Synopsis that is longer than requested

Part of being a professional writer is learning how to write synopses within the page-number limits. If someone asks for one page, and your synopsis is one-and-a-quarter, they probably won't mind. If they ask for two pages, and yours spills a bit over onto a third, again, they probably won't mind.

But a nine-page synopsis when they ask for two to three pages is going to risk auto-rejection.

It's not easy to write an effective synopsis. I often say it's harder than writing the actual book! But it's perfectly possible. The synopsis for my four-book, ~200K-word YA series was 399 words.

When you are looking for an agent, the synopsis is a summary that basically tells the agent that you know how to create a plot and there's not going to be shenanigans in the 11th hour of the book. Like if you are writing a romance and the hero dies in a fiery inferno in the middle of the book? Clearly a problem. Unless the agent asks for something extremely specific length-wise, I wouldn't go longer than four pages (double spaced). Anything longer might show the agent that you don't know how to be to the point, or that your book has too much plot. Either one is not good.

After you are already working with an editor, you can go into much greater detail on a book. The synopsis for book 1 of a series was 2 pages when my agent shopped it. After it sold, I started turning my synopsis in directly to my editor, and they're usually about 8-10 pages long for a 90k book. And that's totally fine. It's just the intro in which you don't want to go overkill.

The thing is, you don't need to cover every plot point in a synopsis. You can say things like, "MC follows a series of clues to discover X is the bad guy," and that's fine.

You want to cover the main high points, but every event doesn't need to go into the synopsis.

If I were you I'd forget about the synopsis for a while and work on your book some more. A lot of editors and agents are going to be put off by the length of it: 250k is far too long.

ave said:

Now, I have run into a bit of a problem. A number of agents and editors want a synopsis that is no longer than say, 2 pages.
But because everything in my story is so intricately connected, if I leave something out of the synopsis, another event down the line, and eventually the ending, will no longer make sense.
My outline, using keywords is about 2-3 pages. I would assume that the synopsis will end up being three times that.

It also doesn't help that my book is an epic fantasy that weighs in at around 250,000 words.

So how do you give an agent a longer synopsis without getting their backs up? Should I explain the situation and ask permission before I submit?

I am also concerned that when agents see the words “Intricate” and “250,000 words” that they automatically assume that it hasn't been pulled off properly- because lets face it, most of the time it hasn't. So explaining my problem may end up creating more problems.

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I feel your pain.

My novel is very long and complex. Any synopsis I attempted usually ran 20-30 pages. (On two different occasions, I actually submitted a synopsis of that length because the length wasn't specified. Give me an inch...Anyway, in one case, I got a request for a full manuscript. In the other, the agent requested a partial and then wanted to see a synopsis of the rest.)

However, that (as you know) is rarely acceptable for a submission to an agent. Most times they do specify a length. (I was very lucky that my agent never requested a synopsis at all.)

So here's what you do.

1) You write the synopsis focused only on the main character and the main conflict. Everything else--everything--is left out.

2) You do include both the external and internal stakes. (Joe must stop a terrorist plot (external); the methods he uses to stop it will mean he becomes a wanted man (internal). You can also view this as public vs private stakes. )

3) You include the set-up, two or three major turning points, the climax, and resolution. Very brief descriptions of each.

4) If something doesn't make sense because of information you had to leave it, you find a way to make it make sense within the context of the synopsis. Think of the synopsis as its own story, within its own conflict arcs. Don't introduce anything to the synopsis-story that will cause confusion.

5) This is harder to do than I've made it sound. But it can be done.

You probably know that the length is already a huge obstacle, but it's not an insurmountable one. Exceptions do happen. But the writing and the story have to be terrific.

If you want to post a draft of a two-page synopsis in SYW, I'll be happy to have a look at it.

Oh, and to answer your questions--don't submit a longer synopsis if they've already specified a length. And don't try to explain anything. Let the work speak for itself. Whenever possible, get pages of actual writing in front of them.

How could I forget? My friend Nicola Morgan, writer, blogger and tweeter extraordinaire, has written a book which she's self-published for Kindle, called Write A Great Synopsis. It's a concise, well-explained, and best of all workable guide to writing synopses, and I think it's very helpful.

In terms of 'how far to break the word count/page number' I would apply the academic standard of 10% either way. More than that and it is noticeably longer or shorter, less than that and they may not even notice it is over.

As an aside... I've often wondered about the 'pages' definition of length. Word count is easy to write to and is fairly standard (1000 words is 1000 words regardless of your formatting) but 'number of pages' is somewhat wooly. 2 pages of double spaced, 12 point courier is around 500 words. 2 pages of single spaced 2 point treefrog (a really comedically small font a friend of mine used to obsess over) is closer to a PhD thesis (but would be unreadable ). So do you assume that the '2 pages' of a synopsis are in the default 12 point arial or times new roman single space that word defaults to or do you format it the same as the publisher/agent guidelines tell you to format the typescript? Just curious...

One thing to remember about a synopsis and the reason you need to keep it short/keep it within guidelines: the longer it is the more likely the agent/editor will get bored mid way through and stop reading. They don't want a detailed description of the intricacies of the plot, they want a quick and simple overview so that can decide if it is the right thing for them.

Read the jacket copy on a published novel. It is a synopsis, one the publisher puts there in order to help sell the book to potential readers. No matter how long the book is, no matter how complex the book is, the jacket synopsis is roughly the same length.

The primary difference between a jacket synopsis and the one you write is that the jacket synopsis doesn't reveal the ending, and yours should.

If you follow this format, make your synopsis just as exciting, and at the same approximate length, you'll do well.

areteus said:

As an aside... I've often wondered about the 'pages' definition of length. Word count is easy to write to and is fairly standard (1000 words is 1000 words regardless of your formatting).

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This actually isn't true. Publishers let writers get away with a word is a word simply because writer over the years failed to understand or follow what word count really means. What concerns publishers is how much space those thousand words use, which translates to page count, which means more or less paper to buy.

Publishers actually count any combination of six spaces and characters as a word. You word count program doesn't do this.

To a publisher, a manuscript "page" is any combination of 1,500 spaces and characters, including the empty white space at the beginning and end of a chapter. Even white space need paper, so you count the spaces there, as well.

This is why standard format is one inch margins all around. Do this, and you get true word count, and true paper count. It's automatic with Courier 12. With Times New Roman, you have to be better at math, but it still works.

Anyway, the logic here is easy. "Encyclopedia" uses more paper than "and", and ten lines of blank space uses the same amount of paper as ten lines filled with words.

Jamesaritchie said:

This actually isn't true. Publishers let writers get away with a word is a word simply because writer over the years failed to understand or follow what word count really means. What concerns publishers is how much space those thousand words use, which translates to page count, which means more or less paper to buy.

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Or maybe you've failed to keep up with the times and don't understand that publishers are perfectly happy with the computer's word count because it now takes them a matter of moments to dump a manuscript into a template and know exactly how many pages the book will be.

When was the last time you sold a book, anyway?

Terie said:

Or maybe you've failed to keep up with the times and don't understand that publishers are perfectly happy with the computer's word count because it now takes them a matter of moments to dump a manuscript into a template and know exactly how many pages the book will be.

When was the last time you sold a book, anyway?

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No, I haven't failed to keep up with the times. I still work in publishing on a regular basis, and the last book I sold was about three months ago. But maybe you don't realize that many publishers still deal with hard copy manuscripts, and when doing so, this all still matters.

But even when dumping into a template, it's still often too little, too late. Yes, the publisher can tell exactly how many pages the book will take by using such a template, and when they do see how many it is, they often have to ask writers who rely on a word count program to make cuts.

One thing that will never, ever change is that word count programs themselves do not tell you how much paper will be used, regardless of current technology. This is one of the primary reasons so many writers have a manuscript that word count says is fine, but that the editor says requires cutting.

Paper is extremely expensive, and publishers don't like giving any more of it than necessary to new writers. If word count told them anything worthwhile, they wouldn't need to dump the manuscript into a template that tells them how much paper the book will use. But word count says little worthwhile, and too many of today's editors simply have no clue about anything except pretty little templates and word count. Such editors are a pain in the ass.

Many publishers have a pretty strict page count for new writers, particularly in some genres, and when a manuscript comes in much above that page count, as it often does when relying strictly on a word count program, that writer is asked to cut, and often isn't even told why.

It's fine to use your word count program, but paper is still paper, regardless of word count programs, silly templates, computers, or anything else. No one has yet invented a technology that allows more words of the same size to use less paper than they used a hundred years ago.The difference is that paper now costs one heck of a lot more than it did even twenty years ago.

I wouldn't think of it in terms of white space. Having a huge bulk of words makes for a ton of editing time, which is just as much a cost as paper and ink.

Jamesaritchie said:

No one has yet invented a technology that allows more words of the same size to use less paper than they used a hundred years ago.

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A good typesetter can adjust margins, kerning, leading and chapter headings to fit words into a much smaller space, without adjusting the font-size one bit. And if the book concerned works well at a particular length, I'd look into this before demanding that the writer cut for length.

This is going to be more of a problem for books which are very specifically genre, I'd expect: for example, it's going to be more of a problem for a book for HM&B than one which is published by Orion.

None of that means that we don't have to watch our word-count: in most genres 125k is pushing it, and 80k would be much better.

ave said:

Interesting. So obviously a 100,000 word novel with a lot of dialogue and thus a lot more white space, will have a higher chance of being cut, than a 100,000 word novel with more action.

I never thought of taking that into account.

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Dialogue can contain a lot of action.

You don't need to take this white-space issue into account at all. Just write your books to the normally-accepted word count, relying on your word-processing program to work out what that is; get your book as good as it can be; and submit it.

James has some very fixed ideas, which many of us sometimes disagree with. That's not to say he's always wrong: but he's definitely not always right.

M. Scott said:

I wouldn't think of it in terms of white space. Having a huge bulk of words makes for a ton of editing time, which is just as much a cost as paper and ink.

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Agreed. It's the words which count. Just get them right, in both quality and quantity, and you'll be fine.