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How to Write a Synopsis for Your Novel: Overcoming the Disconnect

January 31, 2022

book, literature, marketing, publishing, writing

As a writer, I’ve had to write a synopsis for every novel I’ve written. Some of them were written for a literary agent or publisher and were lengthy, others were just a blurb meant to explain what the book was about. In any case, I had to find a way to drastically condense the narrative so that it would fit the given spatial constraints.

I bet you’ve been there yourself, as a writer.

You’ve struggled, perhaps even agonized for hours, days, weeks trying to come up with the perfect text that would summarize your novel. So, here’s a little secret:

It’s impossible.

Nobody can ever fit a narrative requiring the length of a novel in a paragraph, page, or even ten pages. If that were the case, it’s self-evident that the novel wouldn’t exist. Why writing 80,000 words when you can express the same thing in 1000?

The reason a synopsis can never be perfect is based on this. However, with this out of the way, we could perhaps rephrase the question and ask: How to write a synopsis for a novel, making it the best it can be?

This is the topic of today’s post. As the title suggests, in order to learn how to write a synopsis for a novel – in a way that serves its purpose – we must learn how to overcome a certain disconnect; a paradox, caused by the inherent nature of a novel.

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What Is an Intended Audience?

March 29, 2021

Writing

art, book, intended audience, literature, marketing, publishing, writing

I often refer to “intended audience” in my posts, somewhat assuming we all know what it is. And it’s partly true that most of us have a vague idea. But the proverbial devil is in the details, and in this case understanding what an intended audience is – and why you should care as a writer – can make a hell (no pun intended) of a difference.

Let’s start with the vague idea most of us have about this concept that every author should know about. So, what is the intended audience of a book?

It’s the kind of reader expected to read the book.

And so, we might say that the intended audience of romance fiction is not really upper-class professors of philosophy – though, you never know – but, say, lower-middle-class, middle-aged women.

All this is extremely generic – we haven’t reached the… devil yet – and very superficial. It mostly revolves around marketing considerations, in the sense that it offers an estimate on who is likely to buy a given book.

But the most intriguing aspects of establishing an intended audience have to do with artistic considerations instead, and they are much more complex. Crucially, they are also the most useful for a writer to know, and that’s precisely what I’ll share with you in this post.

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Optimal Word Count: Dos and Don’ts

January 9, 2019

Writing

narrative, publishing, word count, writing

If you take a look around you, you’ll discover we’re obsessed with measuringFor more on this, take a look at my article on measuring success. Your camera is this many megapixels, your phone has this many gigabytes of RAM. It’s no surprise that texts – novels, essays, and blog articles – fall victim to the same process. But what is an optimal word count for a given text?

In today’s article I’ll… Well, let’s be unusual and start from the end: I’ll eventually give you some tips on how to calculate the optimal word count for your novel (though probably it won’t be what you expect). But before that, I will talk a bit about word counts.

I’ll explain why I think optimal word counts are overrated. Furthermore, I’ll show you why becoming preoccupied with having the “right” word count for your novel might be counterproductive.

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