If you want to make it in this business, you need a hook.

– Original Author Unknown, but I’m pretty sure everyone in the music industry has heard and/or said this at least once. The other day, while watching Zendaya’s Neverland on YouTube, this line came up. Naturally (because I’m a bit obsessed with all things regarding writing), I wondered how this line applied to the publishing industry. The obvious answer is, if you want a reader to buy your book (assuming they’ve made it to your book’s Amazon page and are looking at a sample), you need a hook.

A few days ago (or maybe weeks or months, I have no idea, most days are a blur of school work, writing, editing, cooking, and cleaning), I posted a meme on Facebook regarding an author’s love of writing a book’s blurb.

{sarcasm} We love to summarize roughly 80,000 words into 500 or fewer. It’s the best thing ever. {/sarcasm}

If you’re an author, you probably got eye-bleed from staring daggers at the screen just now. At the very least you’ve got a headache from rolling your eyes so hard. This is not our favorite thing to do. Unless you’re weird like me. I’m strange even by writers’ standards. But there’s something here that occurred to me when I first started writing and it’s still something I believe now, three years later.

If you want to make it in this business you need a hook, and it’s easier to start with one.

More specifically, you need to be able to write a hook. I’m grateful I found the Snowflake Guy’s method when I first started writing before I ‘knew’ that writing a blurb was hard. I still struggle with them sometimes, but they’re not so bad really because I usually write them before I write the story.

No, really. Randy Ingermanson’s Snowflake Method pretty much trains you to do this. I’ll admit, I don’t do all the steps in that process. But two of his steps leave you with two things you’ll need for your market copy anyway. So why not do them in the beginning, when the idea is new and your enthusiasm is high?

Check out that link. Give it a good once over, and then come back here. I have a challenge for you. I know you’ve got a backlog of ideas. You may even have a stockpile of story ideas in a notebook or file somewhere. Grab a few of those ideas, just three or four. (If you have Scrivener, use it. If not, consider getting it. You can try Scrivener for free and it’s awesome for organization.) Now look at Randy’s steps one and two.

For each of your ideas, write a one-line and a one-paragraph summary. That’s it.

Is it easier to write the elevator pitch before you write the story? How about the blurb? I find it is, but I have yet to meet anyone else who does it this way. Come on, guys. I can’t be the only one. Give it a try and let me know if it works for you. You can leave a comment on this post, or email me directly at jpwest6 (at) gmail (dot) com. I’d love to hear from you.

Good luck and happy writing!

~ Jess (@West1Jess)