Good Night Sweet Prince!

It's 12:30 on Thursday Night/ Friday Morning, and I finally got the first draft of the synopsis done!

(insert fireworks, gun salutes, flag waving, champaign, and party horns here!)

I've been working on this submission for almost a month. I started on the 20th of last month. I had a novel that had been through 3 edits, and I had to edit it again. I had to remake the blurb and do the high concept. So, think about this... I had a third draft of a novel, and it still took a month to get it ready to submit!

When I started writing I didn't even know about all this stuff. I thought an author writes books, and then he or she is done. Silly ignorant me. Now I know better.

First you have to get the idea in a salable format. That means you need a tagline, a logline, a high concept, a pitch line and a blurb.

What does all that mean? It means no one wants your darn book, you have to get them to want it by showing them something to catch their interest.

A high concept is putting the book in terms anyone familier with modern media will recognize. for example, The High concept for Dawn of Blood, is : "The Queen of the Damned" falls in love with "Van Helsing". The High concept for Magick's Bounty is: "Die Hard" in the world of the tv show "Bewitched "

A blurb is what you see on the back cover or the inner flap of a book.

A tagline and pitch line are single sentances that make people need to read your book.
This is a tagline: "When a simple human bounty hunter finds herself accidentally married to the prince of the witches, she becomes the only barrier between the human world and a dangerous world of Olympian Gods and witches gone mad."

The sad thing is, all these single sentances are harder to do than a full chapter of text. I finished re-editing the manuscript in just a couple days, It's taken me a long time to come up with the lines.

So, as a writer, I have all this stuff to do before submitting the novel. Then I have to do a synopsis. I have to take the entire story and put it on 5 pages or less. and even worse I have to still make it interesting! Not just a facts listing, but a mini version of the story that still shows my "voice"

Debbie Macomber said "Submitting your book is like standing up on stage, dropping your pants and waiting for a response."

I think she missed the fact that half the audience have bolt cutters, and the other half have speculums..

So I did it. I got the draft done. I can sleep now.

Nite nite.