You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression

As it turns out, you can judge a book by its cover.          

And by the first chapter, the first 5 pages, the first 250 words, and the first sentence.

You can even judge a book by a 140-character summary on Twitter.

Welcome to the world of publishing in the 21st century, where it's all about that all-important first impression.

Advice on hooking readers from the get-go abounds, but one of my favorite observations on the topic comes from fantasy author Brian Staveley and his blog-entry, "Shakira and Usher Hate Tolkien; Opening Sentences in Fantasy."

The whole article is excellent and well-worth a read, but there's one part that stands out.  Staveley compares the opening scenes of 4 fantasy books that were published before 1990 and 4 that were published afterwards:

"Kicking off the old books we have: 

• a birthday party (The Fellowship of the Ring, by JRR Tolkien), 

• the description of a trail (The Sword of Shannara, by Terry Brooks),

• the sights and smells of a kitchen (Pawn of Prophecy, by David Eddings),

• and some geography... that also sounds suspiciously like history (The Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin)

In the new books, by contrast, we have: 

• a beheading (A Game of Thrones, by GRR Martin), 

• a strangling (The Lies of Locke Lamorra, by Scott Lynch),

• the potential death of the POV character (The Blade Itself, by Joe Abercrombie),

• and a soulless Reaper (The Killing Moon, by NK Jemisin)

Yikes.

Makes me wonder:  would those four pre-1990 books - all excellent, all classics, all examples of the best ever in the genre - get rejected by today's literary agents and publishers, simply because they don't start with a bang?

I would hope not.

Then again, if those books debuted in 2017, they might start out a little differently than they originally did:

"I began The Sword of Shannara, way back in 1977, with a long descriptive passage that set the scene and gave the reader a leisurely first look at one of the protagonists.  Really, I meandered about for almost the first hundred pages.  I got away with it then, but I wouldn't think of doing that in today's entertainment climate."
                                                                                   Terry Brooks, Sometimes the Magic Works