How to Entice a Reader into the World of Your Novel

Instead of Making Them Head for the Exit

The beginning of a novel is like a lobby in a hotel, setting expectations for the rest of the experience. Are there soaring ceilings, sumptuous rugs and warm cookies at the check-in station? Or are you greeted by a guy in an undershirt with a flyswatter in his hand saying, “You renting by the hour or by the night?”

Every Tuesday, when new books come out, I read the Kindle sample of ones I’m interested in. Sometimes I’m wowed and can’t wait to read further, but too often I’m thinking, no desire to read further.

Beginnings are fraught with so many expectations that we, as authors, often try too hard, blowing up a building on the first page or staging a knife fight in hopes of immediately hooking the reader. In fact, that’s one of the most common mistakes I see in unpublished manuscripts: a showy beginning involving a lot of drama among characters I’ve yet to care about.

Most times we must be eased into a novel the way we ease into a conversation with a stranger at a party. I love the beginning of Margo Has Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe because it describes the feeling so well:

“You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people's names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know. And that's fine, goodness knows you've fallen in love with books that didn't grab you in the first paragraph. But that doesn't stop you from wishing they would, from wishing they would come right up to you in the dark of your mind and kiss you on the throat.”

Thorpe brings up another common problem with beginnings: too many characters being introduced too quickly. Always count how many you introduce in the first few pages, even if they’re only mentioned in dialogue. It can be eye-opening.

It might help to think of your reader as someone you’ve kidnapped for a few hours, and you want to put them at ease. Quickly, you need to orient them as to time and place. Also, they’ll want to know who their captor is. As soon as possible, establish your main character’s age, gender, and occupation.

While you don’t have to blow anything up in the first few pages, you do want your character to be dealing with some sort of problem. InGood Material by Dolly Alderton, the character is coping with a recent breakup by making a list.

Reasons Why It’s Good I’m Not With Jen

Can’t dance. Has no rhythm at all. Used to find it adorable until I saw people laughing at her and hate to say I was embarrassed.

Once overheard her say ‘Let’s grab a cappuccino some time and we’ll talk’ to my teenage cousin who wanted advice about his university applications.

Generally has quite nineties ideas about what is glamorous, like cocktails or spending twenty pounds on a plate of tagliatelle in a ‘little place’.

Refuses to get to the airport a minute earlier than ninety minutes before a flight takes off.

Talked too much and too smugly about coming from a big family, as if it was her decision to have three siblings.

More on the excerpt here. It’s well worth the read.

The heading tells us the problem and the list reveals so much about the problems in the relationship and its backstory in an entertaining way.

PROLOGUES

If you want to lose several hours of your life that you’ll never get back, research the question, “Is it okay to use a prologue?”

I’ll save you time. The answer is yes, if you do it well. Usually the purpose of a prologue is to show a future scene that will cause the reader to wonder, “How did it come to that?: Liane Moriarty in Big Little Lies employs that method:

“That doesn’t sound like a school trivia night,” said Mrs. Patty Ponder to Marie Antoinette. “That sounds like a riot.”

The cat didn’t respond. She was dozing on the couch and found school trivia nights to be trivial….

Mrs. Ponder picked up her television remote and turned down the volume on Dancing with the Stars. She’d turned it up loud earlier because of the sound of the heavy rain, but the downpour had eased now.

She could hear people shouting. Angry hollers crashed through the quiet, cold night air. It was somehow hurtful for Mrs. Ponder to hear, as if all that rage were directed at her.

The rest of the novel sets the stage for what happened that night at the school.

You can also hint at what’s to come in the first sentence. Donna Tartt does this in The Secret History:

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history—state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston.”

TONE

I watched No Good Deeds, and early in the first episode, the villain graphically shredded a main character’s fingers. That almost stopped me from watching further, because I have low tolerance for gore. Lucky for me, that scene was an anomaly. The rest of the show was blood-free

In other words, readers want to know what kind of adventure they’re in for, and you want to establish that as quickly as possible:

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”

The above is from Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and immediately a reader has a good feel for the coming experience.

SAVE IT FOR LAST

The beginning is so vital that we writers endlessly fret over it, tweaking, pruning and perfecting, imagining the cold eyes of judgment roving over it, searching for the slightest reason to reject. But often that nitpicking is a waste of time, because, it can be difficult to know our beginning until we’ve gotten through a first draft.

Frequently, your beginning is mostly throat clearing, unnecessary explanation or blocks of backstory, all of which will have to go into the recycle bin.

I just finished a novel, and it took me a while to get it where I wanted it.

THE WOMAN WHO LOVED HALLOWEEN:

The afternoon I summoned a Halloween crone to life in the Home Depot was a normal September day in Summerhill, Georgia: clear skies, ninety-percent humidity, and the usual whiff of the paper mill’s rotten egg odor in the air.

I was perched on a step ladder, hanging a string of bloodshot eyeball lights above the kitchen sink, humming along to Black Magic Woman.

Sounds witchy, yes, but it’s not like I was dusting off my daughter’s old Ouija board to rouse dark forces or browsing in the occult section of the Barnes and Noble. I wasn’t drawing a hexagram on the back of my grocery list or shouting, “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.” Instead, I was getting into the holiday spirit like any Halloween lover might do. .

Now, whether or not you think I did this well—and I’m certainly open to feedback— I established several important things quickly: tone (light-hearted and magical yet rooted in the ordinary world ), protag (female, old enough to have a daughter with an old Ouija board), place (Georgia, present times, fall). I also make a promise of things to come with the crone.

Here’s some great suggestions on how to hook a reader with your first pages from Allison K. Williams.

By the way, I will evaluate your first ten pages for $25, and I have two spots left. For January I also have the following service openings: one beta read, two query letter critiques and one synopsis. Message me for more info. You can find prices here.

TRENDS

Do you know what a kelpie or a fae is? They’re mythical water creatures that regularly turn up in romantasy novels which is still a hot genre. I browsed major deals ($500,000 and up) in the last couple of years, and about twenty percent are romantasy.

Will the trend hold up? Any bans on Tiktok will be problematic. Also, I think the genre will eventually run out of steam the way paranormal romance and YA dystopia did.

In an earlier newsletter, I talked about how Murders in the Building has become a popular comp, (look under “This Week in Pitching”) and I’ve noticed a number of woman novelists pivoting to what publicists are calling “feel-good mysteries.” Abbi Waxman, Catherine MacKenzie (writing as Catherine Mack), Allison Winn Scotch and Molly Harper have all made the switch.

Some elements you might find in “feel-good mysteries” are lush resorts settings like White Lotus and intergenerational, found-family scenarios. Mysteries are almost always part of a series so the pivot to feel-good mysteries will usually require more than one novel.

Christmas short stories made a splash this year. I regularly browse the top 100 bestselling books in Amazon and many holiday stories made a showing. Usually they are found in Kindle Unlimited and are priced low. ($1.99 or $.99). Many of these are put out by Amazon but self-published authors can certainly compete in this area. Something to think about for next year.

Menopause and perimenopausal women are having a moment in films and TV and to a lesser extent in trad published novels, although All Fours by Miranda July has supposedly become something of a bible for the age group, and there are oodles of self-published novels featuring women in midlife like Magical Midlife Madness by K.F. Breene and Midlife Holiday by Cary J. Hansson. Regardless of age, I love novels about women blowing up traditional roles like in Nightbitch. (I adored the movie.) I predict more novels about women breaking out of the box in response to those who are trying to stuff them back in.

Cozy fantasy is one of the fastest growing genres according to Alex Newton at Ky-lytics who makes a living studying such things. The trend kicked off with Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes which he self-published in 2022.(Fascinating article on his process.) The novel got re-issued by Tor and became a bestseller but also launched a genre.

You don’t have to have orcs in your novel as Baldree does, but you do want a fantastical world that is kinder and gentler than most fantasy worlds. Found family and cottagecore are common attributes; it’s the perfect genre to curl up with a cup of cocoa in front of a roaring fire.

On a personal note, I wrote a cozy fantasy a few years ago and no one seemed remotely interested in the concept and this was before I was comfortable with self-publishing. I read it over the holidays and it holds up so now I’ll I have to do is spruce it up, dust it off and get it out there. Feels like found money and just goes to show you that many times it’s not you, it’s the market.

NEWS YOU CAN USE

A publicist reflects on instances when the marketing materials doesn’t match the book.

Alexandra Sokoloff

urges you to watch holiday movies with intention in order to glow up your storytelling skills.

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