There are good reasons to summarize your novel.
Yes, an agent or an editor really expects you, in your book proposal, to compress your novel, no matter its length, to only three pages.
Impossible? Welcome to the world of professional novelists.
A clients whose middle-grade novel I’d edited asked me to check her proposal before she sent it to an agent. All was going well until I came to her synopsis.
Based on her work’s 60,000 words, she’d done considerable compression. But the synopsis still took 1,900 words.
So I checked what the agent requests. She asks for “about three pages,” which my client interpreted as single-spaced pages.
I emailed the agent to confirm she meant double-spaced pages (implying 750 to 900 words) and how strict she is with synopsis length.
She said, “shorter is always better, as you, an overworked editor, know.” Then she revealed why a synopsis is so important to an agent or acquisitions editor:
I really just need to see in the synopsis that:
1) the character needs something
2) her actions are driving the story forward, and
3) she finally brings the story to a satisfying conclusion.
“I do prefer shorter,” she says. But most important, she says, “I just want to see that the author has a workable plot.”
Of course you can’t include each element. If you could, there’d be no need to write 60,000 or 75,000 words. But if you want your full novel published, you must find a way to express its plot in something close to three pages.
At least now you know what an agent wants to see.
