Here's what you need for a strong novel submission package that'll stand out to agents and publishers.

Want even more Good Story Company content? Become a member! Get access to tips, workshops, handouts, resources and videos for writers of all levels—all for less than your Netflix subscription.

Novel Submission Video Transcript

Hello. This is Mary Kole with Good Story Company. And today, we're talking about novel submission.

Now, when you're submitting a novel, whether it's to an agent or to a publisher, you will need a couple of very important things. First of all, query letter, which everybody is very, very interested in hearing about. You can sign up on the Good Story website, goodstorycompany.com for a 27-page submission resource which details everything that I have to say about submission, about query letters, about best practices, all of that. Available for free when you sign up for our email newsletters, so you can pause this video, go sign up for that, and come back because it contains a lot more than I'm able to fit into this video, all about submission of any kind. But this video is specific to novel submission, so you're gonna need a query letter and I have a lot of videos and a lot of other materials on query letters as well.

You're gonna need a synopsis. I have fewer materials on synopses because everybody actively hates them and I do, too. And there's just no great shortcut to doing them. You just have to sit down, and write your synopsis, and just struggle through it.

And then, finally, the novel itself. Now, it's very important to have a complete manuscript when you are getting ready to submit a novel because agents and publishers will want to consider the entire project, rather than a couple of very promising opening chapters. If you don't have the project finished... The first thing they will ask if they are interested is to see the whole thing. And if you cannot furnish that, you should not be going out on submission yet. You should be putting your energy toward finishing the project, so get your manuscript ready. And then, if you haven't yet written your submission material, the next thing to do after you have your manuscript, and it should be critiqued by a beta reader, maybe a critique group, maybe a freelance editor, revise to the full extent of your ability to do so. You have that manuscript.

Now, the query letter and the synopsis are summaries. The query letter is aimed more toward pitching the sales strengths and everything that's juicy and wonderful about your manuscript. The synopsis is more of a dry document that features all of the plot, all of the character development. Your query will want to hit upon a bunch of different points.

First of all, if you are querying a specific agent or a specific publisher, personalization of the query is always important if you have it. For example, I'm querying you because I saw on Manuscript Wish List that you're really looking for novels that have a friendship hook, for example. So think of your themes in your novel and now, we want to rebrand those as sales hooks. It can be a little bit difficult to think about your novel as something that has sales hooks and yourself as doing selling because it doesn't necessarily come naturally to a lot of writers, especially when it comes to talking in that way about the book of their heart, something that they've spent so much creative energy on. But that is what an agent or publisher will think of when they're considering your book, so the personalization.

And then, if you have a logline, which is distilling your story down to one or two sentences, maybe a meets comparison. It's "Jurassic Park" meets "Elf," something that really captures the essence of your story in one or two sentences. That could be at the top of your query letter with the personalization as well. And then two or three paragraphs that describe your main character, what their story is, how it can be encapsulated in terms of the themes that they go through, or the things that they have to do, or the things that they struggle with, and then the main plot points that you want to include in the query letter. I would include the climax in there if at all possible, the crux upon which the entire novel turns, the core of the story. I would include whether it has a romantic element, whether it has a genre like thriller, paranormal. Anything like that that will help an agent or a publisher know where to contextualize your project. A little bit about yourself, your bio paragraph. If you don't have any writing credits, there's no need to apologize. Just maybe a little flavor of who you are, any professional experience that you have that might be at all relevant, just so we know a little bit about the person behind the project.

And then logistics, the word count of the novel, the title of the novel, category or genre again, and how much you're enclosing with the query. Now, a lot of agents and publishers, if they want to get projects that are along the lines of what they're looking to represent or publish, they have submission guidelines available. It behooves them to receive projects only along the lines of what they're interested in. And so, you will always want to check the submission guidelines, usually on an agency or publisher's website. These will tell you what to send. And you're not gonna send an attachment of your entire novel. You have your novel. Don't get me wrong. You have it all ready so that you can send whenever it's requested and hopefully, it is. But you are gonna want to send only what is requested in the submission guidelines and no attachments.

So your query is gonna most likely be in an email message to the agent, or to the publisher, or to the submission box, or to the submission tracking software that you get sent to, to upload materials if an agent is using something like that. And you are going to want to send only what is requested, usually, the query, sometimes the first 10 pages, the first 3 chapters, the first 25 pages. Every submission guideline is different. You're gonna want to send that and then you are going to want to send the synopsis if that's requested as well. Most likely, it's not gonna be as an attachment unless an agent gets back to you and requests, "Hey, I love that. Can I see the first half? Can I see the full manuscript? Do you have everything as an attachment?" And then they'll give you more instructions. But, for now, hold off on any attachments.

If there's an art component, for example, you're a graphic novelist, you're sending around a graphic novel script. You will want to have some of your art assets available to download or put up on a website, maybe even a password-protected website. You'll want to send along a link to view or download the file or credentials to view a password-protected website. That is the best way to get images in front of an agent or a publisher without doing an attachment. Image files, especially, can get very, very big. They can clog up an agent's inbox. You don't want to do that.

So, basically, you're gonna want to have everything available and if somebody says, "I want a synopsis, a query, and the first 10 pages," you can put that together. You don't want to be scrambling to write a synopsis when somebody requests it. You want to have that available.

So let's talk about the synopsis for a minute. I'm not kidding when I say how hated they are, at least by me and a lot of people that I talk to, especially writers. And it's because it seems like a very sort of systematic break down of your novel. It takes all the emotion out of it. It doesn't get a happy effect that you will, ideally, like for a novel to have and so, they're just not that fun. What you want to do, ideally, is one single-spaced page or two double-spaced pages. Somehow, these are not the same amount of text. But you want to prepare both so you can send, depending on requirements. And just go through chapter by chapter. I wouldn't advise bullet points. I would do it in prose, sort of with transitions, and then this happens and that happens. Go through your main plot points as well as your main points of character development. You'll want to introduce the main characters and it's all about the level of detail that you want to include. If a reader cannot understand the thrust of your story, the plot of your story, or a character element, without that detail, it needs to go in the synopsis. If you're including details in there that aren't necessary to basic understanding of your project, I would take those out.

A shorter synopsis is always better but this is the main struggle for a lot of writers. They don't know how to whittle everything down, after all, it's a 90,000-word project. How am I gonna get it down to one page? That's the struggle but I would say, the shorter, the better. I work on synopses in my editorial practice of up to four double-spaced pages, simply because a lot of my clients don't know how to get that information down. And that's something that I look at whenever I see a longer synopsis. But you're probably not gonna get the luxury of four double-spaced pages when you're submitting because a lot of people will request either one or two pages, maximum. So you want to send a synopsis if one is requested. The good news is not everybody requests a synopsis so if it is not the strongest part of your submission package, it may not be that big of a liability.

But, basically, main takeaways are that you need to have the novel completed, you need to have all of your submission elements complete so that you can just send whatever is requested, and you'll want to follow submission guidelines because everybody has what they want to see in a little bit of a different configuration, and you want to sort of show that you are great to work with, that you can follow directions. All of these kind of soft skills are also on display when you submit your novel.

This has been Mary Kole with Good Story Company, and here's to a good novel submission.

Ready to take your writing to the next level? Get even more of the Good Story Company resources you love, plus videos, workshops, handouts, and content you can’t get anywhere else.