Tips for Making Readers Care About Your Book
By Mary Kole
Mary Kole is a former literary agent, freelance editor, writing teacher, author of Writing Irresistible Kidlit, and IP developer for major publishers, with over a decade in the publishing industry.
As a writer, one of your most challenging tasks is making readers care about your characters and story. Without a strong emotional connection, it’s hard for readers to invest in your characters’ journeys and stay engaged throughout the entire story. However, writing a story that captivates your readers’ emotions, imaginations, and attention can make all the difference when it comes to self-publishing or pursuing traditional publication. In this comprehensive article, I’ll explore why it’s essential to make your readers care and offer tips for creating compelling characters and plots that will hook your readers from the beginning to the end.
Why Is Making Readers Care So Important?
Whether you are self-publishing or pursuing traditional publishing, making your readers care about your characters and plot is vital to storytelling success. It is the bedrock of a successful novel. Not only will it keep your readers engaged and enamored with your story, but it will also lead to positive reviews, increased readership, and book sales. All of these are key to not only becoming a published author, but staying one for the long term. A deep emotional connection with your readers will make them invested in your main characters, their challenges and will keep them turning the pages and coming back for more.
Tips for Making Readers Care about Characters
Create Relatable Characters
One of the most effective ways to make your readers care about your characters is to create relatable characters. Making them authentic and relatable will enable your readers to connect with them emotionally on a deep level. Character flaws and imperfections make them easier to cheer for, which means that readers will become invested.
Backstory
Your characters’ backstory plays a crucial role in making them relatable and making readers care about them. It will make your readers more invested in the story if the main character goes through a difficult experience that shapes their personality and character, creating not only a character objective that drives them, but a character need. Both of these will help make readers care.
inner conflict
Writing a character who’s going through internal conflict could be a way to allow readers to understand and connect with the character. You will then convey it using the tool of interiority.
Tips for Making Readers Care About Plot
EMotionally Driven Scenes
Emotionally charged scenes with strong emotions like love, hate, anger, betrayal, and fear can help readers connect with the plot. You can accomplish this by building in plot twists, reveals, and an engaging story climax full of conflict.
Pacing
The pacing of the story, or the perceived speed at which the story moves, is vital in making readers care about the plot of your novel. A slow-paced story can lose readers as they may feel bored, same with a quick-paced novel where readers may get confused by fast action without enough introspection.
high stakes
The story stakes give your work a sense of why the events matter to characters, and therefore to readers. You should always consider, “Why is this important to the character and plot?” for every event that you put into your novel outline.
story climax
Building up suspense and tension throughout a novel and creating an epic climax that pits the protagonist against the antagonist, or against the protagonist’s inner demons, if you don’t have an overt story villain, has the potential to keep a reader hooked to your story.
In conclusion, making readers care about your story, characters, and plot is essential for a successful novel. By creating relatable characters, an engaging story and emotionally charged scenes, you can ensure that readers invest their time and emotions into your book. The above tips and insights should help you create a story that captivates hearts, triggers emotions, and keeps readers invested from beginning to end.
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