Querying a short story collection

Do you really need to summarize every single story in the collection?

Dear Sonal,

I have a short story collection.

I need to know if I need to write a summary for all 18 stories for my synopsis (to send to publishers or agents) or should I just do five or six of them?

Sincerely,
Summer is Short

Dear Summer Is Short,

Short story collections are in some ways the red-headed stepchildren of publishing, and no, Sonal, do not go down that tangent of trying to figure out where the expression red-headed stepchild came from and if it really means what you think it means.

(I went down the tangent. It was fortunately short and not interesting enough to inspire further tangents.)

But that is to say, for all the publishing advice online, much of it skips over what to do with short story collections except to say "Don't write them, they don't sell" even though that's not true. So yes, it's confusing. Short story collections are an awkward fit.

But do you have to summarize every single story in the collection to write a synopsis to query? Yes and no, but mostly yes. And also no.

Can you just summarize a few? Definitely no.

When you get into the nitty-gritty, every agent or publisher wants something slightly different in the initial query. I mean yes, they all want to know up front the basic details about the work (title, length, genre) and they all want a bio, and most want comps, and you should probably have a strong hook for all of them. But some want a two page synopsis and some want a 200 word pitch and some want both of varying sizes.

What you're writing here is a sales letter. What is the book, where does it fit among many categories of books, what kind of things or other books are people who will love this book interested in, and also, is this a reasonably well-written book? Sure, a person could just read the book and answer all those questions, but who has that kind of time?

This is where you need to be more discerning than "this book will appeal to people who like a good story" because that's every book, but there's a marked difference between, say, people who loved the Bridgerton series and people who loved Gravity's Rainbow. Okay, sure, maybe you loved both but one can't assume that a person who liked one of these is necessarily going to like the other. You want to be as specific as possible.

What's the purpose of a synopsis? It's to tell the publisher or agent what the book is about. The plot. What actually happens. Does this sound like a good, well-structured story? With a synopsis showing that you know how to put a story together, and an excerpt showing that you’re a capable writer, that’s enough for an agent or publisher to quickly to decide that yes, this is potentially a workable book. Whether or not it’s something that appeals to them enough to consider acquiring it is another question, but it’s a fast way to get through the slush pile.

For a novel, or for narrative nonfiction, that makes sense but for a short story collection, there’s no singular plot and so the question of what the collection is about shifts to, what is the through line? What holds this collection together? Why is this a short story collection versus a random grouping of stories? What ideas resonate more fully by reading all of these particular stories together?

I know—sometimes it seems like a short story collection is simply what happens when you a write a bunch of random stories, pick one to be the title and voila, it’s a collection. But there has to be more connectivity than that. Maybe not all of these stories belong in a collection together. Maybe they do. What was the question you were exploring through these stories?

Maybe you know what that is. Jessica Westhead's latest collection, Avalanche, was written to explore the question of white people's well-meaning cluelessness amid issues of race and privilege. (Also, it's awesome and Jess is the actual best so check it out.) If so, maybe you don't need to summarize every story to write a good synopsis. You can instead start with what connects these stories and explore the ways you’ve investigated that idea through these stories.

But if you aren't quite sure what connects this collection—and maybe even if you are—the exercise of summarizing every single story can help you figure out those connections, or maybe even uncover a few you didn't realize were there. Trying to summarize everything from the start into a single, short synopsis has a way of making a writer skip over important bits before even trying to see if there’s a way to include it. Better to write out everything and then look for ways to pare down.

That said, nothing makes a writer swear more than having to write a synopsis of their own work. When writing one for my novel, I kept thinking, if I could explain it in 250 words, I wouldn't have written 80,000.

Here is what I did.

1. First, I attempted to write something to the length I needed, got frustrated and failed at it several times because I could never fit in all the important parts.

2. Gave up, and I wrote the most concise but complete summary of the novel I could. Felt like I captured everything in a bare bones way, and that ended up being 1,500 words.

3. I put the 1,500 word summary into ChatGPT and asked it to summarize it in 250 words, and it gave me a very badly written summary full of cheesy adjectives.

4. I asked ChatGPT to summarize it in 500 words, and got a slightly less badly written summary full of cheesy adjectives.

5. Using some of the structure from both AI summaries, and cutting out all the cheesy adjectives, I wrote something workable to the length I needed, and edited it several times to add in things I thought were important and also cut them back out.

I don’t know if using AI is necessary for this process, but it definitely seemed to speed things up, even though AI is a really, really terrible writer (and also terrible for the environment and steals from writers and yes, I am luddite at heart). Even when I tried giving it advice to do better, like telling it to cut out all the extra adjectives, it remained terrible and kept the cheesy adjectives.

Still, what AI was able to do reasonably well was find ways to pull a lot of scenes or ideas together into one very corny umbrella sentence that I could cut out and then add back in and edit into something better. That said, I wonder if I could have simply written my own very terrible summary, sans corny adjectives, and skipped the whole AI part.

In essence: there are no real shortcuts to writing a good synopsis. It is a terrible task. Every writer hates it and struggles with it. But summarizing a few stories from the collection doesn’t work here, because if a few stories can stand in for the entire collection, why does it need to be a collection?

All that said? The best thing you can do is cultivate your relationships with other writers and the literary community as a whole. First of all, apparently other people are fun, and other writers at least understand all the weird awkwardness of being a writer. But on a more practical level, having writing friends that can refer you to an agent or editor is a near-guarantee that your work will be read, and while yes, you will still be expected to provide a good synopsis, you can at least let go of some of the pressure of whether or not this one letter will make or break your book.

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Readers, have you queried a short story collection? Or written a synopsis for your novel? Tell us what the process of doing that was like.