Change in flogging focus:It occurs to me that free books have a very low bar to clear for making a “sale,” and their first pages don’t have to do much to clear that hurdle. But ask me to pay for a book? There’s a challenge. So I’m switching to flogging books that cost, starting with the 99¢ variety. The challenge is not that you would pay 99¢ on the basis of a single page, but if you would go to Amazon in order to turn the page a read more with the idea in mind that you might buy it.
Writers, send your prologue/first chapter to FtQ for a “flogging” critique. Email as an attachment. In your email, include your name, permission to use the first page, and, if it’s okay, permission to post the rest of the prologue/chapter.
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’s educational to take a hard look at their first pages. A poll follows concerning the need for an editor.
When you evaluate today’s opening page, consider how well it uses elements from the checklist of first-page ingredients from my book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling.
Donald Maass, literary agent and author of many books on writing, says, “Independent editor Ray Rhamey’s first-page checklist is an excellent yardstick for measuring what makes openings interesting.”
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.
Here are the first 17 lines of the first chapter for Schooled in Death, a mystery. A poll follows the opening page below. If you don’t want to turn the page, then I’m thinking that this author should have hired an editor.
It was Monday. Always the worst day of the week in the working world. So when my phone rang before I’d showered, brushed my teeth, or even opened my eyes, I knew I was about to be the recipient of bad news and a summons to someone else’s troubles.
I was not wrong.
“Is that Thea, then?” a man’s voice asked.
Reluctantly, I agreed that it was.
He didn’t need to give his name. His gentle Welsh lilt announced my caller was Gareth Wilson, headmaster of The Simmons School. Gareth was the most optimistic person I knew. Usually, just hearing his voice improved my mood. Today, his tones were shot with pain at the situation he found himself in, a situation he rapidly described. One of their young boarding students, a girl no one knew was pregnant, had given birth in her dorm bathroom during the night and left her baby in the trash. It was only because another student had heard the faint sounds of crying that the tiny infant had been found and saved. Now the baby was in a neonatal ICU and the terrified mother, only a child herself, was facing potential criminal charges.
Gareth needed my help—or rather the help of my business, EDGE Consulting—to manage the situation on his campus and in the wider world. Immediately if not sooner. That was the problem with being a private school trouble-shooter—when people called me, their (snip)
You can read more here. This novel earned 4.4 stars on Amazon. It’s 99 cents or free with Kindle Unlimited. The writing is solid and the voice professional, so we start with expectations of something readable ahead. And I think this one delivers with strong story questions raised about the student and what will happen with the baby.
However, I think this could have been a much stronger opening if some of the setup about her business and the description of her caller had been trimmed so that the following could be on the first page:
“It’s complicated, Thea,” Gareth said. “The girl insists that she has never had sex, never mind been pregnant, and the baby can’t possibly be hers, even though she has obviously just given birth."
I would cut the last paragraph that’s on the first page and put this in for a real a page-turner. Your thoughts?
Cover critique
The title and author are well handled. For me, I think the photo of a girl fleeing into the dark without the added woman would have been more effective. But the cover basically works and does raise story questions as well as setting a tone of dangerous things happening. Your thoughts?
Writing Craft Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling
Mystery (coming of age) The Summer Boy
Science Fiction Gundown Free ebooks.