Choosing a HOOK for your BOOK

How to build a hook for your story

A book hook is a short, compelling line that grabs a reader’s attention before they ever open the book. It’s the sentence that appears with your title, your cover, or your blurb and makes someone stop scrolling and think, “I need to know what happens here.”

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The core concept and the hook are not the same thing. Your core concept takes the entire story and reduces it to a few paragraphs that explain the basic idea, the setup, and how the story might move from act one to act three. It captures the full picture of what your novel is and how it works as a complete narrative.

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The hook, on the other hand, distills that concept into a single moment of intrigue. It takes the heart of your story and presents it as a question or promise. Where the concept explains, the hook entices. It should set the premise while leaving something open, something that makes the reader want to fill in the blanks by reading the book.

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A strong hook delivers three things: clarity, curiosity, and emotion. It must be easy to understand, instantly interesting, and emotionally charged enough to make someone care. You’re not telling the whole story, you’re teasing the spark that starts it.

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To build one, start with your core concept and ask: what’s the tension or conflict that drives this story? What makes it different from others in the same genre? Write a sentence or two that expresses that uniqueness and the stakes involved. Keep it natural, like something you could say in conversation without tripping over the words.

Here’s a simple way to think about it: your concept tells the story, your hook sells it.

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Try drafting a few options and focus on the feeling you want to leave behind. Do you want curiosity? Excitement? A sense of danger, mystery, or romance? Once you have a few versions, read them aloud and see which one catches attention fastest.

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Some examples:

• “A woman wakes up in a perfect town that shouldn’t exist, and the only way out is to remember how she got there.”

• “Two strangers swap lives for a week and discover they’ve been lying to the same person.”

• “He’s built to hunt monsters. She’s built to become one.”

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Each one gives just enough to set the premise, create tension, and leave the reader asking what happens next.

In the end, your hook is the headline for your story. It’s the first invitation you offer the reader, and it should make them feel like they’ve just stumbled across something too good to ignore.

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Summary: Choosing a hook

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• A core concept explains the story in full, from setup to resolution

• A hook takes that concept and turns it into a single, intriguing line that sells the story

• A strong hook should be clear, emotional, and spark curiosity

• Start with your concept and find the key tension or question that drives it

• Keep it short, natural, and memorable, like something you could say in one breath

• Test different versions and see which one grabs attention fastest

• The goal is to create a promise that makes the reader want to know more