Category: Copywriting

20 tips for creating relatable – and lovable – protagonists

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Photo by Alex Brown

Photo by Alex Brown

Keep them reading. That’s our mission, right? And there’s nothing that can hook any reader faster and stronger than a protagonist they can relate to, like, and therefore care about. This is one half of the D in AIDA:

The D in AIDA

So what makes a character likeable?

I took inventory of the most likeable attributes of some of my favorite characters. I also borrowed some of the best advice from the Internet, and compiled it all here for your reading pleasure! Not all of this will apply to every character, but pick the right handful of traits for your hero, work two or three of them into your first page, and you’ll be well ahead of the average aspiring novelist.

Stuff that makes us connect with them

  • They enjoy things – especially the simple things. People who don’t enjoy anything are whiny. People who like things are fun to be around, both in real life and in books
  • They have flaws, but not unforgivable ones – flaws they must realize and overcome (Donald Maass writes about flaws and strengths here)
  • When they make bad choices, there are consequences – otherwise it’s a Mary Sue
  • They express universal truths – this doesn’t have to be deeply philosophical, just a little detail that everyone notices but nobody has put into words yet. Like how hard is it to drive in high heels (okay, maybe that one’s semiversal).
  • They want something deeply for personal reasons – this is the most important trait. They are in love. They are slaves. They’ve never met their real father. Etc. Even if your protagonist is a villain trying to take over the universe, he should have a personal reason for doing it (e.g., so that no one can ever hurt him again). We should feel this on the first page.

Stuff that’s just plain likeable

  • They have pets – especially if the pet is stupid, ugly, or smelly
  • They have the chance to be mean but aren’t – even characters who are jerks most of the time, but nice to one person (who must be weak or an underdog), or are nice when it matters most, are lovable (Blake Snyder calls this “saving the cat“)
  • They don’t realize how awesome they are – other characters like them better than they like themselves (this doesn’t mean they need to be totally insecure – just a little)

 

Stuff that makes us root for them

  • They are unlucky – Stanley Yelnats from Holes is unlucky but perpetually hopeful anyway, and it makes us love him
  • They defend the innocent – and/or stand up for the underdogs
  • They want to run away from danger, but don’t – the definition of courage
  • They are loyal – even a character who lies, cheats, and steals, but still sticks up for his friends, is likable

Book Country advises:

  • We don’t have to like what they do: we have to understand why they do it
  • Never let coincidence help a good character

Elise Broach adds:

  • They should be in love or in trouble (or both) on the first page
  • Avoid whiny, passive or cruel
  • Shoot for: spunk, persistence, courage, kindness, ingenuity, loyalty, humour
  • But be careful with spunk/sass – now getting overused
Neil Landau and Matt Frederick suggest these devices for getting to know your character:
  • Create memorable entrances – what would you notice about them meeting them the first time? Their charm, or clumsiness? Their laugh, or their uneasy silence?
  • Use props – what your character carries with him everywhere, or keeps in an honored place in his bedroom, can tell you a lot about him

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QUESTION FOR THE COMMENTS: What protagonists do you connect with most? What makes you like them?

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Stay tuned: next week, we’ll talk about more stuff you need to include in the first pages.

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puppy dog

Ways to make your readers love your main character.

Hooking interest with a killer hook

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Between two marketing campaigns, a video, a cousin’s wedding, and a best friend coming into town, I didn’t write a new post this week.

The I in AIDA

HOWEVER – my absence is your excellent opportunity to learn (or review)  how to write a hook – that thing that’s going to grab the interest of friends at cocktail parties, literary agents in query letters, and bookstore browsers who glance at the back cover.

This post explains what a hook is, how to write one, and how you’ll know when you’ve written a good one.

This post gives examples of hooks that will help you write yours.

Have fun, and if you like, post your hook in the comments for some feedback!

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6 types of book titles that get noticed – and picked up

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While a cover has to grab your eye, it’s the title that has to make you pick up the book. So what makes a book title grab your attention?

On Goodreads, the social media site for readers, 1,052 people voted on the book titles they thought were the most eye-catching or unique. I’ve taken the top 100 titles and organized them by what makes them unique (many would fit in multiple categories, and some of the categories are just a shade different from one another, but I’ve arranged them in the interest of clarity and space).

If you can write a title that fits into two or more of these categories and is readable at a glance – you probably have a winner.

Surprising

These you pick up either to see what the heck they’re talking about, or to find out what crazy thing they’ll say next. This category is so popular, I broke it into subcategories!

– Words you’re surprised to see together

  • The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse
  • The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul
  • Still Life with Psychotic Squirrel
  • TheGuernseyLiterary and Potato Peel Society
  • The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
  • When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?
  • The Devil Wears Prada
  • The Baby Jesus Butt Plug
  • So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
  • The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
  • The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
  • Love in the Time of Cholera
  • Hitler the Cat Goes West
  • The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
  • Nostradamus Ate My Hamster
  • Go-Go Girls of the Apocolypse
  • Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
  • Practical Demonkeeping
  • A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
  • You Suck (A Love Story)

– A surprising play on a common saying/well-known title

  • Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
  • Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea
  • Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
  • Women are from Venus, Men Are From Hell
  • How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
  • Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
  • English as a Second F***ing Language: How to Swear Effectively… (place)

 – Breaks rules…surprisingly

Some are unapologetically direct, some grammatically incorrect, some give away the ending, and some are just crass (a cheap trick I wouldn’t recommend).

  • Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank: A Slightly-Tarnished Southern Belle’s Words of Wisdom
  • Me Talk Pretty One Day
  • I Am America (And So Can You!)
  • Tequila Makes Her Clothes Fall Off
  • Another Bull**** Night in Suck City
  • How To S*** In the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art
  • John Dies at the End
  • This is Not a Novel
  • F*** This Book
  • On Bull****
  • The Haunted Vagina
  • Dude, You’re a F**: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School
  • Don’t Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It’s Raining: America’s Toughest Family Court Judge Speaks Out

Funny/Clever

If the title alone makes you chuckle, you’re likely to pick up the book.

  • Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
  • Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation
  • I Was Told There’d Be Cake
  • The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things
  • If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?
  • I Still Miss My Man but My Aim is Getting Better
  • I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
  • In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash
  • Don’t Bend Over in the Garden, Granny, You Know Them Taters got Eyes
  • Since You’re Leaving Anyway, Take out the Trash
  • Even God is Single (So Stop Giving Me a Hard Time)
  • I Gave You My Heart, but You Sold It Online

 

Poetic

Just plain beautiful, but with a deeper meaning.

  • Something Wicked this Way Comes
  • Midnight in theGarden of Good and Evil
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being
  • A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
  • To Kill a Mockingbird
  • One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
  • Where the Wild Things Are
  • When You Are Engulfed in Flames
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God
  • A Confederacy of Dunces
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns
  • Neverwhere
  • A Clockwork Orange
  • The Grapes of Wrath
  • The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
  • The Man Who Was Thursday
  • The Silence of the Lambs
  • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
  • The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
  • If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
  • The Sound and the Fury
  • For Whom the Bell Tolls
  • I Capture the Castle
  • All Quiet on the Western Front

 

Makes You Think

A unique way to look at things. Atlas Shrugged is a prime example – Atlas being the Greek god who holds up the world heavens (or holds the heavens and the earth apart, depending on which tradition you follow).

  • Atlas Shrugged
  • Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History
  • She Got up off the Couch; and Other Heroic acts from Mooreland,Indiana
  • A Wrinkle in Time

Intriguing

Specifies or implies something irresistibly interesting or thought-provoking. You have to know more.

  • The Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England: A Novel
  • The Perks of Being a Wallflower
  • What to Say When You Talk to Yourself
  • Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

 

Whimsical

It simply sounds fun.

  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
  • The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead
  • Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
  • The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales
  • Smashed, Squashed, Splattered, Chewed, Chunked and Spewed
  • The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cave
  • There’s a Wocket in My Pocket
  • Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
  • Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants

 

I can’t figure out why these are interesting (if you can, tell us in the comments)

  • Brave New World
  • Table 21
  • Reading Lolita in Tehran
  • To Live and Drink in L.A.
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: a Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

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What are your favorite titles? Tell us in the comments!

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P.S. My calendar next week looks like it got sneezed on by the Deadline Monster, so I can tell you right now I won’t be able to write about the D in AIDA until the week after. But stay tuned! We may do a little review of the I in AIDA.


5 tips for grabbing attention with your book cover

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The "A" in AIDA

It’s not that we judge books by their covers. But if you’re standing in a bookstore staring at a dozen photo-realistic illustrations next to one cartoony sketch, you’re gonna notice the cartoony sketch.

A great cover makes us look.

Will you have any control over your cover? If you self publish, yes. If you go the traditional route, it depends on your contract. Typically you’ll be allowed to voice your opinions, but the publisher makes the final decision. This can be a good or bad thing. On the one hand, their marketing department probably knows more about selling books than you do. On the other hand, you know more about your book.

So if you’re self-publishing, here are some cover design tips. If you’re going traditional, here, at least, are a few notes you may want to bring up when they ask for your opinion.

1. Keep it simple. Go to any bookstore and stare at the shelves for awhile and your eyes will start to burn from the colors and clutter. Those tired eyes will naturally gravitate towards negative space to get some rest. That’s why, often, the simpler your cover, the better. Think Google vs. Yahoo search.

2. Promote natural eye flow. Choose the sizes and colors of each element – title, byline, images, etc. – based on importance. Where does the eye fall first? Where does it go from there? Where does it end? Does the eye flow easily from one element to the next, or is there a war of elements all screaming for your attention at once?

3. Avoid photo realistic illustrations of people. Stand in the romance section and that’s almost all you’ll see. Shirtless guys with their arms around buxom blondes, long hair waving in the wind. Add a dragon for fantasy or laser guns for science fiction, but with or without the shirtless guy, you’ll see this pattern everywhere. If you are only targeting an audience that reads your genre exclusively, the typical cover may benefit you best. But if you want to appeal to a wider audience, pick something simpler, with greater contrast. Do you really think Twilight would have gotten so popular if it had looked like every other paranormal romance book out there?

4. Avoid overused fonts. Comic sans, for instance, or Papyrus. Check out a list of overused fonts here.

5. Aim for bold and iconic. Negative space with one or two contrasting colors will point you in the right direction. If it’s still recognizable when you squint at it (this advice per Karen Kavett), you may have a winner. Especially since online shoppers are only going to be looking at a thumbnail about a square-inch big.

Along those lines, consider also how the design can translate to other materials. Website. T-shirts. Think of your cover more as a signature or a logo rather than exclusively a glimpse at the scenery. Like the mockingjay pin on The Hunger Games, the puppet-master hand of The Godfather, the burning paper man of Fahrenheit 451, or the bent tree of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Just check out some of these titles for comparison:

Images from Amazon (book links below)

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What are some of your favorite book covers? Tell me in the comments!

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Stay tuned: next week, we talk book titles!

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Book links: Kiss Me Dead, Irish Moon, Yours Mine & Ours, Her Dark Angel, Bound in Darkness, Twilight, Fair Game, Shadow’s Fall, Game of Thrones

4 steps to convince people they NEED to read your novel

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Photo by Leah Tautkute

Photo by Leah Tautkute

 

Did you take the leap with me last week and admit to yourself that your writing is what needs improving–not your friends’ tastes? Are you ready to find out how to fix it?

Meet AIDA.

No, AIDA isn’t the personal writing coach I’ve hired to help you turn your novel into a bestseller, but if you want to think of it that way, go ahead.

AIDA is an acronym for Attention > Interest > Desire > Action: a basic formula marketers and salespeople use to guide them through each phase of the sales process. It goes like this:

Attention: Get noticed. In a media-saturated world, this is hard to do.

Interest: Once you have their attention, prove you have something worth their time–by giving them the most compelling part of your message in as brief a form as possible.

Desire: Once you have their interest, show them how the product will meet a need they have.

Action: Once they know they want it, tell them how to get it.

How does it apply to your novel?

Attention:

Getting a friend’s attention could be as simple as letting them know you’re writing a book (“Really? What’s it about?”). For a literary agent you’re querying, it’s spelling their name right and following all the submission guidelines. But for your toughest audience—the book store customer who’s never heard of you—it’s a lot tougher. You need a cover and a title that stand out among hundreds of others. We’ll talk more about this in the coming weeks.

Interest:

What makes this worth the time of the friend, literary agent, or customer? This one’s a bit trickier, but it follows the question your friend asked you when you got their attention: what’s it about? You have to summarize your story in the most compelling way possible, in a few sentences. This is known as your elevator pitch or “hook”—it’s how you’ll describe your book to people at cocktail parties, how you’ll begin your query letter, and what you’ll give to the writer or intern who’ll craft the copy for your book cover. This is the part that makes your friend ask to read it, the agent to request a full or partial manuscript, and the customer to flip to page one. I’ve actually already covered the hook extensively:

Action:

I’m gonna do a flip-flop on you and talk about Action first, because before we can understand the Desire phase, we have to understand what action we want our audience to take. For a friend it might just be to finish reading the book. For an agent it’s to offer representation. For the book-store customer, it’s to buy the book. It seems like three very different stages, but really it all boils down to the same thing: you want them to keep reading. You have to suck them in fast. You have to make them want to know what happens next. Which brings us to:

Desire:

How do you convince a reader this piece of fiction is something they need? Ask yourself—why do you read? Is it an escape from reality? An alleviation of boredom? A hunt for truth? A search for someone who understands you?

It’s sure to be one of those reasons. It may be all of them.

Those are the needs. And it takes the whole book to meet those needs. But the promise—and the evidence—that you can meet those needs happen in the first few pages. That bookstore customer is not going to keep reading to see if it gets better—you must grab them in the first paragraph. And to keep all your readers reading, you have to keep sucking them in deeper and deeper throughout the entire book.

A variety of factors affect this “sucking in.” But there are two main things you absolutely can’t succeed without:

  1. A relatable protagonist.
  2. Conflict.

If your reader relates to, or identifies with, your hero, you’ve begun forging an emotional connection. When you add conflict—which usually involves threatening the thing that hero loves most—you create the reader’s need to find out: “What happens next? Does the hero overcome the conflict?” And, since the reader relates to this hero, the subconscious question: “Could I overcome that conflict?”

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Discover the Whole AIDA Series:

Attention

Interest

Desire

Action

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man reading

How to get people to read your book.