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How strong is the opening page of this novel—would it, all on its own, hook an agent if it was submitted by an unpublished writer?

There’s a picture of Mother Teresa that hangs on our living room wall where a television would go if we could afford the kind of television that hangs on the wall, or even a home with the kind of walls that could hold a television.

The walls of a trailer house aren’t made of the same stuff walls in a normal house are made of. In a trailer house, the walls crumble beneath your fingernails like chalk if you so much as scratch at them.

I once asked my mother, Janean, why she keeps a picture of Mother Teresa on our living room wall.

“The bitch was a fraud,” she said.

Her words. Not mine.

I think when you’re the worst of people, finding the worst in others becomes a survival tactic of sorts. You focus heavily on the darkness in people in the hopes of masking the true shade of your own darkness. That’s how my mother has spent her entire life. Always seeking the worst in people. Even her own daughter.

Even Mother Teresa.

Janean is lying on the couch in the same position she was in when I left for my shift at McDonald’s eight hours ago. She’s staring at the picture of Mother Teresa, but she’s not actually looking at it. It’s as if her eyeballs have stopped working.

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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 paperback trade fiction bestseller list for February 19, 2023. Were the opening pages of the first chapter of Heart Bones by Colleen Hoover compelling?

My vote: Yes-ish.

This book received 4.6 out of 5 stars on Amazon. It’s worth noting that Ms Hoover has five books on the NYT bestseller list for paperback trade fiction. They are, in fact the top five. We have previously flogged the two of the novels-one received 53% No votes and the other 63% Yes votes.

My page turn wasn’t a gotta-do-it, but the voice and the suggestion of trouble ahead were enough to earn a turn. We learn on the following pages that her mother has died from an overdose. I submit that the opening page would be stronger if the last paragraph had an additional sentence moved up from later in the narrative:

Janean is lying on the couch in the same position she was in when I left for my shift at McDonald’s eight hours ago. Except now there’s a needle dangling from the skin just underneath the inside of her elbow.

Your thoughts? Would that change make the opening stronger?

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.