A lackluster first chapter can turn readers off and make them abandon the book before they've given it a fair chance.
I’m a brutal reader. If the first page of a novel doesn’t pique my interest, I rarely give it a try unless the premise is one I’m super interested in. Even when I do keep reading, the book has until the end of the first chapter to hook me or not. If it doesn’t, I don’t buy that book—even if I love the premise.
I can’t tell you how many book samples I’ve downloaded that never won my dollar vote. Some of them just “weren’t for me” books, but often, they aren’t doing enough to make me want to keep reading. I make it to the end of the sample in about half the books I read, and probably buy about half of those. That’s a lot of books that don’t make the cut.
You might think those poor rejected books were just badly written, but most of them were “good books.” The writing was strong, the characters were well-drawn, and the text flowed smoothly.
But each made a fatal mistake.
