Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, It seemed to me that it could be educational to take a hard look at their first pages. If you don’t know about BookBub, it’s a pretty nifty way to try to build interest in your work. The website is here.
I’m mostly sampling books that are offered for free—BookBub says that readers are 10x more likely to click on a book that’s offered for free than a discounted book. Following is the first page and a poll. Then my comments follow, along with the book cover, the author’s name, and a link so you can take a look for yourself if you wish. At Amazon you can click on the Read More feature to get more of the chapter if you’re interested. There’s a second poll concerning the need for an editor.
Today I thought I’d sample a 99-cent trilogy, a bargain if the work holds up. This is a YA fantasy. Here are the first 17 manuscript lines of the first page in The Otherworld Trilogy. Should this author have hired an editor?
The only reason I knew that I was awake was because of the pale green glow of neon stars staring back at me from my ceiling. I lay in my bed for a few moments, taking deep, steadying breaths while letting my eyes adjust to the darkness of my room. The remnants of a dream still danced in my mind, but as the approaching dawn light chased away the dark, it tried to slip away. Unfortunately, this particular dream was familiar to me, and it would take a lot more than my return to the conscious world to eject it from my mind.
I turned my head on my pillow and blinked my eyes several times at my alarm clock. Groaning at the early hour, I rolled over onto my stomach and buried my head into the pillow. I guess the darkness had some claim on the subconscious world, because instead of dispelling the dream, my actions only made it come racing back.
Huffing in frustration, I kicked off the covers and leaned over the side of my bed, scrabbling around stray pairs of shoes and forgotten socks as I searched out my current journal. Years ago the therapist I had been seeing thought it would be a good idea to keep track of these strange recurring dreams. Anytime I dreamt of anything that reminded me of my past before entering the foster system, I was supposed to write it down. That and anything strange that I saw or heard while I was awake. I hate to say it, but the visions happened more often than I would like to admit.
Did this writer need an editor? My notes and a poll follow.
This book received 4.6 stars on Amazon. It sort of opens with a dream, usually a no-no, but this writer carries it off by going into not the dream itself but the character’s reaction and experience with its recurring nature, along the way delivering some character and backstory in an interesting way. We understand that there is particular significance to the dream.
I like the voice, and the writing is just fine—though there’s a touch too much of it for my taste. I think the details and description are overwritten a little. But I’m not the female teen audience this is written for.
As far as story questions or jeopardy, not much of either . . . but, for me, two things urged me to turn the page and find out more: the mention of a therapist, which means that there is something troubling about her situation, and the mention of “visions,” which suggests much more than a regular old dream. So I turned to page to learn more, and enjoyed the ride. I’ll put this on my Kindle for when I do the treadmill.
Submissions welcome, none in the queue for Friday. If you’d like a fresh look at your opening chapter or prologue, please email your submission to me re the directions at the bottom of this post.
The Flogometer challenge: can you craft a first page that compels me to turn to the next page? Caveat: Please keep in mind that this is entirely subjective.
What's a first page in publishingland? In a properly formatted novel manuscript (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type, etc.) there should be about 16 or 17 lines on the first page (first pages of chapters/prologues start about 1/3 of the way down the page). Directions for submissions are below—they include a request to post the rest of the chapter, but that’s optional.
A word about the line-editing in these posts: it’s “one-pass” editing, and I don’t try to address everything, which is why I appreciate the comments from the FtQ tribe. In a paid edit, I go through each manuscript three times.
Before you rip into today’s submission, consider this checklist of first-page ingredients from my book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling. While it's not a requirement that all of these elements must be on the first page, they can be, and I think you have the best chance of hooking a reader if they are.
Were I you, I'd examine my first page in the light of this list before submitting to the Flogometer. I use it on my own work.
A First-page Checklist
It begins to engage the reader with the character
Something is wrong/goes wrong or challenges the character
The character desires something.
The character takes action. Can be internal or external action: thoughts, deeds, emotions. This does NOT include musing about whatever.
There’s enough of a setting to orient the reader as to where things are happening.
It happens in the NOW of the story.
Backstory? What backstory? We’re in the NOW of the story.
Set-up? What set-up? We’re in the NOW of the story.
The one thing it must do: raise a story question.
Caveat: a first page can succeed without including all of these possibilities. They are simply tools you can use. In particular, a strong first-person voice with the right content can raise powerful story questions and a create page turn without doing all of the above. On the other hand, testing pages with the checklist no matter where they are in a story can help identify where a narrative lags and why it does.
Roberta sends the prologue and first chapter of The Factory Girl Murders.. The rest of the submission follows the break.
Prologue: Lent, 1905, Bialystok, Russia
Horses do not trample children, not even dead children. Avram didn’t know much about horses but he was sure of that. He had often petted the little white mare that pulled the Count’s drosky. Once he had fed her windfalls from the orchard. He liked the feeling of her coarse mane and the kindly way she nickered as she nuzzled his pockets for more apples, a dense, comforting smell rising off her like Ma’s bread baking in the oven.
There was nothing kind or comforting about the black stallion, the white flecks of sweat on his neck, or the fat Cossack astride him, wheeling the horse this way and that, sawing the iron bit back and forth until the horse’s mouth was ripped and bloody. The stallion reared up, hooves as big as dinner plates pawing the air. Even if he didn’t mean to, the horse might crush Avram.
People scattered all around Avram, zigzagging, leaving deep footprints in the snow, stumbling, screaming, shouting, black specks on a field of white snow patched with red blood. His uncle Tubal, and his cousin, Saul ran with peyash fluttering around their ears, prayers shawls fluttering, tzitzits hanging out from underneath. The women ran, shawls slipping from their shoulders, some holding screaming babies.
No one noticed him. Avram was safe, snug inside Laska. Her ribs poked into his stomach and legs. He didn’t mind. It will be over soon. His Ma always said this when bad things happened. Why didn’t Ma come and get him? Maybe he should wiggle out and find her.
Chapter 1: Lower Eastside, New York City, January, 1932
The two girls stood in front of the window of Bialy’s bakery, giggling so hard they were hanging onto each other, their too big matching grey coats making them look like a pair of fantail pigeons preening each other. The one Bialy liked was Giddy Brodsky. The other girl was her sister, Manka, the Communist. They lived at 34 Hester Street, apartment 3A, a tall, skinny, dark building pretty much like every tenement on the Lower Eastside. He found out about Giddy from Mrs. Lowenstein, the shadkin, the matchmaker. She dropped the information as casual he dropped bagel dough into boiling water. “Oh,” she had said, bunching up her rouged cheeks, “Giddy Brodsky? The one with the sister? On Hester Street she lives, next to the kosher butcher.”
In other words, not exactly the Frick mansion. Four apartments to a floor. One bedroom, a kitchen, a front parlour, ten people to a flat, plus a couple of boarders. If they were lucky, maybe a see-through between the kitchen and front parlour to let in light and an air shaft so you could hear everyone’s fights and smell everyone’s cooking. Toilet down the hall for all four families. Bialy could have easily found his way around Giddy’s apartment in the dark. The thought excited him. He grew a little hard.
Giddy living in such a dump! The thought pained him and yet, clamp your eyes on her. So clean, so well turned out in her boater hat and white blouse and long black skirt. She looked (snip)
In both pieces I liked the voice and the writing (this is a first draft and there are little glitches, but they’ll be cleared up, I’m sure). The prologue mostly worked for me. There’s a riveting scene happening, and we’re drawn into the story of a little boy. There was one clarity issue: the narrative tells us that he’s inside Laska. But we don’t know what that is. I suggest moving the description up from later so we can see the scene completely. Here’s the addition:
. . . inside Laska, the carcass of his mother’s cow. Laska died of old age in the fall when the ground was too frozen to bury her. Vultures and crows picked her clean.
The prologue earned a page turn from me, and it was worth the read. The opening of the first chapter, though, didn’t produce any riveting story questions as it introduced characters. There is a paragraph later that might have done the job:
“So what other girls you wanna know about?” said Mrs. Lowenstein. “You know me, I've lived here all my life. Everybody I know.” She lowered her voice. “I even knew that poor girl who was murdered last week, down by Grand.” She shook her head. “A tragedy, even if she was an Italian girl.”
The chapter opening needs some hint of jeopardy to come for someone, especially after the dramatic prologue action. But this is a promising start for me.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, It seemed to me that it could be educational to take a hard look at their first pages. If you don’t know about BookBub, it’s a pretty nifty way to try to build interest in your work. The website is here.
I’m mostly sampling books that are offered for free—BookBub says that readers are 10x more likely to click on a book that’s offered for free than a discounted book. Following is the first page and a poll. Then my comments follow, along with the book cover, the author’s name, and a link so you can take a look for yourself if you wish. At Amazon you can click on the Read More feature to get more of the chapter if you’re interested. There’s a second poll concerning the need for an editor.
Should this author have hired an editor? Here are the first 17 manuscript lines from the prologue of Atlantis Stolen (Sam Reilly Book 2).
The barren winter landscape was desolate in its beauty. While the sun approached its zenith, it did little to stop the cold stinging his weather-worn face while he worked. Albert Olsen filled his bucket with another shovel of sludge and then turned to climb the slippery crest of the muddy bank. Once on the ridge, he didn’t have far to walk before he could dump its contents down the other side.
From there, Olsen saw the other islands.
A strange mixture of mud and ice stood surrounded by a river whose partially frozen mouth looked as wide as an ocean when it thawed. Not that he paid much attention to any of it as he returned to fill yet another bucket.
It was strenuous and tediously boring work, but it needed to be done so the boats could survive. And if they didn’t, the little outcrop certainly wouldn’t.
So the sea canals needed to be built. They had begun as small ditches used to drain the marshland so basic farming could meet the needs of the settlement. But protecting the ships had warranted the effort to widen and deepen them to accommodate small boats, or ships at high tide.
Wrapped in a pair of thick animal hides, fur hat, and boots, even a day’s shoveling did little to allay his cold. The sort of cold that sunk into your bones and didn’t come out again long (snip)
Did this writer need an editor? My notes and a poll follow.
This book received 4.4 stars on Amazon. The writing is clean and the voice sounds good. We’re in a different sort of past, and that’s interesting. Other than that, though, what does this opening have to offer? Tension in either me, the reader (caused by what’s happening in the story) or scene tension (also caused by what’s happening in the story)? Nope. A man is cold and doing messy, boring work. I had no desire to see what happened next.
The title and the promise of a tale of fabled Atlantis are good, but none of that is on this page. More than that, this character dies at the end of the prologue and has no influence on the rest of the story. He is here simply to find a mysterious object and to show the dastardly deed of another character (who is also long dead when the first chapter opens). I plan to read deeper in this book, but it had better deliver pretty soon to keep me involved. This is the problem with starting with exposition rather than action in a scene.
Author Allison Winn Scotch, a best-selling author, was asked about self-publishing, something she did for one of her novels. Since much of my editing and book design is for self-publishers in addition to the book design I do for small publishers, I thought it would be good to share it with you.
While you can read “Keep These Tips in Mind When Considering Self-Publishing a Book” in its entirety here, these highlights caught my eye.
“I put the book through all the paces that it would have gone through had I opted for a traditional publisher.”
“I think it is super, super, super important to go through a very hearty editing process.”
As to that last one, if you follow my flogs of Bookbubbers who offer free books, you know how crucial that part of the process is.
But first--I'm wondering why submissions to the Flogometer have dried up. While I think it's educational to flog published works, I really like helping unpublished writers get fresh insights into their writing a lot more. So come on in, send your first chapter or prologue as an attachment to me. You could learning something. More that one flogged writer has let me know that they got consideration from agents after rewriting following a flogging, and some have gotten those agents.
Now to the Bookbubbers.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, It seemed to me that it could be educational to take a hard look at their first pages. If you don’t know about BookBub, it’s a pretty nifty way to try to build interest in your work. The website is here.
I’m mostly sampling books that are offered for free—BookBub says that readers are 10x more likely to click on a book that’s offered for free than a discounted book. Following is the first page and a poll. Then my comments follow, along with the book cover, the author’s name, and a link so you can take a look for yourself if you wish. At Amazon you can click on the Read More feature to get more of the chapter if you’re interested. There’s a second poll concerning the need for an editor.
Should this author have hired an editor? Here are the first 17 manuscript lines from the first chapter of in Blackman’s Coffin: A Sam Blackman Mystery (Sam Blackman Series Book 1. You can turn the page here.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, shaking me awake.
“Now you can pass as a local. They’ve all got one leg shorter than the other. Comes from being raised on the side of a mountain.” The woman sitting beside my hospital bed laughed at her own joke and then offered me a paper bag.
“Who the hell are you?” I pushed the control to incline the bed to where I could see her eye to eye. I didn’t need someone waking me up and rubbing my nose in my predicament.
She tossed the bag onto my chest. “Tikima Robertson. Marine Corps—retired. Never got over it so now I come to the V.A. hospital to harass the leathernecks who feel sorry for themselves.” She gave a salute. The dark metal hook at the end of her forearm brushed her arched eyebrow. “What I figure is if the Marines had had a few more good women, we’d have been out of Iraq three years ago.”
“Then let me be the first to encourage you to re-up.” I glanced down at the bag and saw a hardback copy of Elmore Leonard’s Up in Honey’s Room. I’m a Leonard fan and the gift cooled my anger a few degrees.
“I would have reenlisted, but when I type I tear up the computer keyboard.” She waved the prosthetic hook in front of me. “So the Corps didn’t want me back in public disinformation.”
I snapped off the sheet and uncovered my maimed left leg.
Did this writer need an editor? My notes and a poll follow.
This book received 4.5 stars on Amazon. I looked through several possibilities today, hoping for one that got me to turn the page. For the first few, poor writing accompanied by poor storytelling nixed the book immediately, and I just didn’t want to go there.
But this book starts with a strong voice and an edge between two sympathetic characters—at least, I found wounded warriors sympathetic. There isn’t exactly conflict here, but a sense that it could happen. That was the story question for me—what will happen between these two? I read on and wasn’t disappointed. The characters remained prickly, but did manage to connect, and I wanted more of their story. Spoiler alert: this is a mystery, and it’s her murder that the book is about. In a sense, this is backstory. But it also goes to character, those of both of these people.
There were little things I’d suggest as an editor that the writer look at, but they were little bitty things. For example, the first sentence has a filter—"I felt." It could have been more of his direct experience if it had been:
I was privileged to be invited to be one of more than 50 authors, editors, agents, and other publishing pros to contribute an essay to Author In Progress: A No-Holds-Barred Guide to What it Really Takes to Get Published. It comes out November 1, but is available for pre-order now.
The essayists are regular contributors to Writer Unboxed, one of the best and most helpful writer blogs out there. I’ve been chipping in almost since its start 10 or so years ago, and now do a monthly feature, “Flog a Pro,” in which we take a look at current bestsellers for the power of their opening pages.
My contribution to Author In Progress is “Plot It, or Pants it?: How to Decide if Pantsing Is the Right Approach for Your Novel.” A companion article takes a look at the values of plotting, including a dialogue between me and that writer. Those are just two of many valuable essays that could sparks insights to your writing and process.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, It seemed to me that it could be educational to take a hard look at their first pages. If you don’t know about BookBub, it’s a pretty nifty way to try to build interest in your work. The website is here.
I’m mostly sampling books that are offered for free—BookBub says that readers are 10x more likely to click on a book that’s offered for free than a discounted book. Following is the first page and a poll. Then my comments follow, along with the book cover, the author’s name, and a link so you can take a look for yourself if you wish. At Amazon you can click on the Read More feature to get more of the chapter if you’re interested. There’s a second poll concerning the need for an editor.
Should this author have hired an editor? Here are the first 17 manuscript lines from the first chapter of in Creatures of Appetite, Jacob Thorne Book 1.
Maureen dragged her daughter Tami through the crowded outdoor Flea Market on the hunt for a deal. Snow fell, covering the school parking lot, the entire market, customers and vendors alike, but that stopped no one. In Nebraska during the winter, snow fell nearly every other day, but the Flea Market was but once a month.
And no one looked forward to it more than Maureen. While some women were addicted to soap operas, some to pills and others to Facebook, Maureen’s drug of choice was secondhand sales.
It wasn’t from economical necessity, for her husband Richard was a good provider with a decent job and good benefits. It was simply that the search for bargains was Maureen’s personal primal urge. Each find a treasure, each dollar saved a victory, and as a result very few items in Maureen’s household were brand new, except for her husband’s golf clubs and, of course, everyone’s underwear.
Even Richard, divorced when he met Maureen ten years earlier, would remark that she’d been primarily interested in him because he was used goods, but he smiled when he said that. And it was easy for him to have a sense of humor about it, since he wasn’t forced to accompany Maureen on her excursions as Tami was.
Tami, only five years old and definitely not used goods, was very much bored by it all, (snip)
Did this writer need an editor? My notes and an alternative opening with a poll follow.
This book received 4.5 stars on Amazon. But what moved readers to go past this opening page? What happens here? A woman and her child are at a flea market, and we get backstory about the woman and her husband and her living situation. Tension? No. Story question? No.
And why the long introduction to a character who does not appear in the rest of the story? Maureen and her daughter are simply devices for discovering a body.
I looked further (past some head-hopping) for a stronger opening. Here it is, a poll follows.
Tami’s mother spotted a marked-down Crock-Pot on a Flea Market table in the school parking lot and released Tami’s hand to beat two other housewives to it. Tami took advantage and made for the playground.
She wandered over to the swings, her boots crunching in the snow, and gave each one a push to watch it go back and forth. Two boys, maybe seven, a couple of years older than her, stood next to the jungle gym on the other end of the playground. The boys beckoned Tami over.
“You wanna see something really scary?” the larger of the two asked. The smaller boy pointed a snow-covered mitten into the shadows underneath the jungle gym.
Tami wasn’t quite able to make out what was on the ground. She slipped under the gym bars to get a closer look. The boys stayed right where they were.
“Tami Sue Paulson!” her mother yelled.
Tami finally got near enough for a good look at it and stopped right in her tracks. She put her mitten-covered thumb into her mouth, her eyes wide as saucers. Her mother, Crock-Pot tucked under one arm, marched over to the jungle gym.
“Tami Sue Paulson, how many times do I have to tell you about wandering off-” She stopped. The Crock-Pot fell from her hands and broke on the ground. Her face froze for an instant, and then melted into a scream.
Recently a writer submitted a very well written first chapter to FtQ that I felt lacked the tension and story question needed to provoke a page turn.
It wasn’t just me. 80% of FtQ readers voted No.
But I liked the work, so I delved deeper into the chapter and found a narrative section at the end of the chapter that, for me, made a much stronger opening—it engaged me with the character who had a problem, and I wanted to know what happened next. With very minor tinkering to make it work as an opening, I offered it as an alternative.
FtQ readers responded with 77.78% Yes votes.
So the swing was from 80% Noto 78% Yes.
And yet this writer, instead of thinking about the differences in the two narratives that would account for such a huge shift in page turns, lambasted me for “messing with my work” and “rewriting it in his own way, out of the character’s voice.” I had added three words for clarity and changed one verb tense, the rest was all the writer’s.
The last line of the alternative narrative was the last line in the chapter. The writer said they had placed it at the end of the chapter because they wanted the reader to, guess what, go on to the next chapter.
EXACTLY!
But the writer was unable to see that placing it at the end of the opening page was what made many more readers want to turn the page.
The original opening received 20% Yes votes, the alternative earned 78% yesses. I would think any writer would want to dig into that and understand what was going on. Why did 4 times as many readers prefer one opening to another? But this writer dug in, all right, with their heels, believing that readers other than me and FtQ readers will read pages and pages despite a lack of, well, story.
I wish that writer luck, and hope that I’m mistaken about the appeal of the narrative. But I’ve seen too many agents and editors say that they need to be captured by story on the first page. I’ve conducted too many first-page workshops at writers conferences in which first pages were rejected by the class time and again because of the same lack—but in those workshops the writers said thank you. One writer even voted against his own submission when its turn came. That was an open-minded writer who got it.
So love your words. Love your characters. Love your story. But never think it can’t be improved. And don’t deny hand-in-front-of-face evidence that readers don’t want to read on. And don’t turn a blind eye to an alternative that works. Analyze. Think. It’s up to your words and story to make readers read on. If they don’t, the fault isn’t theirs.
Many of the folks who utilize BookBub are self-published, and because we hear over and over the need for self-published authors to have their work edited, It seemed to me that it could be educational to take a hard look at their first pages. If you don’t know about BookBub, it’s a pretty nifty way to try to build interest in your work. The website is here.
I’m mostly sampling books that are offered for free—BookBub says that readers are 10x more likely to click on a book that’s offered for free than a discounted book. Following is the first page and a poll. Then my comments follow, along with the book cover, the author’s name, and a link so you can take a look for yourself if you wish. At Amazon you can click on the Read More feature to get more of the chapter if you’re interested. There’s a second poll concerning the need for an editor.
This set of four novels was offered for 99 cents and I bought it. I often buy these incredibly inexpensive sets for reading while I’m on my treadmill exercising for a half-hour a day, especially fantasy series. You can hardly lose at that price.
Should this author have hired an editor? Here are the first 17 manuscript lines from the prologue of volume 1 in Alastair Stone Chronicles Box Set: Books 1 through 4.
Adelaide Bonham was convinced that her house hated her.
She clutched her heavy comforter tighter around her bony shoulders, but it didn’t help. Mainly because it hadn’t been the sudden wave of cold rolling through her bedroom that caused the shaking in her wrinkled hands.
Not entirely, anyway.
The first time she’d heard the voices, a couple of weeks ago, she thought it was the workmen. The house and its grounds were so vast that there were always workers around, doing some task or another: repairing, cleaning, landscaping. She thought it was odd that they were still there so late in the day, but there’d been enough exceptions over the years that she didn’t worry about it. She mentioned the voices to Iona in passing, then promptly forgot about them. Despite her love for thrillers and cozy murder mysteries, Adelaide Bonham wasn’t a woman prone to flights of fancy or unreasonable fears.
The second time she heard the voices, about a week later, she didn’t tell anyone. She had a good reason: at eighty-nine years old, she was well aware that anything out of the ordinary she claimed she saw or heard would be instantly attributed to that dismissive diagnosis of senior citizens everywhere: her mind’s starting to go, poor dear.
Adelaide was certain her mind was not starting to go. Sure, she might have her occasional (snip)
Did this writer need an editor? My notes and a poll follow.
Usually prologues don’t work for me, but this one did by raising story questions—does her house hate her? How can a house hate? What will this sympathetic old-lady character do? And so on.
More than that, the writing is clear and strong. It gives you the sense that you’re in good hands, the hands of a pro. So, based on reading more on Amazon, I bought this and look forward to entertaining miles on my treadmill.