Four Dreaded Words

“What’s your book about?” It seems like a simple question, until I, as a newbie author, try to answer it.

In my mind, my book is about 100,000 words of carefully interwoven plots that took months to get right, complex characters that grew and evolved on their own, colorful and exotic places and worlds, literary devices, clever uses of punctuation, good parts, bad parts, terrible parts, loathesome parts, unfinished parts, and a title.

Strangely, casual readers aren’t interested in those things.

They want to hear something like, “It’s about a farm boy who blows up the Death Star,” or, “It’s about a badass archeologist with a gun and a bullwhip.”

What’s up with that?