This means that you must say what the whole book is about as briefly as possible. To say what the whole book is about is not the same as saying what kind of book it is. (That was covered by Rule 1.) The word “about” may be misleading here. In one sense, a book is about a certain type of subject matter, which it treats in a certain way. If you know this, you know what kind of book it is. But there is another, more colloquial sense of “about.” We ask a person what he is about, what he is up to. So we can wonder what an author is up to, what he is trying to do. To find out what a book is about in
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