Flog a Pro: would you pay to turn the first page of this bestseller?
By Ray Rhamey | February 18, 2016 |
Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.
Here’s the question:
Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents.
So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 cents for the rest of the chapter every time you sample a book’s first page.
Please judge by storytelling quality, not by genre or content—some reject an opening page immediately because of genre, but that’s not a good enough reason when the point is to analyze for storytelling strength.
This novel was number one on the New York Times hardback fiction bestseller list for February 2, 2016. How strong is the opening page—would this have hooked an agent if it came in from an unpublished writer? Following are what would be the first 17 manuscript lines of Chapter 1.
The trip by jeep from the small village near Luena to Malanje in Angola, in southwest Africa, followed by a train ride to Luanda, the capital, had taken seven hours. The drive from Luena was long and arduous due to unexploded land mines in the area, which required extreme diligence and caution to avoid as they drove. After forty years of conflict and civil war, the country was still ravaged and in desperate need of all the help outside sources could provide, which was why Ginny Carter had been there, sent by SOS Human Rights. SOS/ HR was a private foundation based in New York that sent human rights workers around the globe. Her assignments were usually two or three months long in any given location, occasionally longer. She was sent in as part of a support team, to address whatever human rights issues were being violated or in question, typically to assist women and children, or even to address the most pressing physical needs in a trouble spot somewhere, like lack of food, water, medicine, or shelter. She frequently got involved in legal issues, visiting women in prisons, interfacing with attorneys, and trying to get the women fair trials. SOS took good care of their workers and was a responsible organization, but the work was dangerous at times. She had taken an in-depth training course before they sent her into the field initially, and had been taught about everything from digging ditches and purifying water, to extensive first aid, but nothing had prepared her for what she had seen since. She had learned a great deal about man’s cruelty to man and the plight of people in (snip)
My vote and notes after the fold.
This is Blue by Danielle Steel. Was this opening page compelling to you?
My vote: no.
Well, as you should expect from an author published by a major house, Delacorte Press, Danielle Steel’s writing is clean and professional. For this reader, the list of virtues stops right about there. I was soon wishing for a paragraph break, and right after that wishing for something to happen to this character rather than being submerged in backstory.
She’s leaving what would be a great, tense setting for a story. But she’s leaving that while we’re filled in on the “then” of the story. The next few pages, should you turn this one, deal with arriving at the airport, taking a cab, getting home, all laced with more setup and backstory. I wonder if a literary agent would have ever gotten even that far—my bet is that she would be crying “Where’s the story?” and then stomping the delete key with her index finger and going on to the next submission. As you might guess, I didn’t turn the page.
Your thoughts?
Tip: You can actually turn the page for free by utilizing Amazon’s “Look inside” feature, and I recommend doing that if you have the time and interest. Blue is here.
Stop by my Monday “Flog a BookBubber” feature on Flogging the Quill. If you’re familiar with BookBub, it’s a site that offers free or very low cost ebooks. It is heavily used by self-publishers, though established authors are sometimes there.
We often see the meme on the Internet that self-published authors should have had editing done before they published. So the new Flog a BookBubber posts take a look at opening pages to see if that’s true. You can vote on turning the page and then on whether or not they should have sought an editor. Visit on Mondays and take a look.
[coffee]
Ray Rhamey is the author of five novels and one writing craft book, Mastering the Craft of Compelling Storytelling. He’s also an editor of book-length fiction and designs book covers and interiors for Indie authors and small presses. His website, crrreative.com, offers an a la carte menu of creative services for writers and publishers. Learn more about Ray’s books at rayrhamey.com.
This is the kind of opening that would land me a rejection letter. The opening is dry and, essentially, an info dump. Hopefully, the author gets into the action immediately after this, but I felt that all of this opening could have been saved for later, sprinkled in as the reader needed it.
I would not buy the book.
Act first, explain later. This does the opposite. So, no.
It lost me on the first sentence. I plowed on, but it just never got better.
I hear that Danielle Steel has some great books, but I doubt that this is one of them.
What an outrage! I have an immediate image of a writer forced to turn the crank at such speed that she never even polishes her own draft. Obviously, if I info-dumped like this anywhere in my epic fantasy I’d be shouted out of the room. I read this out loud to my lovely wife, and she interrupted to say “who is ‘she'”? Look at that. One mention of the MC’s name, and then a sea of “she” to the end of the page. That’s as impersonal as it gets- this is not even a good synopsis.
A few years back, I got some great advice at a fiction writer’s workshop: always start a story “in scene.” This doesn’t read like a scene; it’s all back story.
Nope. Three sentences in, I started skimming for action. Never found it. Considering the setting, the author really could’ve made that first page tense.
Oh, and I assumed the quoted section was incorrectly formatted on the blog page until I read your comments. That’s all one paragraph? Ah, well. Blessings to her and her readers, but I’ll pass on this one.
Too much detail and backstory in the beginning. Took too long to get to the protagonist. Lost me after the long and convoluted first sentence!
Nope. As a reader I found it dull, dull, dull: no voice, no characterization, no action. As an editor, I saw plenty to mark up. Steel’s fans like it though. Out of some 500 reviews on Amazon, 96% rate it with 4 and 5 stars. So I assume it gets better. I noticed in reading farther into the chapter, many paragraphs in a row began with the same form “She.” “As she cleared customs… She could have gone … She cared nothing … She was worn and tired …She had nothing … She walked … She opened the door…” Gosh, don’t they have line editors at Delacorte Press?!
The sentences are all about the same length and too long. It was lacking a call to adventure. It would have been better to work all this backstory into the first few chapters and start with an active scene instead.
Baaaaackstoryyyyyzzzzzzz…
On and on and on… as others have commented here.
Then on page 8, opening a paragraph, I read…
‘She was worn out and tired…’
The whole thing so far is written with such minor redundancies that they just pile up to one huge redundant back-story.
On page 10 comes the first hint of dialogue…”Where are you from in Pakistan?”….
As if by this time I care.
It’s such lazy writing.
I hope Danielle Steele reads this blog.
I read three sentences before falling asleep. This is obviously an author who has got to the stage where she’s dialling it in. Awful.
Just goes to prove that a so-called established writer can get away with tripe that a beginner would get crucified for. I’ve read more engaging fan fiction. Heck, I’ve written better fan fiction.
I’ll keep my 30 cents.
I read this book a week or so ago and recognized the writing immediately. Yes, my manuscript would be rejected if this were mine.
That said, we all know if you’re Danielle Steel, it doesn’t matter. Is that fair? No.
Enough said.
Nope. It droned on and on. I hung in there hoping something would happen. I wouldn’t buy this book.
This is still more proof — as if we needed more — that an established bestselling author doesn’t have to follow the same “rules” the rest of us do. My editor would never allow me to start a book this way. I wouldn’t be inclined to do it, in any case, because when I read I want to get right into the story instead of being bludgeoned senseless with dry backstory, and I try to write the kind of book I enjoy reading.
There’s an element of how fiction has evolved here, too. I think it was okay in the early 80s for a little data-dumping. Readers expected it. I never was bothered by it then, but now it stands out as amateur and boring. This is not a particularly artful data-dump, either. But as a teen, Barbara Taylor Bradford’s A Woman of Substance was one of my faves and that didn’t start out so well, either. My other favorite was Dickens’ Bleak House and Du Maurier’s Rebecca, but those authors belabor a fence and fog, which enhances theme and setting and becomes character. GREAT post. Thanks for letting me vote.
Oh, dear: the power of being a name author. You no longer have to be good. The rest of us have to be good, and may we never stop being good after we have become names.
But why does a bestselling author, known and loved by her readers, get away with writing like an eleventh grader for Civics class? Because her very name contains the promise of the novel—this nobel but beleaguered heroine buffeted by X will suffer untold Y, encounter handsome Z and live happily… Her formula works. Readers skim the boring stuff, right? They know she’ll get to the good part, and maybe they’ll learn something about (fill in the blank.)
I haven’t read this kind of stuff since I was a teenager, but there was a delicious kind of thrill in imagining what the heroine would be subjected to before she got her guy…
But the thrill didn’t last long. I’ll take the thrill of beautiful craft–sentence, plot, character, story—any day over this.
BORING.
I recently finished reading Middlemarch, so am inclined to be a bit backstory-friendly…but no. There was nothing here to make me *care* about the character and the situation enough to give this a page-turn. I know I’m not Steel’s intended reader, and I’m not writing for her audience either. So I’m not really offended that she’s doing so well–just motivated to do my own best, starting with page one.
Which is a wordy way of agreeing with everyone else here, LOL! ;-)
Three words: Holy backstory, Batman!
More succinctly: Nope.
The style was dull and informative from the first sentence. She shouldn’t need to explain where Angola is, for instance.
I’ve spent a little time on Amazon going through a few first pages of Danielle Steel’s previous novels.
That is her style. She opens with pages of information dump and backstory.
That’s it.
So who knows how she gets past the dragon at the gate of her publishers. Unless the dragon’s name is “Success”.
I hate it, of course.
But the bottom line here is that the bulk of readers of romance fiction don’t care about information dumps or backstory. They care about STORY.
And readers of romance fiction don’t read blogs like this, so they don’t know the difference.
Um, I’m a huge reader of romance fiction and I read this blog. Religiously. And I don’t love Danielle Steele. Must I point out that romance readers are as varied in their tastes as other readers?
Yes, we do; and yes, we do.
My humble apologies, M McKenzie. I didn’t think many READERS of any genre come to these writers’ blogs.
But do readers care about information dumps and backstory taking up the first chapter of a novel?
It’s the writers who are so picky it’s almost impossible for some of us to just sit back and enjoy a story.
(Please note, everybody, I said SOME OF US)
No. I quit in the middle or so of the first sentence. It was a geographical info dump. As someone else said, boring.
But . . . if this was offered to ANY literary agent, he or she would grab it with both hands and easily flog it to any number of publishers i.e. both the agent and the publisher would gobble it up on name alone. That’s what newbies are up against.
“Issues” related to human rights or anything else can’t be violated, but all the basic rules of show-don’t-tell can be violated. It does nothing for my morale to know that I write much better than Danielle Steele does. Her success demonstrates how unimportant basic standards are to the vast majority of readers. But then I must admit that I knew this already.
There was so much she could have done to even spice up the backstory, but there was no attempt to do so. She mentioned some of the things she saw, but no examples. I don’t like info dumps any better than the next person, but this was horrible! No, I am a newbie and I would never consider writing like this because I’d put myself to sleep!
I think there is a wide gap between impressing an agent or publisher, and impressing the average reader. And when you have a track record like Steel – who has been published for half a century and has six pages of listings on Amazon –
Well, it may be statistics that count in the end.
Yeah that first line is abysmal. That first page has no personality, we know what she does but not why she does it. One of my favorite first lines comes from Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. “The moon exploded without warning and for no apparent reason.” Granted the first character isn’t introduced by the first page, but there is instant tension.
Another good first line from a book I just finish, Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. “Prince Raoden woke up that morning not knowing he had been cursed for all eternity.”
why am I not getting the latest comments about this post?
I totally agree with the No votes. Out of curiosity I noticed the book hit number one on the NYT bestseller list right out of the gate. The blurb reads: A woman whose life has been shattered befriends a homeless boy.”
I’d say name recognition and a premise that clicked with her fan base are what catapulted this to the number one spot. What can I say? I’m a Libra, things have to balance out.
Reads like a paragraph plucked from the middle of magazine non-fiction . . but not as artful.
Ouch!
A tedious snooze-fest for me. Danielle Steele is lucky to have a loyal fan base that won’t mind this awful writing.
Vincent Bracco, it hit me as I read your comment.
***the book hit number one on the NYT bestseller list right out of the gate***
How do we KNOW it hit the best-seller list? How do we know it was not just advertising designed to sell more copies?
I often wonder (in the world of publishing) what is true and what is false.