I know that people have a lot of demands on their time.  That’s especially true in the publishing industry, and particularly so in an era when it seems that everyone is writing a book and with so many self-publishing options every single one of them can immediately be put up for sale.

But there’s one example that drives home this point to me in quantitative terms.  When you submit a novel for publication or to an agent, you need to provide a synopsis.  When I first started to investigate this process years ago, the average synopsis was ten pages.  Everyone complained about how hard it was to condense a novel’s entire story into ten pages.  Today, many editors and agents are requesting a synopsis of one page.  (Some are willing to read up to two.)  They have less time to read more things, and that means that everyone who wants to be read needs to learn how to write more concisely.