The Summary And The Suffering

Writing back cover blurbs isn’t on my list of favorite things to do; I’d rather write a 100k-word novel than a 150-word teaser. Why? Let me count the reasons…

The purpose of a back cover copy is to snag a reader’s attention and make them want to read your book. For an author, that’s an immediate powder keg of pressure, right there. The text must grab readers with powerful, captivating words, avoid spoilers, introduce the story in roughly 150 words, and finish on a cliffhanger that leaves readers salivating for more.

Sounds easy? It’s not. I wrote about 80 versions of the blurb for Guardians of Caledon. The teaser for Hindsight, recently released to mailing list subscribers, was readable in only nine drafts (practice makes better, perhaps?), but that doesn’t mean it’s done. It will undergo multitudinous rewrites and tweaks between now and when it ends up on the book, and I’ll still be wondering whether I could have improved it after publication.

(As I’m typing this blog, I’ve added another paragraph to Hindsight’s blurb—a potential replacement for the third paragraph, but I can’t decide which version is best. I will agonize over it for weeks.)

Questions constantly plague a writer. Am I telling a great story well? Will anyone want to read this? Am I just pretending to know what I’m doing? Now tell the writer to compose a back cover blurb, and a hundred different questions add to the uncertainty in her head. Am I telling enough? Am I telling too much? Where should I stop? Why does this teaser sound so dull?

A lot of authors clam up and/or stutter when asked to summarize their plot. Writing summaries is no easier, except that the pressure expands over weeks of drafting, rather than having to answer within 20 seconds and feel like an idiot for years.

Any writer seeking an agent must master the art of summarizing, because agents, too, demand summaries. Often in one sentence. Then there’s the synopsis, where the author gets to sum up her entire plot in one page and spoil the ending. Those are challenging, too. What to include? What not to include? The entire story is important—right? But I can’t include everything, or it won’t fit on the page!

Summarizing the book in any form is way more difficult than writing the book.

Like any other writing project, the first step is to write something. Anything. Even if it’s stupid. You can’t fix a blank page, so put some sort of gibberish on it so you can rework it. For Hindsight's teaser, I wrote a list of key story elements, and then summarized them in a few sentences that would accomplish the aforementioned herculean requirements.
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Once those sentences are in place, you tweak and scrap and rewrite until you produce something you think might work. You slap it on the back cover. And then you hope it will entice readers to open your book!