By setup here I mean character details, their backstory, the main challenge of the plot, etc. When you read the book, you would come to know this hidden key detail (at least) by 1/3rd of the book. These are the details that makes you care for the characters and make you want to read the book. It is not the detail that you wait whole book to know (how will the hero destroy the one ring?)
For eg:
“but their quiet life is thrown into turmoil when an uninvited stranger shows up at their door with a startling proposal.”
what is the damn proposal? I am not reading 100 pages of story to come to a “proposal” if it does not sound interesting to me.
Now. this is not a complaint about the book (it is an interesting book here, and the proposal is that the man has to leave his wife he dearly loves, to go and stay in a space station for 2 years.)
This kind of synopsis feels like a cheap trick to me, to get me to read a book that may not be worth my time, while paradoxically the book actually might be good.
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I’m the opposite. I can’t stand it when there’s too much info in the blurb. It’s like when you see a movie trailer that shoehorns every funny moment from the movie so now there’s no point in seeing it anymore.
I don’t get the hate for OP here. I agree that the synopsis shouldn’t give the whole plot away, but this is clearly not asking for something like that. Do you really think it ruins Tolkien’s master vision by knowing that the goal is destroying the one ring? Hell! Seeing the movie, something that does have spoilers, doesn’t make the book unreadable!
There is a balance to be made here between book and spoiler.
Though, I think you can know if you’ll like a book within the first chapter or two…but I’m not gonna read the first 1-2 chapters of every book. I only have so much time. 🤷♂️
100% with you on this one. It’s lazy writing and, as you point out, often unnecessary. I blame creative writing courses. If the story is interesting enough and the characters strong enough then a book won’t need artificial ‘teasers’ to maintain interest. If we’re reading a third person perspective following the action through the dialogue of characters or observation of their actions then fair enough, we are not privy to their unspoken knowledge. But when writing in the first person perspective it serves only to break the flow of the connection when we are suddenly and inexplicably shut out of portions of the inner dialogue.