I have mixed feelings about this book. It seems to be miss-named to me. A better title might have been Million Dollar Stories, or Emotionally Satisfying Stories.
I was looking for a book on outlining, and this isn't one really.
It spent 1/3 of it's pages talking about why readers read and how to capture the readers you want. It touched (very briefly) on characters and setting, and spent a third of the book on some (very interesting) plotting tools. The last third was on plot elements - the inciting incident, beginning, middle, end, etc.
The outlining? That was in the very last section of the book, it was very brief, and he provided no treatments to show what it should look like (although there were descriptive examples).
Also, in tone it swung wildly from very commercial and analytic (which I expected), to extremely personal, emotional insights into the life history of the author (which I didn't expect, and which at times frankly shocked me).
The analysis about why people read I found interesting, ditto the plotting tools. It's a good, brief introduction to writing elements. But it's not what it says on the tin.
So... No. Not what I wanted, nor thought I'd get from the title and blurb.
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