Descriptions and/or Summaries

How do you come up with a good description and/or summary?

I haven’t quite figured that out yet

I find writing a summary or description for a story difficult - you want to get the possible reader interested to read your story, yet, you don’t want to give too much away. It has to create a certain feeling of wanting to read about the things that might happen in the book, wanting to know what the story is all about, but then again, you don’t want to tell everything that will happen in the story.

Great summaries, descriptions or blurbs, to me, are the ones that manage to give you an idea of what the story will be about in only a couple of lines and begin or end with a few questions. I think that the questions make the description more effective seeing as even when you didn’t manage to make the possible-reader wonder about your story, the questions will do it for you.

A summary shouldn’t be too descriptive or go into too much detail as you want to attract more readers. Basically, when you keep it a little vague but still interesting, more people will give your story a try compared to when you make your description very specific. I’m not sure how much sense this makes, but when you write your description in such a way that it is completely clear that it’s all about romance, or entirely about horror and gruesome scenes, you’ll only spark the interest of those people who love these specific genres. Whereas, when you keep it a little less specific and add perhaps a hint of different genres, more people will be interested in reading your work.