I read a book that really showed me how not to write a book yesterday* - Anne McCaffrey's No One Noticed the Cat. It's got a barely interesting premise (magically endowed cat protects prince from dangerous schemings) and goes absolutely nowhere with it.
Part of the problem may be that it's a really short book, but instead of telling a really short, fully realized story, the author opts to skate over the surface of a longer story. The symptoms of this abound. For instance, for a book that's supposed to be about a cat, the cat is really only shown doing something important once or twice. There's also no suspense to speak of, because the prince (who is the viewpoint character) neutralizes every threat as soon as he becomes aware of it. This is great for him, but not good for the reader.
There are other flaws too: many of the minor-but-key-to-the-plot-mechanics characters have similar-sounding names and ambiguous relationships (they're _all_ cousins, which is realistic for a pseudo-medieval royal court but not the least bit helpful.) On top of that, referents are often ambiguous, and at one point I found myself turning the same page three times, rereading the same paragraph, convinced that there was a mistake in the binding.
There wasn't anything particularly deep thematically to reward all this. And I see that Ms. McCaffrey still hasn't got her head around women's lib, let alone more subtle issues of fairness and non-sterotyping characterization.
You'll just have to take my word for this one.... it's out of print.
The moral of this story? You can build an excellent career writing this stuff, but that's no excuse.
* Sept 15, 2001