Reasons I Will Not Give Your Story a Chance

Summaries, Synopsis, and Blurbs

Summaries that say, "No summary.  Just read," or "Summary sucks.  Story is better."

(1) If there is no summary, I'm not going to read it.  Period.  Even if I like the title. It says to me that if you can't even come up with one sentence to summarize your story, you probably won't even put effort into your actual story.

(2) If you do give a summary, but say that it sucks, I'm more than likely going to assume that the story sucks too.  Moving on.

Summaries that are author notes.

Basically it's the author just talking to the readers, saying, "What's up?" or saying what their updating schedule will be like.  Hun, that stuff is for journal entries or activity entries.  Not summaries.

Summaries that basically introduce the main character/OC.

You know, if your title fails to impress me, I may still click on it if your summary intrigues me.  What doesn't interest me in the least is a brief character sheet in your summary.  Either this is done with the character directly speaking to the audience through the summary:

"Hi, I'm Shea and I'm a 16 year old high school student.  Completely ordinary with brown hair and green eyes until I meet Jason, the bad boy."

Or is basically a short character bio sheet:

"She is 16 years old, in high school, with brown hair and green eyes, and is fairly ordinary."

Of course saying something about the character is fine, but if you don't get into the plot I won't know what your story is about at all.  And when I say plot, I mean conflict.

"Shea was just your ordinary high school girl with brown hair and green eyes until she meets bad boy Jason.  What will happen?"

Yeah, no.  That's not even remotely attracting me to the story.  Even if this story is in the Romance genre, you still need a conflict other than the arguments that Shea and Jason have.  There has to be an outside source that is also getting in the way, and that helps develop the relationship and portrays why these two characters should be together.  Otherwise, just from reading that summary, it's just going to sound to me like, "Oh, I like him.  He seems to like me.  Let's get together.  Oh, he's a jerk.  I'm breaking up with him.  He came back to me and was crying on my front porch.  I guess I'll forgive him and get back together.  Gosh, why is he still such a jerk?  But I'll stay with him anyway."

Collect a few books in your house and look at their summaries.  Here are my examples:

The Hobbit, by J. R. R. Tolkien says that Bilbo is a hobbit who wanted to be left alone, but then says that Gandalf brings along dwarves that invite and entice Bilbo to come along to the adventure and fight monsters.  As if that's not enough, the summary also says that Bilbo has to confront the dragon, Smaug.  Alone.

The Body Finder, by Kimberly Derting, immediately describes Violet's problems—her crush on Jay Heaton, and her struggles with her secret ability to sense the dead.  The summary also gets into the town having a serial killer and that she takes it upon herself to find the killer, but right next to that mystery, Violet is also trying to figure out if Jay's protectiveness of her is because of their close friendship, or if it's because he may have feelings for her too.