The blurb – sell yourself in a paragraph!

A novel’s synopsis is typically expected to be one page long – A4, single spacing sometimes allowed. I’ve seen that some agents and publishers are now looking for the one paragraph synopsis. For me that would be a ‘bah humbug’ moment (see previous blog). But should it be? Can you do an elevator pitch, a Dragon’s Den two minutes, some tell-me-why-I-shouldn’t-kill-you-now final words? In other words, can you quickly justify what you have just spent potentially years putting together? Can you?

The synopsis for a publisher is an art to master so practise on your friends. Then take it one step further because you have the chance to influence another biggie as well!  Assume for a moment that your sample chapters impressed, your synopsis was compelling, your face fitted the current publishing want-list. If you want to live the vision, you can even assume you have an advance in the bank. What else can you do? What else do you need?

How about readers?

If you can do a pitch to sell to a publisher how about having a go at the pitch to sell to the public? You have one paragraph and perhaps a tag line. Think about the back of your book or the flyleaf. What would drag someone in to read your book instead of the new Dan Brown or Booker prize winner? One paragraph. Doesn’t have to tell the ending like your synopsis would – this just has to make your book more interesting than anyone else’s.

Go and stand in the best seller section of Waterstones and read them. Spend hours and just read them. Take notes of what catches your eye and try to ape the style of those that attract you the most. Is it the upbeat sentence endings, the tantalising questions, the possibility of something dark or dirty or kinky or fun? The publisher will know what to write but you should have some control and how better to control than to dictate?

The synopsis

If I could fit my story into a page I wouldn’t have needed the other 300+ would I? A synopsis! Bah humbug. How the hell does anyone craft a synopsis for the first time?

It’s never that hard actually. I always rant at the request but then fall back on reality.  It should be the easiest thing in the world because most authors explain their latest pet to anyone who will listen – friends, at family gatherings, at parties. Just writing down that normal patter had a synopsis ready to go in half an hour. The elevator pitch!

It wasn’t that hard – but nor was it that easy. The premise is fine, one paragraph, one edit and done. But an author never tells random people the ending. Never reveals the key twists, the characters’ difficult relationships. But a publisher only wants to read three full chapters and then expects to know how the rest of the book develops in only one page more. Completely. Utterly. Conclusively.

That’s usually more tricky. Five pages long. First edit down to four. Then three (and a half, unfortunately).

I mentioned my professional life in a previous blog. Another role with writing at its heart. Reports, reviews, succinct summaries of complex issues for the time-poor. I’d been so busy focussing on my writing life I felt like a Homer ‘Doh!’ moment was appropriate. I stopped looking at my synopsis as a book and saw it as a report to be summarised. Extraneous text vanished, pared to the bone. Whole paragraphs fell beneath my professional sword.

And there it was. A story on a page.

I noticed in my research that one agent was only expecting a paragraph of synopsis. ONE paragraph!

Bah humbug!