Submission-Ready Course - Session Two
This session is all about the synopsis and timing of your submission. We'll also be doing a wee exercise on comparative titles and authors.
Hi everyone,
I hope the first session was helpful! If you missed it, you can still have a look at it here: Session One.
This week's session is all about the (dreaded) synopsis and a discussion on timing (both in terms of when you know when you're ready to submit, and the best time of year for submitting to agents/publishers).
There will be an exercise about finding comps at the end of this post. Comps are the comparative titles we use to give an idea of the genre and market for your book.
The Synopsis
Synopses have a nasty habit of intimidating writers. Perhaps you worry that people will judge you for a subpar synopsis when you know your book is great.
Well, I'm here to tell you that, yes synopses are important, but by no means (to me, at least) the most important part of your submission. Synopses are a very small part of the journey and aren't really used by anyone apart from an agent and/or editor. (I don't ever send synopses to editors when I'm submitting an author's manuscript.) They're useful in that they give me an idea of where the story is going, and the twists and turns along the way. To be perfectly honest, most people aren't great at writing them1, myself included. They're tricky! I'd much rather the book itself is great, rather than reading the most polished synopsis of all time, then not loving the book.
So now that we know an amazing and mind-blowing synopsis is not the be all and end all, let's work on what's important: writing one that does the job without making you feel inadequate and/or taking too much time. (We all have better things to do.)
So how do we write one?
A synopsis is a summary of the book, in a concise form. Ideally, this should be one to two pages (absolute maximum). For non-fiction, you could potentially merge your synopsis with the introduction of your proposal (and get away with a longer synopsis!) but this may not work in your favour. Being able to distil your book down to a few paragraphs is a really useful skill to hone.
Your writing sample will showcase your writing style so there’s no real need to do that in your synopsis. Keep it simple. There's no need for linguistic or stylistic embellishments2. A synopsis should be written in the third person point of view, even if the book is first person.
There's no need to name every single character, or to describe the action in minute detail. Broad strokes are what you're aiming for here. If you're the type of writer who plots a novel before writing it, then by all means use your post-it notes / spreadsheet / Word doc as a starting point.
You should follow the order of events and structure of your book. (It's also a useful exercise to see whether your structure is balanced.)
Spoilers! This is your choice but it’s often useful for an agent to see the twists, and to know the ending upfront. For non-fiction, that does mean that ideally you will have an idea of the insights you are planning/hoping to have when writing your book. It’s absolutely fine if these change during the writing, it happens all the time.
What if your novel is too experimental to summarise in a straight-forward synopsis? Write about the ideas and themes and explain your inspiration and choices.
If you need more help, Jericho Writers have a brilliant guide online.
Timing
When do you know your book is ready for submission?
A novel takes time – think of it like building a house (yes, I stole this from my pal, the brilliant V.E. Schwab3). You need your foundations, your walls, then your essential internal functions like water and electricity, and then you can start decorating and making it pretty. Beautiful painting on unstable foundations will not make it a habitable house. So before you go and make your sentences pretty (painting), you need to assess the bigger pieces of your narrative (foundation and walls). It's also helpful to have a break before tackling a new edit. I'd suggest a few weeks at the very least.
Your manuscript won’t be perfect (there’s no such thing!) but you need to make sure you have interrogated it as critically and objectively as you can. Is it really as good as you can possibly make it? If you notice any problems, fix them – because other readers will notice them too.
Agents rarely re-read a submission, so do make sure your manuscript is genuinely ready to share before sending. Don’t send something unfinished, unedited, formatted poorly or ‘just about’ good enough. If you don’t treat your submission with the same care and professionalism you would a job application, you're missing a trick.
Is there a good or bad time to send a submission to an agent?
Book Fair times: if the agent you're querying attends book fairs, odds are they'll be busy — and I don't just mean the three or four days of a Fair. (See this post on Book Fairs.) An agent will be in “book fair mode” a good month and a half before a book fair and for at least a fortnight after. So sending anything in September/October (Frankfurt Book Fair) and February/March (London Book Fair and/or Bologna Book Fair) may not be the best idea.
The last three weeks of December also tend to be no-gos. Everyone is exhausted and tying up loose ends before the holidays; some people won't be keen to add extra work to their schedules before the new year.
Summer can go either way. There can be more downtime for reading, but a lot of us take holidays and/or attend literary festivals etc at this time of year.
Most of us are working our way through overflowing inboxes, fuelled by too much caffeine… so in some ways it doesn’t really matter when you submit, because we will only rarely have a chance to look at your submission the week you send it.
This is a roundabout way to say that as long as a submission inbox is open, feel free to submit. Yes there are better and worse times, but we all have hundreds of queries in our inboxes so it may not have a huge impact on your odds of getting a faster response4.
Exercise
This exercise will include a FIELD TRIP! (If you're able to take one, that is.)
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to go visit your local bookshop5. Walk around the aisles and try to find the shelf where your book would fit. Which part of fiction or non-fiction would it sit in? Maybe have a look at the exact spot where your name would fit alphabetically if that helps you visualise it? Once you've found your shelf, the one that would become your book's home, we can start our little exercise.
Find books similar to the one you’re writing from these bookshelves. You can ask the bookseller for help if you like. I recently did this with a bunch of writers at Portobello Bookshop and it was immense fun. Look through most of the books on this shelf, start a wee pile and continue refining it until you have three or four books that you feel fit the bill. You'll be using some of these titles in the exercise later on.
Now, the reason I'm making you go to a bookshop for this isn't just to get you to buy books (though it is totally a side quest you should do for extra points!). I'm mostly suggesting this because when we talk about “genre” and “comps”, you may be a bit baffled at first. But ultimately, what we are talking about in practical terms is this: we want to know where your book would be shelved in a bookshop. This helps us know which editors to pitch to, and the sales potential of your book.
The great thing is that bookshops usually tend to stock books that a) sell well, b) are relatively new and current. This means that the lovely bookshop staff have done half your job for you—because that's exactly what you're looking for!
When you're done, replace the books you're not going to buy (in the exact spot they belong!6) and if you're choosing the side quest, buy the ones you fancy reading. Then, go back to your desk or the local coffee shop and start making a list. This list will be influenced by your bookshop trip and will probably feature at least one of the books you picked out but we'll use the rest elsewhere in your submission.
The category/genre of your book (your book might fit firmly in one genre or sit between two, e.g. historical fantasy).
Two comparative authors from books you chose, or authors you may already be familiar with. These are authors who have had several books published (or one highly publicised/successful one) and have a career that looks like the one you are aiming to have. The idea is that readers who love these two authors would also love to read your book specifically. The “specifically” is quite important here. It’s not that others wouldn't enjoy it, it’s that your book would be specifically suited to these readers. For example, some authors on my auto-buy list at the moment are Noreen Masud for non-fiction and Bryan Washington for fiction — I will read everything they write. If I see them used as comps on a submission, I will AUTOMATICALLY be intrigued because they are exactly my jam7.
Three comparative titles for your book. But, wait! Don't rush this, because I'm not merely asking for the three books you chose in the bookshop. This time, I'd love you to think about:
One that’s similar plot-wise (fiction) or theme-wise (non-fiction) — this might well be one of the books you picked out.
One that’s similar tone/style-wise (for non-fiction, think journalistic, or science-based or lyrical).
One that might feature a similar protagonist or setting or vibe (fiction) or a similar ethos but isn't a straight-forward fit (non-fiction) — aka the wild card comp!
Weird, right? I know!8 But there is method in my madness, I promise. Standard comps aren't actually as useful as they appear to be. Let me explain.
When I get queries, I often see a list of comps that are essentially the exact same book in ever so slightly different guises. This isn't necessarily a bad thing — it does tell me that the book has an established market and that you know what it is.
What these comps don't tell me though, is how that book would stand out in said market. In a crowded market, with hundreds and hundreds of books being published every year, this is more important than ever.
Some left-field comps let me know that you read widely, think about your work critically and know how to get an agent's attention.
If this is all a bit confusing, let me give you some examples of comps I have used for books I'm pitching:
If Muriel Spark wrote the TV show Dexter: This one might sound weird, but it did exactly what I needed it to do to describe a satirical book in which a Scottish woman's unconventional response to the housing crisis is to punish all landlords. I wanted to give the idea of Spark's mordant wit and her targeting of the powers-that-be. At the same time, I wanted to give a sense of the plot — a character who commits terrible crimes but we can't help rooting for them. This combination provides an intriguing contrast that catches people's attention. Of course, I also used My Sister The Serial Killer, Death of a Bookseller and A Certain Hunger down the line in my email as the more straightforward comps (and the books which I would have picked up in a bookshop to sit alongside it), but this is the one I used in my elevator pitch.9
The Crucible meets The Secret History: my point with this comp was to give the idea this is a dark academia book about female obsession but also to hint that all may not be as it seems. The Crucible is by far one of my favourite plays and I find it so clever in the way it that it uses the reader's assumptions and prejudice. It was the perfect comp for this book (and also, a fascinating book to reread and reassess post-MeToo). Of course, as above, I used a more specific set of comps later in my email which went along the lines of “For fans of the witchy history of Weyward by Emilia Hart, the lust and female obsession in Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth and the claustrophobia and exploration of fate and power in The Cloisters by Katie Hays.” This highlighted the market — you'll note I have used comps that aren't obviously the same so I have added little descriptions to point out relevant aspects. I will go over why I did that later on.10
By asking you to list all these comps, I'm hopefully helping you assess your book critically and situate it in the current market. Not to spoil my own course, but the work that we do in these exercises will be used further down the line. So, even if I'm going at it in a roundabout way, please trust me!
I hope that's all clear and the bookshop trip was fun! Let me know in the comments if you have any questions — there are no silly questions. Publishing can be opaque at the best of times, so if there's anything I can do to make it more transparent, I'm happy to help!
Coming up next week is a discussion on writing your query letter, specifically your biography and elevator pitch!
Until next time, keep on writing!
Caro
And if you are one of these rare people who is somehow good at it, congratulations, we're all jealous of you!
Otherwise known as the No Metaphors in Synopsis rule. See it. Say it. Sorted.
She writes a brilliant monthly newsletter filled with craft advice and updates so definitely worth a read — subscribe to The Visible Life of V.E. Schwab.
I know this is awful to hear but I don't think as an industry we have found a solution to the massive influx of submissions since 2020. We are doing our best but for example, we get hundreds every month. We're all constantly guilt-ridden about lengthy response times. If you have a solution, please share!
Of course, feel free to go to your library instead if that works better for you.
Please don't give more work to booksellers who are the best people! One day you will want to do an event or a signing there so make sure to be friendly!
This is why I represent authors who write in the same space as these two authors and have used them as comps in submissions!
I am incredibly contrary and like to do things my own way, so no surprise there.
This will be published in 2026 and has not been announced yet, so more on this soon!
This is sooo helpful, Caro. One question when thinking about memoir. I find bookshops so frustrating as often memoir gets lobbed in with biography, even in biggies like Waterstones. My local bookshop is better in this regard in that it has a shelf that is memoir, in its broad sense, but also a literary criticism shelf where you might find the likes of Maggie Nelson, etc, but I suspect on that shelf the critical component comes before the personal narrative component. Thinking back to your first course, the 70 is the criticism, the 30 the memoir: the likes of Olivia Laing.
What about those memoirs that are led by the personal narrative, and thread in literary criticism, film criticism, cultural criticism, psychology, etc, more as part of the thinking and insights around the personal story?
So this question is in relation to the first part of your exercise - which shelf in a bookshop would your book fit in? Noreen Masud's book works because it has that nature edge, and so can sit on the nature table (as well as be thrown in with biography) and can be submitted to lots of nature writing prizes - but many memoirs fall between two stools.
Would you advise in the proposal that a writer should make more of a point of the 30 per cent component in terms of placement, even if it is a bit nebulous, ie woven in with the personal story, particularly in the current climate of memoir taking a bit of a nose dive? Or indeed if it should be made more of a point of in the book itself? One comparative title to my book is Joanna Biggs: A Life of One's Own. But in my book the lives of women writers are part of a bigger picture that includes film and fiction and also - my relationship with my mother. What I mean is that in Biggs' book she has nine female writers, each life dissected and forming a chapter - really neat. The current idea for my book isn't like this at all. The chapters are theme or psychologically led, and the cultural references woven into that.
Thanks so much, Caro. I'm at exaactly this point in my Memoir. Your clarity, humour and goodwill is just what I need to keep me at my desk. Off to the bookshop later, too. Hopefully the comps will be a-swirling :)