Flog a Pro: Would You Turn the First Page of this Bestseller?
By Ray Rhamey | November 17, 2022 |
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. In a sense, time is money for a literary agent working her way through a raft of submissions, and she is spending that resource whenever she turns a 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.
How strong is the opening page of this novel—would it, all on its own, hook an agent if it was submitted by an unpublished writer?
A hundred years ago, Biloxi was a bustling resort and fishing community on the Gulf Coast. Some of its 12,000 people worked in shipbuilding, some in the hotels and restaurants, but for the majority their livelihoods came from the ocean and its bountiful supply of seafood. The workers were immigrants from Eastern Europe, most from Croatia where their ancestors had fished for centuries in the Adriatic Sea. The men worked the schooners and trawlers harvesting seafood in the Gulf while the women and children shucked oysters and packed shrimp for ten cents an hour. There were forty canneries side by side in an area known as the Back Bay. In 1925, Biloxi shipped twenty million tons of seafood to the rest of the country. Demand was so great, and the supply so plentiful, that by then the city could boast of being the “Seafood Capital of the World.”
The immigrants lived in either barracks or shotgun houses on Point Cadet, a peninsula on the eastern edge of Biloxi, around the corner from the beaches of the Gulf. Their parents and grandparents were Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, as well as Croatians, and they had been quick to assimilate into the ways of their new country. The children learned English, taught it to their parents, and rarely spoke the mother tongues at home. Most of their surnames had been unpronounceable to customs officials and had been modified and Americanized at the Port of New Orleans and Ellis Island. In Biloxi cemeteries, there were tombstones with names like (snip)
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You can turn the page and read more here. Kindle users can request a sample sent to their devices, and I’ve found this to be a great way to evaluate a narrative that is borderline on the first page and see if it’s worth my coin.
This novel was number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list for November 20, 2022. Were the opening pages of the first chapter of The Boys from Biloxi by John Grisham compelling?
My vote: A resounding NO.
This book received 4.5 out of 5 stars on Amazon. I think it’s wonderful that John Grisham has made a zillion dollars with his novels—I’ve even enjoyed several of them. And that he can indulge himself like this and get paid for it. I’d like that for myself. But I kinda resent this whatever-it-is being labeled “A legal thriller” on its Amazon page.
Judge for yourself and scroll through the six Look Inside chapters–14,000 words!–of this, er, narrative. Thousands of words and nary a story in sight. Never any tension in the air. Not a thrill to be had. It’s a history lesson for most of those words and more. Setup. Backstory. Nostory. C’mon, Doubleday, do your job. Require your thriller writer to actually deliver a thriller, not a tour of his research into Biloxi. Spend the money you put out on this into discovering and launching new writers (hey, I have some novels). At the very least, haul out a dictionary and update yourself on the meaning of the word “thriller.”
I just can’t see an agent being told by an unknown writer that this is a thriller and snapping this up.
Your thoughts?
You’re invited to a flogging—your own You see here the insights fresh eyes bring to the performance of bestseller first pages, so why not do the same with the opening of your WIP? Submit your prologue/first chapter to my blog, Flogging the Quill, and I’ll give you my thoughts and even a little line editing if I see a need. And the readers of FtQ are good at offering constructive notes, too. Hope to see you there.
To submit, email your first chapter or prologue (or both) as an attachment to me, and let me know if it’s okay to use your first page and to post the complete chapter.
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.
[coffee]
I was a no. It was interesting enough, I guess, but no plot to grab onto. I thought I was reading a history book (which I like, but if I had picked this up because I wanted a novel…)
I assume there’s a purpose for explaining the history of immigrants in Biloxi, it’s setting a context we will need, but I got the point after the first paragraph. I was then ready to move on but Grisham wasn’t. Remembering that we’re voting only on the effectiveness of the first page, I voted no.
Full disclosure- I’m a frickin’ HISTORY TEACHER, and even I am muttering “dear God”. I’m about to go lecture on the Gupta and Han empires and I will create a more personal, meaningful connection to present-day sleepy sophomores than this guy. Grisham needs to be flogged with a sheet of soggy pasta for inflicting this on an unsuspecting public.
I’ve always been a pretty good fan of John Grisham, but this was definitely a no. As others have pointed out, it sounded like a history lesson. It was kind of reminiscent of reading Les Miserable (the too much history part).
Could Grisham have introduced just ONE character, just given us a name?
No—even though I majored in American history and love to devour a big fat work of well-researched narrative history. When I read a thriller, or any fiction, I want the fictional dream, not a encyclopedia entry. What was Grisham thinking, or was he?
Edit: *an* encyclopedia entry
“The fictional dream” is exactly it. That’s what we want. Astute.
Thanks, but credit for “fictional dream” goes to John Gardner.
I’m from the area, so it was a quick skim in search of something new. All I can say, before I put the book down, is that I hope people learn that the town name is pronounced Buh-LUX-ee.
Maybe if this was supposed to be non-fiction it might have been interesting, but knowing it is supposed to be fiction and then getting this history lesson was an automatic turn-off for me. Yes, he can indulge himself, and many other famous authors indulge themselves like this, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to buy any of their indulgent books. Never read him before, I’ll probably never read him in the future. (But if they make it into a movie or TV series… maybe I’d watch it.)
There are writers who just insist on that second page to finish a good setup… there are writers who indulge themselves for a page because they’re famous, and then get moving… there are writers who ease slowly into the story but make it good…
And then there’s taking fourteen THOUSAND words for history. In a “thriller.”
Bare minimum, they could have taken the word “thriller” off of it and marketed it as an ultra-slow-build character piece. Anything else is publishing malpractice.
I feel like there is a possible thriller story idea in those last couple words: publishing malpractice. Someone needs to write THAT book.
Or the mystery of whether that fictional author would ever find a publisher who’d touch his expose. (Must be a period piece from the trad-only days.)
Keith closes the book, places it back on the shelf, and then checks the store signage to see if he has inadvertently stumbled into the “Nonfiction” aisle.
Then Keith votes “no.”
Nope.
Due to the obvious fact he makes his publishers money (resting on his laurels) they snap up his next book without question. And you wonder why struggling writers go rogue.
I voted yes because I was prepared to give it a chance, but when I read further, I wished I hadn;t. There was a promising line at the start of chapter 2 “The rivalry started as a friendship….” which could have been a good 1st line, but then it went back to the history lesson.
Heh! I always enjoy this column so much, Ray, and today especially. I started skimming the excerpt just a few sentences in and couldn’t agree more with your assessment–and while I always enjoy your even-handed critique, I admit I giggled at your clear frustration with this one (and shared your sentiments).
While I’m tired of the expectation that books need to start with a riveting first page, filled with character and tension and questions, THIS just isn’t interesting. It’s not beautifully told, it’s not descriptive, it’s just not much of anything. For a moment I thought you’d decided to flog a non-fiction book. A boring one. Lol
“For a moment I thought you’d decided to flog a non-fiction book.”
LOL I also briefly wondered this…
I’m an outlier here as I enjoyed this setting as entry point, but I was ready for a historical novel set in Biloxi. :) But I don’t read many thrillers, and haven’t read anything by this author in years, so it hasn’t been on my reading radar.
I’m a history buff (in fact I was a history major), so I almost voted “yes.” I thought Ray was just having a grumpy day, and I myself have a tendency to start a story slowly, but this is a slap in the face, followed by a long slow beating. Ivanhoe and Moby Dick are lively by comparison. On the other hand, who knew Biloxi was a seafood capital?
At first reading my impression is that this is both a developmental and line editing problem. The writing is wooden and uninspired and reads like the introduction to a sophomore history thesis; only two adjectives appear to describe the culturally and geographically rich landscape. If indeed there are 14,000 words of “history lesson” prefacing the action, these could well have been broken up into more palatable sections and used as backstory digressions. And any editor worth the title would have encouraged Mr. Grisham to give the reader a better sense of place by enlivening the prose with descriptives that tickled the senses.
Once again I succumbed to the lure of lurid prose by squandering another hour that I’ll never get back browsing the 14,000 word Amazonian excerpt. And OMG!!! Virtually every paragraph is larded with gag reflux-inducing chestnuts like “they assimilated into” (no one assimilates “into” anything), “sticky-fingered prostitutes (Yuck! what was he thinking?), “the jailhouse doors revolved with GIs” (my stomach revolved and revolted), and “bad boys and misfits” (aren’t bad boys misfits?). Was this hot mess ghost written? An exercise in a beta version of AI novel writing software? After the second chapter I gave up trying to read critically. Is he paid by the word? A serious writer would have condensed the 14,000 words in the first six chapters to maybe 1400. But then this exercise in amateurish profligacy would not offer the hapless reader the additional duty of a three pound doorstop.
Yeah, I wonder where the editor was. Anne Rice decided that editors would no longer touch her books and that signaled a big decline in the quality of the storytelling and her vampire series sputtered out. I was a big fan, but she became unreadable. Got too big for her britches, you ask me. Maybe Grisham is doing the same thing.
The use of was in the first sentence. Ugh!
Has Grisham forgotten how to tell a story? And does he really think readers are going to remember all these facts later? What _was_ he thinking?
Voted NO.
Definitely a no for me. I felt exactly the same about Camino Winds. That was a DNF for me and it was so different from previous Grisham works that I wondered if he was writing it at all. This felt the same way.
A big no after the first sentence. I knew I was in for a couple of paragraphs of backstory or exposition. No character, no connection, no thanks :)
Great summation of facts as a tightly knit history lesson for sure. A gripping start to a thriller? No. Thanks Ray!
It started slow and never really picked up speed. I get that some back story is important to developing the story line and setting the main characters in opposition, but I had to scroll through a bunch of it to even figure out who they were.
I couldn’t agree more with your assessment. A great history lesson, but we have learned this before. It is not knew information.
No. For grins, I grabbed five random books off my shelves that might charitably be described as thrillers. All five showed me a character and a situation going really wrong within the first two paragraphs. If this is a thriller, it’s an outlier.
Couldn’t even finish reading the excerpt.
I voted no. It almost put me to sleep. I have this on hold at the library. I think I’ll go take it off hold now.
I voted no at the first word. I’d read it on Amazon and knew what I was in for. And this is a best seller? The herd mentality strikes again.
I voted yes. I wanted to know how important all this was and why it was important enough to put up front. I wouldn’t dare do this as the opening as the opening of something I wrote, but if I like the voice—the voice makes it feel like it’s important and relevant—I’ll give the author a little more room. If the voice is wrong, however, I probably won’t finish reading the page.
And any of this is important because??? History, story, memoir, travelogue, advert, biography. This fails on pretty much any score but decent note taking.