Contents
The air turned black all around me. Icy fingers gripped my arm in the darkness. Wandering through the graveyard it felt like something was watching me. The eyes in the painting follow him down the corridor.
A classic hook strategy is to start with an action-packed or climactic event. This method hooks your reader in two ways: first, with the energy of the scene itself. And second, by dropping your reader into the middle of the story without context, you’ll leave them with questions that will compel them to keep reading.
Some of the most common YA genres include contemporary fiction, fantasy, romance, and dystopian. Hybrid genres are also common in YA.
Opening lines that introduce an important event without providing specifics, such as “And then, after six years, she saw him again.” from Katherine Mansfield’s A Dill Pickle, pique the reader’s curiosity and encourage the reader to discover the answers later in the work.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s/Philosopher’s Stone is not a YA novel. It’s middle-grade, meaning it’s for children between the ages of 8 and 12.
“I think that these definitions are fairly simple: middle grade books feature pre-teen characters in situations of interest to 8-12 year olds, and YA novels feature teen protagonists in situations of interest to teen readers. … Think books like Percy Jackson and Skulduggery Pleasant.
The average income for a published young adult author with an agent was $31,000. The average income for one without was $5,000. Selling a book in that calendar year. The highest earning author said his/her income was 90% advances, 5% royalties, and 5% misc.
For fiction, they suggest middle-grade works be anywhere from 40 to 150 manuscript pages and YA from 175 to 200 pages. Consult listings in the current edition of Children’s Writer’s & Illustrator’s Market for information on both fiction and nonfiction word counts for various publishers.
It takes most authors about six months to a year to write a book. That said, your timeline will depend on the length and genre of your book, as well as your day-to-day writing routine. Other factors that affect your book-writing time include: The amount of research and outlining you do beforehand.
1st Sentence | I lead with a quick factoid about comics. |
---|---|
2nd & 3rd | These sentences define graphic novels and gives a brief history. This is also how the body of my paper starts. |
4rd Sentence | This sentence introduces the current issue. See how I gave the history first and now give the current issue? That’s flow. |
Creating a hook for an essay can involve a question, a surprise, or maybe a quotation creates a desire to read on to see what happens next. Even if all the information in the body of the essay is solid, it’s important to get the reader to that point with a good attention grabber.
One of the most common hook ideas is to start with a rhetorical question. Better still, start with a series of rhetorical questions. An excellent example of this tactic is Simon Sinek’s TED presentation on how great leaders can inspire action. He begins with: “How do you explain when things don’t go as we assumed?
A hook is an opening statement (which is usually the first sentence) in an essay that attempts to grab the reader’s attention so that they want to read on. It can be done by using a few different types of hooks, which are a question, quote, statistic, or anecdote.