chilled blasts past my skirt as patrons shed their coats in the doorway? That gives you both seasonal detail and information about me: I am concentrating; I am wearing a skirt despite the cold weather; I am not expecting to meet anyone I know here. Or that the barista’s three-day stubble reminds me of a Miami Vice-loving guy I dated in college? That both describes the guy in my peripheral vision and tells the reader my age, in rough terms. Or that I am bouncing my leg up and down at roughly the same rate as the fresh-faced girl in sweats across the room, scowling into a sociology text book? That conveys both caffeine consumption and the fact that I’m near a university.

Get the picture?

Now how much more do you feel you are here with me if I add that the air is redolent with the smell of baking cheese bread, the oxtail soup of the flat-shoed retiree at the table next to me, and the acrid bite of vinegar wafting from her companion’s I’m-on-a-diet salad? What if I mention that I have been moving my cell phone closer and closer to me for the past 15 minutes, lest the clanking of cups, nearby discussions of Nancy Pelosi and the war in Iraq, and vintage Velvet Underground drown out my call to flee this place? What about if I tell you that the pony-tailed busboy currently unburdening the overflowing wall of meticulously-labeled recycling bins — a receptacle for glass, one for plastic, one for newspaper, one for cardboard, one for compostable products — a dead ringer for Bud Cort, of Harold & Maude fame, put down his volume of Hegel to attend to his duties, and ran his beringed hand across the Don Johnson clone’s back as he passed?

All of these details help set a sense of place, and of me as a character (rather nervous, I notice from these details; must be the coffee) within it.

All right, I’ve outstayed the beret-wearing finger-lover, so I am going to venture out onto the street now. My call may come at any minute, and I probably should not drink any more coffee.

Keep up the good work!

PS to Matthew: I answered your (very good) question via that same June comment; I try to respond to questions actually on the site as much as possible, so folks later reading those posts may see the response, too. I’m going to try to write a blog on the subject next week, too, though — I suspect that you’re not the only one in that particular boat!

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Synopsis Wisdom, Part IV: Don’t let resentment hold you back

Hello, readers –

Before I get started on the latest installment in my series on how to write a synopsis for your book (and why it really would behoove you to do so BEFORE the conference is upon us), many thanks to my correspondent (who shall remain nameless) for writing in with the skinny on Flag Day — and a confession that might conceivably raise the eyebrows of the Department of Homeland Security:

”Hello, Anne. Flag Day commemorates the day Betsy Ross (supposedly; many historians are skeptical of the Betsy Ross lore) presented George Washington with the flag he had requested: the first Stars and Stripes. I think it’s a rather lovely design, although I won’t discuss here my opinions of what has/hasn’t been done in its name. And I deny ALL the rumors that Che Guevara is alive and well, lives in my basement, and loves Taco Bell…(Aunt Jean warned me that fish and house guests both start to “turn” after three days…)”

I can believe it all but the part about Taco Bell. But thanks for filling us in.

Back to synopses. For those of you who are still resistant to the idea of writing one before you are specifically asked for it (which, unless you happen to be a masochist who just adores being under time pressure, is an exceedingly bad idea), I have two more inducements to offer you today.

First — and this is a big one — taking the time to work on a synopsis BEFORE you meet with an agent is going to make it easier for you to pitch your book. It helps you think of your baby as a marketable product, as well as a piece of art and physical proof that you have locked yourself away from your kith and kin for endless hours, creating. Even writers desperate to sell their first books tend to forget that it is a product intended for a specific market. Yet any agent who signs you is going to HAVE to summarize the book in order to market it — there is just no way around that.

So by having labored to reduce your marvelously complex story or argument to its basic elements, you will be far less likely to succumb to that bugbear of pitchers, the Pitch that Would Not Die. When you are signed up for a 15-minute pitch meeting, you really do need to be able to summarize your book within just a few minutes — harder than it sounds! — so you have time to talk about other matters, such as whether the agent wants to read the book. Confidentially, anyone who has ever sat down for coffee or a drink with an agent has heard at least one horror story about a pitch that went on for an hour, because the author did not have the vaguest conception what was and was not important to emphasize in his plot summary.

Trust me, you do not want to be remembered for that.

The second inducement: a well-crafted synopsis is something of a rarity, so if you can produce one as a follow-up to a good meeting at a conference, you will look like a star. You would be astonished (at least I hope you would) at how often an otherwise well-written submission is accompanied by a synopsis obviously dashed off at the last minute, as though the writing quality, clarity, and organization of it weren’t to be evaluated at all.

I don’t think that sheer deadline panic accounts for the pervasiveness of the disorganized synopsis; I suspect resentment. I’ve met countless writers who don’t really understand why the synopsis is necessary at all, and thus hate it. Frustrated by what appears to be an arbitrary requirement, many writers just throw together a synopsis in a fatal rush and shove it into an envelope, hoping that no one will pay much attention to it. It’s the first 50 pages that count, right?

Wrong. EVERYTHING you submit to an agent or editor is a writing sample. If you can’t remember that full-time, have it tattooed on the back of your hand.

While frustration is certainly understandable, it’s self-defeating to treat the synopsis as unimportant or (even more common) to toss it out in a last-minute frenzy. Find a more constructive outlet for your annoyance — and make sure that every page you submit is your best writing.

Caught your attention with that constructive outlet quip, didn’t I? In real life, almost nobody is actually brave enough to say to an agent or editor, “No, you can’t have a synopsis, you lazy so-and-so. Read the whole damned book, if you liked my pitch, because, as any fool can tell you, that’s the only way you’re going to find out if I can write is to READ MY WRITING!” ’Fess up — wouldn’t you LOVE to see someone do that at a conference? So that is my mental health assignment for you while working on the synopsis: once an hour, picture the nastiest, most aloof agent in the world, and mentally bellow your frustrations at him at length.

Then get back to work.

I know, it sounds silly, but it will make you feel better to do it, I promise. In fact, I think it would be STERLING preparation for the conference to name your least-favorite sofa cushion The Industry and pound it silly twice a day until it’s time to give your pitch. I’m all in favor of venting hostility on inanimate objects, rather than on human ones. Far better that your neighbors hear you screaming about how hard it all is than that your resentment find its way into your synopsis. Or your query letter. Or even into your verbal pitch.

Yes, I’ve seen all three happen. I’ll spare you the details, but trust me, these were not pretty incidents.

After you have thrown a well-deserved tantrum or two at how difficult it is to catch an agent’s attention, remind yourself that the synopsis DOES serve a purpose within your submission packet: from the requesting agent’s POV, it is the substitute for the rest of the book.

Let me repeat that: in this context, the synopsis is the substitute for the rest of the book.

It bears repeating, because the synopsis an agent or editor asks you to include with your first 50 pp. actually serves a rather different purpose than the synopsis you tuck into the envelope with your query letter. After all, a querying synopsis’ primary purpose is to prompt the agent or editor to ask to see the first 50 pp.; basically, it acts as a proxy pitcher for your book.

But at a conference meeting, YOU are the pitcher, and your goal is to get the agent or editor to ask to see the pages. Now, let’s assume s/he has done so. In the packet of requested materials you send, the synopsis has a new goal: to convince the agent or editor that the rest of the book is every bit as interesting and action-packed as your first 50 pp. It is a marketing tool, intended to get the agent or editor to ask to see the rest of the book.

I hear some of you out there grumbling. “But Anne,” you cry, “isn’t it the job of the first 50 pp. to inspire such interest in the reader that she wants — nay, longs — to read the rest of the book?”

In a word, yes, but not alone. Often, agents (and their screeners; remember, even if an agent asks you to send pages, she is usually not the first person in the building to read them, even if she REALLY liked you) will read the requested chapter(s) first, to see if they like the authorial voice, and then turn to the synopsis. Thus, the synopsis is where you demonstrate to their hyper-critical eyes that you are not merely a writer who can hold them in thrall for a few isolated pages: you have the vision and tenacity to take the compelling characters you have begun to reveal in your first chapter through an interesting story to a satisfying conclusion.

The synopsis, in short, is where you show that you can plot out a BOOK.

For this reason, it is imperative that your synopsis makes it very, very clear how the first 50 pp. you are submitting fits into the overall arc of the book, regardless of whether you are submitting fiction or nonfiction. But don’t forget to make the rest of the book sound interesting, too.

And PLEASE don’t make the very common mistake of not explaining how the plot is resolved. This is not the time to conceal your favorite plot twist, as a delightful surprise for when the agent requests the entire book. Revealing it now will SUBSTANTIALLY increase the probability that the rest of the book will get read, in fact.

Why? Well, agents and editors tend not to be very fond of guessing games (or, as they like to call them, “those damned writer tricks that waste my time.”) So ending your synopsis on a cliffhanger on the theory that they will be DYING to read the rest of the book to find out how it all ends seldom works. Remember, agency screeners are suspicious people: if you don’t show how the plot works itself to a conclusion, they may well conclude that you just haven’t written the ending yet.

Next!

More tips follow on Monday. In the meantime, here comes the tape recording again: for those of you who have not yet done it, there is still time to register for this summer’s PNWA conference. Come along and have a spot of tea with your humble correspondent and talk about your work. If you’re lost about which agents and editors to pick for your appointments, check out my archived blogs for April 26 – May 17 to get the skinny on the agents and May 18 – 26 for the editors.

Hey, while you’re on the website, why not sign up for my Prepping Your Pitch course on June 24th? It’s free to PNWA members, and while it isn’t strictly necessary to pre-register, it would be nice for me and the organizers to know whether to expect 5 people or 500. Makes a difference in how many cookies to buy, after all.

Keep up the good work!

– Anne Mini