Say what makes your story unlike anything else on the shelf—and say it in a single page.
Someone asks what your book is about. You start at the beginning—the setup, the inciting incident, the twist you spent a year getting right—and somewhere around the third “but then,” you can feel the conversation slipping away from you.
It isn’t that your story is dull. It’s that plot rarely sells a book to a person who hasn’t read it. What does the work is sharing the premise, the world, and the singular things that make your novel unlike every other book in its category—and doing it in one page. In this FREE one-hour webinar, I’ll show you how to write that page, and how to put it to work everywhere from your query letter to your back-cover copy.
You’ll discover:
- How to find your story’s unique selling proposition—the one thing that sets it apart from every other book in its category
- How to build the page around premise, theme, setting, and feel, keeping plot firmly in its place
- How to adapt that single page into a query letter, a conference pitch, back-cover copy, and a 30-second answer to “What’s your book about?”
- How to use it during revision as a check on whether your manuscript still delivers what the page promises
Perfect for:
- Writers who can walk through their plot beat by beat but go quiet when someone asks what makes the book different
- Authors heading into a query round, a pitch session, or a first conversation with an agent—don’t keep reinventing the wheel!
- Authors with a book on the way who need back-cover copy, catalog copy, and interview answers that all tell the same story
A live Q&A follows the presentation to answer your questions.
Fill out the form below to reserve your FREE virtual seat.
Know someone who might enjoy this discussion? Please share this page with them and help this community grow!
The One-Page Secret to Writing Success:
Know Your Story’s Unique Selling Proposition
Ask a room of writers what their book is about, and most will answer with plot. It’s the natural place to go—it’s the part we’ve spent years building. But plot is the one thing that almost never wins over a stranger, and a stranger is exactly who you’re talking to when it counts: the agent reading your query, the editor across the table, the reader choosing between your book and the one beside it.
During our hour together, we’ll build the page from the top. We’ll start with premise, then the theme underneath it, the setting when setting is part of the draw, and the feeling a reader carries away at the end. Then we’ll talk about what to leave out, because the discipline of a one-pager is subtraction. A page that tries to include everything ends up saying nothing.
We’ll also look at how much work a single page can do once you have it. It anchors a query letter. It gives you something steady to say in a pitch session when you have 10 minutes and a nervous stomach. It seeds back-cover copy, bookseller one-sheets, and book club material. And it does a quieter job too: kept beside you during revision, it tells you when the manuscript has wandered away from the book you meant to write. Whether you write genre fiction, literary fiction, or nonfiction, the one-page document is your most important writing and marketing tool.
Join us at our FREE virtual discussion:
November 14, 2026 at 1 p.m. Eastern
Reserve your spot at this FREE virtual workshop. I’ll send you the access details shortly before the event!
In Beat the Bots: A Writer’s Guide to Surviving and Thriving in the Age of AI, published in August, Jane K. Cleland shares practical exercises to nurture imagination, spark original thinking, and resist creative conformity. Her other books on the craft of writing, Mastering Suspense, Structure & Plot and Mastering Plot Twists, both won the Agatha Award.
Jane has also written fourteen novels in the multiple award-winning Josie Prescott Antiques Mystery series [St. Martin’s Minotaur, with short fiction published by Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine]. The series has been optioned for film and TV.
In addition, Jane is a contributing editor for Writer’s Digest magazine and the chair of the Black Orchid Novella Award, presented by the Wolfe Pack in partnership with Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Jane has served as President of the New York Chapter and Vice President of the Florida chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and was on the national board.
