In Summary
The summary/back book blurb is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of writing a novel, it is the point at which you must describe your entire novel using generally less than five hundred words. A proper summary, which is occasionally requested by literary agents which includes giving away all the dirty details is generally a bit longer, spanning an entire page in length but is no less difficult to do.
What elements are important enough for inclusion in this back of the book blurb, what will make the most amount of people want to read it, and more importantly what’s going to convince a literary agent to pick me over the next person?
These are the questions that plague authors facing this particular part of the writing process. I’ve still got quite a bit of work to go before I’ve completed this current draft and can start on draft 3, but I know where the book is going so I figured it would be better to get a jump on this part of the process now, and not put it off until the very end.
In general I keep a summarized version of the novel on hand when I start the initial writing process, all of the important details of what should be included in the completed version, but this is usually a rough draft version of a summary. More often than not it’s full of more questions than answers, things I need to figure out before I begin writing and things that can afford to wait until later. While the information contained in this initial summary could be ultimately beneficial to be, it’s not exactly what you’d want to give to a literary agent hoping to see a summary of what happens throughout the book.
Ultimately what should make the cut in what you put on the back cover blurb should be only the most interesting bits. The bits that would draw readers in. I suggest for this part you run your back cover blurb with as many people as you can. Trusted friends and family members, people you know are going to tell you the truth, because it’s important that they find it interesting. All the better if you can interest someone who’s a self proclaimed ‘non-reader’ or someone who admits they don’t read all that much. If you can pique their interest, you might just be able to pique an agents.
