It better have a good synopsis

I was telling a friend that I was almost finished with my book, and after expressing interest in reading it, he said:

it better have a good synopsis or whatever you call the overview of the book

My response was, "Yeah, of course," though what I wanted to say was:

no, I'm going to go with a bad synopsis, I think that will sell more books.

Of course, the real problem is; how do you know you have a good synopsis? I wrote the book, and have read it about a dozen times at least, and I'm still not sure what to include in the synopsis, and what angle to take. I guess the problem is that each reader will probably find something different appealing.

I did find this article on writing a book synopsis, and I think I followed the five points...okay, I didn't exactly follow point 5 "Tell us the ending," but I heavily hint at it.

So this is the synopsis I have written:

Struggling musician Ed Fisher doesn’t care for fellow musician Aleck Sorenson. Sorenson has it all, good looks, talent, and fame, but that’s not why Ed doesn’t like him. He doesn’t like him because he’s a jerk. A jerk that nearly cost Ed’s band a gig.
So he’s not going to talk to him, he’s not going to go near him.
That’s the plan, but few plans go the way you want them to. And when it turns out the FBI is even more interested in Aleck than Ed is, Ed faces a dilemma. A dilemma that’s not helped when he discoverers he might be falling in love with Aleck.

Comments

Grammarly - Inconsistent punctuation fix bug

As I wrote in my previous post ( Grammarly - I think I like it ), I've been using Grammarly to proof my book. I'm still happy with it, but I did discover a problem it has with certain punctuation imported in a Word .docx file. One of Grammarly's features is a fix for 'Inconsistent punctuation.' It was upset that my files (which were .docx files exported from Adobe InDesign ) contained a mix of straight and curly apostrophe and quotation marks. I think the problem is that internally InDesign fixes these issues in your original text on the fly, but if you export the text it sends out the original formatting rather than changing the punctuation. I figured that making this change in Grammarly was a good idea, but what I discovered is that after doing this, there were instances where single apostrophes and quotation marks were moved, particularly around a 'word' or if I had a single apostrophe next to quotation marks: "And then he shouted 'Fire!&#

Grammarly - I think I like it

I’d seen the ads for Grammarly, a tool that promised to help me “ Compose bold, clear*, mistake-free writing with Grammarly’s AI-powered writing assistant, ” but I was skeptical. Maybe I didn’t want to spend the $139.95 a year it costs (there is also a $29.95 a month option.) [* that sentence came from Grammarly’s website, and Grammarly suggested changing the word clear.] This week I finally tried the free version, just out of curiosity, and after using it I was intrigued enough to get the paid version, a nd though it’s only been a few days, I like it. I’ve been running my book through it, and while we have a lot of disagreements (primarily over Unclear Antecedents), it has found enough spelling errors I had missed, and grammar and punctuation mistakes, to make me feel that it's worth the price. Pros • It finds spelling mistakes and grammar issues that I missed using other tools, and with multiple proof-readings. • It’s easy to use, though performance c

Debugging Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing - Internal Error

I’ve been setting up my next book in Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP.) This is the second book I have published through KDP, and it’s a reasonably straightforward process. I first uploaded a draft of the book and cover months ago to check that I had the formatting right. This is something I recommend doing; if your text layout goes into the trim area, or has some other problem, the upload will be rejected. You want to make sure your design is right before you finish the layout of your whole book. Anyway, I just finished the manuscript and went to upload it and the updated cover. When I did, I got an Internal Error for both the cover and the book. That confused me, as I hadn't made significant changes to the formatting. I tried uploading the previous version of the text and cover—the ones that had uploaded successfully some months ago—and got errors on those too! I tried some different things uploading different versions and managed at one point to get the original cover to

Just Another Writer's Journal

Search This Blog