There are tons of amazing books out there, and they’ve all left an indelible mark on the literary landscape. But each one is unique, with winning titles spanning various genres, themes, and target audiences. So what makes a book truly great?
Of course, there’s no silver bullet solution, no specific formula to achieve literary greatness. However, regardless of the type of book you’re working on, there are some key fundamentals that you can shape to fit your story.
With that in mind, here are six tips that will help you make it to that coveted destination: a great book.
1. Craft a Compelling Message
Anyone can throw a bunch of sentences, paragraphs, and pages together to create content. But what makes a book truly meaningful is the message driving the narrative, so you need to clearly understand the purpose of your book from the very start. What do you want your reader to take away from your story? How do you hope it will impact them? Why are you writing this book? Generally, people write because they have something to say—to themselves, to their readers, to the world. What is it that you have to say? This should drive each section, each chapter, each scene and serve your overall message. Whether your goal is to educate, entertain, change mindsets, or instigate change, your reader should be able to set aside the book and understand exactly what you wanted them to take away from the reading experience.
2. Start with a Strong Hook
The first page of your book is the most important. While there are some people out there who will truck along even if they don’t find the beginning of a book compelling, most people—especially casual readers—aren’t like that. If you can’t draw your reader in immediately, they might shut the book and read something else. Attention spans get smaller every day, so starting your story with a great hook is vital to getting readers interested. Only then can you focus on keeping them interested.
Tip: If you’re writing a memoir, begin with a detailed account of a notable moment that shaped you (and consequently your story). You can flit back to an earlier moment with chapter one if you plan to take more of a chronological approach, but it’s worth immersing the reader in a vivid, emotional, life-changing event to get them hooked.
3. Use Vivid Language with Sensory Details
When it comes to writing a book, there should always be a balance of summarizing and storytelling. The former is to keep the narrative moving; the latter, in simple terms, is to make the narrative worth reading.
As humans, we connect through stories, and all the best stories plunge us right in and make us feel like we’re going through the experience ourselves. And for that to happen, there must be rich imagery and sensory details. It’s a matter of “show, don’t tell” by describing how the reader should perceive the scene through their five senses. Literally consider what you (if a memoir) or the character saw, heard, felt, smelled, and tasted. You’ll be amazed at how getting creative with sensory details and descriptive language can level up your work and make your book un-put-down-able.
4. Include Sentence Variety
It’s important to change things up. Readers want to see variety. Lack of variety is boring. Sentence variety makes content engaging. You can see the difference it makes. Right?
Your writing is an extension of you, your heart, your voice. You don't talk like a robot, do you? Of course not! Your written content shouldn’t read that way either. So mix it up by using different sentence structures, from simple to compound-complex, and different lengths of sentences too. It’s also a good idea to vary the beginning of each sentence, such as by starting with a descriptive adverb (generally starts with –ly), a prepositional phrase (introduces a location, position, or time), or a participial phrase (includes a descriptive verb ending in –ing or –ed). Using different strategies to incorporate sentence variety will infuse liveliness and rhythm in the text and help you hone your unique author voice to connect with your readers.
5. Make the Personal Universal
Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, you’re bound to imbue parts of yourself in your writing. We humans can’t help it! Your book is a reflection of you, even if it takes place in an alternate universe. You might be tempted to erase yourself from your book or try to generalize, worried that your reader won’t be able to relate. But the truth is the more honest you are, the more detailed you get, the more readers will want to know. While everyone is different, the human experience is much the same. When you practice strategic and authentic vulnerability, readers will find something familiar in your writing and latch onto it.
6. Craft an Impactful Conclusion
Just as the beginning of the book is important to hook your reader, the ending can make or break a reading experience. If your book’s ending is unsatisfying, it may go from a great book to just an okay book in your reader’s mind. Conversely, a killer ending can save a book (although you want the meat of the story to be positively received as well, of course). While some clichés may say otherwise, in a book, the destination is just as important as the journey, so make sure it packs a punch while aligning with the rest of the story.
Tip: The best endings are the ones that leave the reader thinking about the book long after they’ve put it down. Whether you pull on the reader’s heartstrings, surprise them with a cliffhanger, or call them to apply actionable changes in their own life, the conclusion should make your entire story linger in the reader’s mind. Maybe they’ll even recommend it to others!
While every writer has a different process, and each bestseller is noteworthy in its own right, the fundamentals of a great book are much the same. If you put your building blocks together correctly, you’ll end up with something beautiful. All it takes is an idea and a dream . . . and a lot of coffee.
If you have an idea for a book or would like to move forward with publishing, visit the Ballast Books website for more information.