Why do people get off before the final stop?
When readers step aboard your novels, whisk them away to fantastic worlds, toy with their emotions, help them feel urgency, as characters are tossed into and withdrawn from their senses. Design your words to excite, entertain, delight filling pages with temptations that are eagerly consumed, drawing guests ever onward, ever inward, not wanting their journey to end. As guests, readers must eventually part ways with you, seeking new adventures. As the hosts, writers hope nobody leaves until the journey is done. Will they book another journey under your caring guidance?
Readers show interest in your work the second they carefully risk all and pick it from several thousand possibles and probables. The hard part is done. Why is it that readers do not become fans and eagerly search lists for another opportunity to read more from the same author? Some answers to that question are uncovered in this article.
1. Will this book live up to its promises?
After paying for the adventure, readers eagerly hop aboard your vehicle for a thrill ride to the end of the line, they have needs to be met and know what they want, what to expect — you told them in the description and on the cover. Most readers will have scanned random pages to back up their decision to purchase. Now a second fee is to be extracted; reading will use their valuable time. With fully paid ticket in hand, your reader naturally expects appropriate customer satisfaction at every stage of the journey, right to the last full stop.
“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” Anna Quindlen
Their preferred genre defines much of what they expect to experience or face between stops, and to a certain extent, what happens or is allowed to happen at those stops. Chapter content controls encounters between stations. Stations are built in stops between those encounters, inserted at key points along the journey. At these points time, location, pace, feeling, emotion, characters can all be twisted, turned, eliminated, enhanced — all manner of things can happen in the blink of an eye, with the turn of a page.
Readers commit to the journey between stations, giving authors the benefit of their company and an opportunity to impress, and probably not wanting to leap from speeding stories. Once at a station, they must be excitedly anticipating or curious enough to enter the next phase. Are there tempting morsels in preceding chapters? Enough to entice further commitment? Great, maybe your passengers will stick with you, enthralled till the last stop.
Of course, the seductive offerings of your writing must be much more than that. Readers pay for a first-class ticket, not cattle-class. Think for a moment, what makes you put a book down at the bookstore or, worse, what makes you put it down once you have started to read it — alighting before journey’s end? Why do you get off before the end, perhaps never to continue with that travel plan? After all, didn’t you buy a first-class seat?
2. Comfortable for the whole journey.
We are all driven by different literary needs when we pick up a book and cosy down for a few hours of escape. Comma fetishists will abandon their purchase at the first sign of unruly punctuation marks. Finding two or three wrongly spelled words within a few pages will be enough for others to abandon the journey. Personally, I am comma-forgiving to some degree. What bugs me is words, too sophisticated for the rest of the work, which are used often. That’s just me. Let’s see what else bugs readers enough to feel further time spent is not worth the effort.
Most reasons for abandonment can be readily fixed before you print: grammar, layout, font, dialog, word use, and so on. However, there are elements to think about well before you get to this point if you want readers to become followers. Perfection of the previously mentioned essential constituents is a solid target. However, they do not make for a bestseller, they make a book that is grammatically, visually, and lexically on point. You are wasting valuable moments of creativity, concentrating on what every novel should be instead of creating the essence of what makes your work stand out from the crowd. Commas will not be your first concern.
3. Take your readers on a spectacular odyssey.
Be determined that people will not abandon your adventure part way through, or they will not travel with you again. Certainly, they will not stretch out for tickets and ride along with you. They will become a lost opportunity.
“All aboard.”
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