How to Write a Chapter Synopsis

Video Transcript

"In doing a book proposal for a nonfiction book, you get a good title page, you get the table of contents, then you have to give them a synopsis, a real quick overview of what the book is about. Now, the first thing you want to do is, in this one, I wrote just kind of like a one page synopsis, and that would be how you would explain the book if you were sitting down in a restaurant and somebody said, "tell me what your book is about," and you only have like one minute to tell them. That's what this is. And so, you do this real quick overview. This would be like a 30,000 feet overfly of it. Then you go down, and remember your table of contents page, then you go through and you take each chapter and you write a four or five sentence synopsis of each chapter. So, I've given basically a two or three paragraph overview of the whole book, and then I go through and do just a couple of sentences on each chapter. Now these are very important because they can real quickly get the essence of the book and you might have, there's, in this chapter, we are going to tell you the four things that you need to do for such and such, or in this chapter we are going to look at the five myths that people often have towards this issue that we're talking about. So, they can see that you have really done your homework on them. This synopsis gives them the ability to real quickly know the content of the book and also get a feel at the heart that this is what they want to publish."