Promise of the Premise Workshop with Nina Simon

The most important thing you can do in the first few pages of your book is something simple: make your reader a promise as to what kind of experience lies ahead. When your first pages make a strong promise--one that sets up expectations with regard to tone, pace, and experience--you will find and delight the readers who want to fall in love with your story. In this workshop, we'll use real-world examples to explore effective, weak, and confusing promises, and you'll experiment with ways to make the promise of your premise as clear and captivating as possible.

This session is part of the 2026 Writers Conference. Register for this two-day event.

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