with Leigh Stein
LIVE CLASS - Thursday, November 14, 5pm PT (90 minutes including Q&A)
$150 (Live attendance and/or Recorded viewing / Unlimited enrollment)
If you cannot attend live, you will receive a link to the recording. The recording will be available for 30 days.
Agents get up to 100 queries in their inbox every day. Book editors get dozens of submissions each week. It isn’t the most beautifully written 300-page manuscripts that rise to the top—in the era of short attention spans, it’s the killer concept that sells. Learn how to answer the question, “What’s your book about?” in a way that makes an agent or an editor think, I need this in my life IMMEDIATELY, in this master class taught by Leigh Stein, the author of six books and a coach whose clients have sold projects to imprints of Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster.
Writers at all stages of the publishing process—whether you're drafting your manuscript, querying agents, or about to have your debut published—can benefit tremendously from thinking about their book from a reader's point of view.
This is for fiction and non-fiction writers (poets also welcome!). Conceptualizing a book gets at the paradox at the heart of book publishing: your book must be totally original and similar to something that's already popular. By the end of this master class, writers will be able to describe their own book in a succinct and compelling way.
Please note: This master class does not include personal feedback on your concept from Leigh. Students should come prepared with a list of three to five comp titles, in their category, published in the last three to five years.
About Leigh Stein
Leigh Stein is the creator of the Attention Economy Substack and the author of six books, including the critically acclaimed satirical novel Self Care and a gothic novel titled If You’re Seeing This, It’s Meant for You, forthcoming from Ballantine in 2025. She has written culture pieces and personal essays for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker online, Airmail, Allure, ELLE, BuzzFeed, The Cut, Salon, and Slate. Leigh is a sought-after book publishing expert and coach with more than 15 years of experience working in media and publishing, beginning at the New Yorker. Her clients have sold projects to imprints of Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster, as well as Audible, Bloomsbury, The Experiment, MIT Press, Quirk Books, and Zibby Books.
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