It may also be used to sell a series or prove you can come up with a sequel. The synopsis may also be used later as a selling tool in order to win over other people or departments who will be involved in the process of producing your book. If a publisher or agent enjoys your sample chapters and is excited by your synopsis, he or she will ask for more. If your sample chapters are a demonstration of your writing ability, your synopsis is a demonstration of your ability to put together your content in a way that will draw the reader through the story and satisfy them at the end. Why? And why do writers hate the process so much? Shouldn’t we enjoy having the chance to demonstrate how brilliant and exciting our plot is?Ī synopsis is really just a summing up of the main plot points of your novel and the journey of your main characters. Writing the synopsis for your novel is a task generally loathed by writers, yet it is an essential part of selling your book. Here’s a very informative post about word counts from the experts at Skylark. I would love to know if there are any more resources on this area, so please get in contact if you know of any so I can add them to my links! Tracy’s interviews with children’s agents and publishers will give you the low down you need before submitting. This post by writer American Chuck Sambuchino is a great guide to required word lengths for American markets, children’s and adults’.Īnother blog from across the pond with useful advice on word counts. Examples include How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, Angel Blood by John Singleton, Numbers by Rachel Ward and the brilliant Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld. Increasingly, these books are appealing to adults who are not put off by length. Publishers will usually ask for a synopsis and the first two or three chapters.Īt least 30,000, going up to 100,000. Derek Landy, JK Rowling, Jean DuPrau and Charlotte Haptie are all great writers for this age group. Established authors can get away with more. (The audio versions narrated by Miranda Richardson are brilliant, by the way!) Series books for this age range are popular and include Beast Quest, Rainbow Magic and Cows in Action.Ĭalled middle grade in the US, these can be 20,000 to 75,000. The Horrid Henry books by Francesca Simon are a good example. Sometimes called early readers or chapter books, these books bridge the gap between picture books and novels with plenty of line drawings within the text and can be 6-15,000 words long. The whole text is usually submitted for this length book. You won’t be expected to provide illustrations – the publisher will match you with an artist (unless you are one yourself!). Classics include The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney. Less is more as the pictures do the talking. You will only have an approximate guide but at least you won’t be wildly off course. If it’s illustrated, adjust the word count by the percentage you feel the pictures take up. If they don’t specify a word count, and many don’t, take a look at some of their books in your local library and do a quick word count by counting three lines, dividing by three to get an average, multiplying by the number of lines on the page and then by the number of pages. Before submitting, make sure you check the publisher’s website. The reason there isn’t a definitive list is that publishers vary considerably in their requirements and so you will see that the range is large within each category. Following on from my blog post on which publishers are accepting unsolicited manuscripts for children, I thought I’d put together something else I had difficulty finding on the web – a guide to word counts.
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