Ultimate Blog Series on Novel Queries (#5)

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This is my definitive No Rules series on novel queries. It's meant particularly
for writers who are new to the query process. (A series on nonfiction book queries
will come later.) Go back
to the beginning of the series.







ONE-SENTENCE HOOKS OF BOOKS THAT SOLD


There are many reasons for writers to pay to subscribe to PublishersMarketplace (the
No. 1 reason is probably agent research), but subscribers also have the advantage
of absorbing its excellent deal information.



Every day, PublishersMarketplace lists book deals that were recently signed at major
New York houses. It identifies the title, the author, the publisher/editor who bought
the project, and the agent who sold it.



Most importantly, these deals also offer a quick blurb, or hook. These hooks are inevitably
well-crafted, and can help you better understand what hooks really excite agents/publishers.




Let's have a look; these are all DEBUT novel deals.

Bridget Boland's DOULA, an emotionally controversial novel about a doula with a sixth
sense [protagonist] who, while following her calling,
has to confront a dark and uncertain future when standing trial for the death of her
best friend's baby [protagonist's problem]




[a doula with a sixth sense? cool.]







John Hornor Jacobs's SOUTHERN GODS, in which a Memphis DJ [protagonist] hires
a recent World War II veteran to find a mysterious bluesman whose music [protagonist's
problem] — broadcast at ever-shifting frequencies by a phantom radio station
—> is said to make living men insane and dead men rise [twist]




[wow! what a twist!]







Dana Gynther's CROSSING ON THE PARIS, chronicling the lives of three women of different
generations and classes [protagonists] whose lives intersect
on a majestic ocean liner traveling from Paris to New York in the wake of World War
I [more premise than problem], exploring the power of
chance encounters [promise of intrigue]




[this sounds lovely even though the hook breaks my rules and
doesn't explicitly express a problem; but one can sense serious complications in a
context/setting like this]






Vanessa Veselka's ZAZEN, in which an otherwise innocuous vegan restaurant worker and
ex-paleontologist [protagonists] starts calling in fake
bomb threats, which turn real [protagonists' problem]




[this isn't something you read every day, right?]

Katherine Karlin's SEND ME WORK, a story collection involving
women who work at various jobs normally restricted to men [protagonists],
in an oil refinery, as a welder, on a railroad, in a shipyard and a symphony orchestra,
revealing unrecognized dimensions of American experience [more
premise than problem]




[this was sold to a university press, and I see a clear fascination/twist
here in the premise, but not necessarily an expectation of a commercial, page-turning
thriller; but see how the hook pulls you in, seduces you, even though an explicit
problem is not stated?]

Want more? Go subscribe to PublishersMarketplace ($20/month).



Next up: bios

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