Ah, the dreaded blurb so small you have to condense your entire book into a single sentence. In the literary world, this is often referred to as the elevator pitch, stemming from trying to sell your book to someone with the same amount of time as riding in an elevator, but without the uncomfortable staring. How do you do that when your book is something like 80k – 120k words long, has multiple main characters, a dozen supporting characters, and a plot along with two subplots?

First off, let’s think of how many words we get to use for our sentence. At the very most, twenty-five. Any more than that, we’re asking for a headache by creating a run-on sentence.

Second, we now examine the overall plot and break it down into three parts:

1. The Main Character
2. The Overall Conflict
3. The Villain

Let’s take the example of a book titled Fallen From the Stars:

A human with no memory tries to adapt while dealing with prejudice from the elves as the village prepares for the arrival of the Bloody Baron.

These parts can be in any order, but typically, you want to start it with the main character. The human (Main Character) with no memory (the Overall Conflict – Man vs. Himself) tries to adapt while dealing with prejudice from the elves (Villain) as the village prepares for the arrival of the Bloody Baron (Villain).

The key point to summarization is always write it about the plot of your story. With that in mind, writing a one-sentence, a paragraph, or a full-page proposal shouldn’t prove too challenging.

Happy Writing!