“So, what’s your book about?”
This is a wonderful question, but it’s also a terrifying one. It’s almost impossible to fit all of what makes your book amazing, all those nuances of plot or that savvy advice, into an elevator pitch or even a 5-minute spiel.
If you say the right things, the asker of that question will be chomping at the bit for your book. Say the wrong things, and you’ll get a firm but polite brush-off and a lost reader.
No matter how good your content is, it’s not going to sell itself unless you give it a little nudge. You have to shape how you package your summary—whether it’s verbal, a query letter, or back cover copy—to grab a reader.
Every part of your book should be interesting, but interesting is not the same thing as good sales material. Details that will sell your book are always attention-grabbing, but not all attention-grabbing things make you want to buy a book.
As to what makes a good hook, it’s simple: make it specific with people-drive examples, but don’t get bogged down in details.
If you’ve put together a how-to book or a self-help book, it’s important that instead of using sweeping, generic generalizations for issues a book tackles, you pick a specific example that illustrates your point. People are engineered to be more attracted to something if they have to wrestle a little bit with it.
By giving an example of an individual experience (it doesn’t have to be your own!), your potential reader will have to work to apply it to their own life (but don’t make them work too hard. A specific-yet-broadly applicable example is best), which will not only help the concept stick, but they’ll become more self-aware, which is the point with this genre of books! A personalized example in your “my book is about…” speech will also prove that that book is truly useful!
If you’ve written a high fantasy novel with a setting detailed enough to give Tolkien a run for his money, you might be tempted to start talking about your imagined country’s political history or geography or some sort of set-up background information. Don’t. Instead, shift the focus of your hook. Make it character-driven. The setting won’t grab a potential reader; how your characters interact with and assert their agency in that setting will. It’s what will separate your book from everyone else’s. Why is Mordor memorable? Because of what the Fellowship went through to get there!
Give only bare-bones information about your world. Readers have to fall in love with a character before they care even a little about an entire world.
Unfocus your eyes and look at your book from as high of a bird’s eye view as possible. Is your book, at it’s heart, a love story? A coming-of-age novel? A way to make people happy? Figure out the core of your story, your ultimate goal for what the readers should take away from it, and build outwards.
