How I wrote my synopsis

This is just totally awesome and I must share it now. Disney Princesses in real life. I know; it’s making it’s way around the internet, but I still love it!

Anyway, the real thing that matters is the synopsis. That’s why you’re reading this, right?

I know that I said I would send out my manuscript by New Years. That isn’t happening. Why? Mainly because I need to use the school printers since my printer is really sloppy. My dad was there and the school ran out of paper, so I never had a chance to print it before I left. That being said, I will have everything ready to go by next year and I will submit something somewhere. (Okay, I’ll submit Just Trust Me to Tor.com.) Won’t get a rejection letter but it’s a start.

Another big reason why I didn’t submit my manuscript this year is I decided to rewrite my synopsis, and it turned out much better. My novel is 88,000 words; my original synopsis was 9 pages. The publisher wants 3-10. Then I saw this tip about how the best synopses have two sentences per chapter. (It was written by a publisher for the publishing house I am submitting too. BONUS!) I worked out the math and this is what I came up with each chapter is roughly ten pages.

Keep in mind that I write in Times New Roman at single spacing. When I refer to pages, I am in font size 12. (Though I normally write in 13. Not like you care.) So you want it close to that with these numbers if you decide to copy me.

So, how did I write my synopsis?

–I went through my manuscript and, every ten pages, I wrote two sentences about what happened.

–Since I already had a nine page synopsis written, I marked all of what I considered “important” sentences. The ones that I liked the sound of the best. Next time I’ll just write the sentences right in my outline.

–I combined all the sentences into one document and edited. At this point, so long as I did not add more than a few words, I allowed longer sentences to break into shorter sentences. The idea was to keep the word count close to the same, not necessarily the sentence count.

–I allowed myself one well-integrated paragraph that gave background information, since I’m writing in a different world than we live.

That’s it. If you want, I can post what I’ll be sending out as an example. Keep in mind (this is my disclaimer) that I have not ever been accepted / been published, and I don’t know if it is going to work. But this is what I did, so it might give you an idea of where to start. I realize that there isn’t a lot out there about writing synopses, especially in writing books.

Oh, and if you care, my final page count was about 3 pages, so I’m happy.