
The First Five Pages is a concise, useful guide to helping writers address the more common manuscript issues that keep them from being publishable. The chapters are arranged to address issues in order of importance to agents; and then describes the issue, presents common problems for that issue, and offers solutions to those problems. Each chapter ends with exercises to help the writer fix those problems in their own manuscript.
There was nothing in this book I hadn’t read in other writing books or blogs, but I like that Lukeman thought about the importance of each issue. Now, not only can you focus on just the issue plaguing you, you can get a feel much time you should budget to fixing it in relation to other potential problems. I also appreciated how the chapters were laid out. Being able to see examples of how each issue manifests itself with immediate feedback on why that’s a problem and how to fix it adds a concrete layer that I would find easy to follow, and I’m sure others would, too.






