How to Write a Book Summary (Step-by-Step)
In , I wrote a book summary for The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.
Distilling the book’s key ideas helped me remember what I read. Plus, readers got a lot from it, so I continued with other nonfiction books I read.
Since then, I’ve written + book summaries for the best non-fiction books of all time. And, in doing so, I’ve learned a thing or two about writing good book summaries.
In this article, I want to share how to write a book summary that will help you remember what you read months, even years, after reading.
Table of Contents
Why Write a Book Summary?
I’ve found there are three key benefits to writing a book summary.
First, writing a book summary helps you remember what you read. We’ve all read a book only to forget its key ideas as soon as we finish. Summarizing a book in your own words, though, minimizes that problem by helping you internalize the book’s key insights.
Second, writing a book summary helps you connect key concepts from other books. When writing a book summary for The Little Book of Yes, I noticed the author wrote about the importance of endings, a key idea also cover
5 Steps to Writing a Captivating Nonfiction Book Synopsis
If you’re submitting your nonfiction manuscript to publishers, you want to make sure your masterpiece gets the attention it deserves—which is why being able to write a great summary, or synopsis, is so important.
Nonfiction editors spend a lot of time reading and reviewing manuscript submissions and their accompanying summaries. But the fact is, not every publishing company or agency will spend time actually looking at your manuscript if your summary doesn’t capture their attention first.
How to Write a Nonfiction Book Summary
Writing a summary of your book can be surprisingly difficult. No one knows your book better than you, but that deep connection can be a detriment—it can make it challenging to pick and choose the most important points.
Remember, your summary can’t—and shouldn’t—include every smart observation or bit of groundbreaking advice contained in your book. Instead, focus on the most important, unique, and salient points that will excite the person reading enough that they want to read the whole book.
By following these simple steps, you’ll have a killer synopsis that can be used for book proposals,
+ Free Book Summaries
Welcome to the best free nonfiction book summaries resource online.
This page is a distillation of everything I’ve learned from the best non-fiction books of all time.
From business to leadership, self-help to psychology, you’ll find more than good book summaries organized by category.
If you’re looking for the best book summaries online, click “Book Summaries by Title” to browse all my entries to date.
Get New Book Summaries In Your Inbox
Enter your email address below to get new book summaries delivered to your inbox. (I publish new summaries monthly, on average.)Book Summaries: Table of Contents
1. Book Summaries by Title
Since , I’ve written summaries for over of the best nonfiction books of all time.
Browse all my entries below, or use Control+F (or Command+F on a Mac) if you have a particular title in mind.
2. Book Summaries by Category
These are my book summaries, listed by category.
1. Business Book Summaries. These books offer compelling stories, intriguing insights, and fascinating takeaways from some of the biggest and brightest minds in business and beyond.
2. Biography and Memoir Book Summaries. Some of the
Non-fiction text types – WJECBiography
A biography is writing about someone’s life. If someone is writing about their own life it becomes an autobiography. These forms can also widen out to focus on a specific part of someone’s life, or their family.
A biography is usually written both to inform and to entertain. This means it is a mix of factual information and creative writing. The audience is usually made up of people who are interested in the person being written about. However, sometimes biographies of people who aren’t well known can be interesting because of an experience that they’ve had.
This is the opening paragraph of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens, the novelist. The young man she is describing is Dickens, aged
14 January , London. An inquest is being held at Marylebone Workhouse, a muddled complex of buildings spread over a large area between the Marylebone Road and Paddington Street. The Beadle, a parish officer responsible for persuading householders to do their duty as jurors at such inquests, has assembled twelve men. Most of them are middle-aged local tradesmen, but one stands out among them as different. He is young and sligh
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