WRITING A BOOK MANUSCRIPT HOW TO

And they don’t want questions-they want answers. Your potential agent or publisher is not a buyer who needs to be lured. Yes, your synopsis should reveal how your story ends.Ī common mistake is to confuse your synopsis with back cover or advertising copy-which is full of teasers and questions designed to lure readers. The point of your synopsis is to reveal the entire story in as few as 500 words, allowing an agent or a publisher to determine whether the premise and approach make it worthy of asking to see the eventual manuscript. You won’t be held rigidly to your synopsis, and many story beats will wind up in different chapters than you predicted.) (Don’t worry - agents and publishers know fiction is organic and stories often take on lives of their own. Need help writing your novel? Click here to download my ultimate 12-step guide.įor FICTION SYNOPSES, summarize the main beats of your story, chapter by chapter. Just remember that each contains valuable training that applies to both. I cover both fiction and nonfiction here, so feel free to jump straight to your genre. I also give you two synopsis templates - one for fiction and one for nonfiction, with real examples of each.

WRITING A BOOK MANUSCRIPT HOW TO

Writing your synopsis can also reveal fatal flaws in your outline, allowing you to make the fix before you invest months in the writing.īelow I detail everything I’ve learned about how to write a synopsis that works for you. You want to craft yours in such a way that it empowers an agent to sell your manuscript to a publisher. Regardless, synopsis writing is crucial to your success.

Getting it wrong can expose even the smallest crack in your foundation. Getting this right can make the writing so much easier.

It’s because an effective, working synopsis should become your foundational document for the writing itself. It’s not just because you must convince an agent or a publisher (in as few as 500 words) that your novel or nonfiction manuscript will succeed in the marketplace. You know writing a book is going to be hard, even grueling.

Writing a book manuscript