For the next few weeks, we’re going to look at some of the most common issues I’ve seen in first chapters.
In today’s intro, we’ll look at why your first chapter is so incredibly important and difficult. Beginning next week, we’ll address specific issues and how to address them.
Why it matters
On one hand, it seems obvious that you want your first chapter to work flawlessly. But every chapter is important. You can’t have a killer first chapter and then let the story drift along aimlessly for the next forty chapters.
But readers won’t get to the second chapter, your brilliant piece of writing where the story gets great, if the first chapter doesn’t hook them.
That’s the goal of the opening chapter: grab the reader by the eyeballs and the gut so they want to keep reading. So they must keep reading.
Who is that reader? Let’s look at a few different readers you may want your first chapter to hook.
Literary agents
If you’d like to have your book traditionally published, you can’t just send it to some Random Penguin and say, “Here’s my masterpiece. I’d like this to come out in time for Christmas.”
Your first step in the traditional publishing process is to land a literary agent.
If that’s your goal, a literary agent will be your first reader. The only one that matters at this point.
Every agent receives thousands of queries per year. They may take on one or two new clients. Maybe. They’re looking for that book that grabs their attention and that they believe they can sell to a publisher.
Agents typically ask for your first chapter or something along this line. It varies. Some ask for your first chapter, or first twenty pages, or ten or even five pages.
If it doesn’t immediately intrigue them, they’re not going to think, “Maybe this gets better in the next chapter” then ask you to send more. You’ll get a polite and probably AI-generated rejection form letter, if that. Mostly you’ll just never hear back.
Even your stellar first chapter can be rejected for a wide variety of reasons, so you don’t want to add any other reasons. You want to find that one agent who loves it.
I once received a rejection letter from an agent… two years after the book had published.
Agents often never make it through the entire first chapter. If they hit something on page one or page eleven that takes them out of the story, they hit the reject button and move to the next query letter in the hundreds in their inbox.
If you do land an agent, fantastic! That’s just step one of the process since your agent may never successfully sell your book to a publishing company.
Yes, it’s brutal and may not seem very fair. It’s the way the world of book publishing works.
But you don’t get past step one unless your first chapter is spot on.
Small presses
On the other hand, if you’ve decided to forgo the literary agent route and instead submit your work to small publishers, university presses, hybrid publishers, or some similar company, guess what?
They tend to follow the same process as agents. They get more submissions than they could possibly publish, and they’re in the business of selling books for a profit. They are selective. (If they’re not, you want nothing to do with them anyway.)
An acquisitions editor at a small press is reviewing submissions in much the same way as an agent does.
Whether an agent or a small press, if they absolutely love your first chapter, they may ask for the rest of the manuscript. So yes, the whole book must be exceptional to land a contract or agency representation.
The first chapter is what gets your little toe in the door.
Readers
Maybe you’re going to skip all that time and effort and pain and heartache to self-publish and get your book to readers directly without those pesky gatekeepers.
The good news is you have lots of options. Publishing is no longer just an exclusive club for big-name authors with powerful literary agents. The good news is you can publish that book.
The bad news is that anyone and everyone can publish a book. And they do.
You’re not competing for an agent with thousands of other manuscripts, you’re competing with millions of other books for readers.
The most recent numbers I could find are that there are more than 40 million titles for sale on Amazon. (That was almost two years ago, so it might be 50 million or 500 million by now, I don’t know.)
Eventually, if you’re lucky and have planned and promoted well, you might attract a potential reader.
Maybe the cover artwork grabs that reader’s attention. They read the book description and find it intriguing. It’s the genre and type of book they enjoy. They open the book (or Amazon sample) and read the first page or two.
If your opening page or two doesn’t deliver or there are serious issues, you just lost a potential sale.
But they liked your opening page, and you sold your first book.
Yay!
What if that reader isn’t captivated by your first chapter? If something feels amiss. Something feels off, even if the average reader can’t pinpoint what it is exactly. Or it doesn’t hold their attention like they thought it would.
Life is too busy and too short to waste time reading a book that doesn’t captivate you.
The reader puts the book down and never goes back to it. They might even return it for a refund (you lost that sale).
Worse, they leave a one-star review on Amazon or Goodreads to alert everyone else that the first chapter was such a dud that they couldn’t finish reading.
That might cost you a dozen or a hundred potential sales.
I’ll say what goes without saying: This is not what you want.
It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked or how much your mom loved the book.
Your book could be dead in the water before you sell a second copy. There are 40 million other choices for readers.
First chapter goals
To land that agent or publishing contract or reader, your first chapter has a lot of heavy lifting to do. It doesn’t matter how great the rest of your book is if your first chapter fails to do its job.
What is that job?
Establish an interesting setting
Introduce a compelling character that readers care about
Create intriguing story questions that will hook readers
There are a lot of moving parts to accomplish these three specific goals.
Those moving parts are what we’ll dive into over the next ten weeks.