Hook Your Readers: 3 Tips to Catch & Keep Your Audience
How do we sell our stories? That is the big question. It is the reason for craft classes and editing and cover design and agents and editors and all the time on social media. And while platforms and covers and algorithms do matter, there is one tried and true way to sell more books.
Write a great story.
And not just any story, but a story that hooks from the very beginning and only continues to hook deeper.
Think of great stories like concertina wire.
The danger of concertina wire is not just in one hook, but hundreds or thousands. And it isn’t even in the thousands of hooks. It is the tension created by the coiled structure. If a person is snagged even a little, every effort to break free (turning a page for resolution) only traps the victim deeper in a web of barbed spines.
Now granted, this is a morbid visual, but y’all are writers and there is a good reason our family doesn’t like us talking at the dinner table.
So I was researching sucking chest wounds today and, hey, pass the spaghetti please?
Moving on…
We’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating. Many new writers finish their first novel, and (I know as an editor) that odds are more than good that I’m going to chop off the first 50-100 pages.
We dream killers editors call this the fish head. What do we do with fish heads? We toss them (unless you are my weird Scandinavian family who makes fish face soup out of them).
[image error]Image courtesy of David Pursehouse via Flickr Creative Commons
Often, when I go to do this kind of cutting, new writers will protest. “No, but you need this and the story really gets going on page 84.”
My answer? “Then let’s start on page 84.”
Too many stories fall flat because they lack the barbs necessary for snagging the modern reader who has the attention span of an ADD hamster with a meth habit. Additionally, a lot of us writers fall into bad habits of assuming readers are stupid, that they need all kinds of brain holding to “get” what we are talking about which means we not only lack barbs…but necessary tension.
I will prove readers are really smarter than we give them credit for 
