On Hooks

Most writers learn about hooks in the narrowest possible way. At some point, usually in a Google search result or in a YouTube video, someone tells you a hook is the first line of your novel. The opening sentence. The thing that grabs attention before a reader puts the book down. That definition is correct. But it’s incomplete. It treats hooks like a technical flourish instead of what they actually are.

A hook isn’t a sentence. It’s an event. It’s the moment when someone who did not care one second ago suddenly does. Not deeply right away, but enough to pause. Enough to lean in, and enough to give you a little bit of their attention in a world that is constantly asking for it.

And that moment doesn’t only exist on page one of a book. It happens everywhere a human being encounters your work. It happens when someone scrolls past a social media post. When they skim a blurb. When publishers, editors, or agents open a pitch email. When people ask you, casually, what your book is about. Your opening line is a hook, yes, but it’s only one of many. Every entry point into your work has to do the same job.

That’s because a hook isn’t where your story starts. It’s where someone else’s interest begins.

When you’re trying to hook someone, you have to begin from an uncomfortable assumption:

Not because people are cruel or dismissive, but because they’re busy. They’re saturated and filtering constantly. Every day, they’re exposed to more information than they could possibly process, and most of it never makes it past the first mental gate.

The baseline level of interest in your work, whether from strangers, readers, or even people who care about you, is zero. And even if you know for sure that they do care, assume it’s zero. And that matters more than most new writers want to admit, because any strategy that assumes more interest than that is built on shaky ground.

People don’t wake up wanting your story. They wake up wanting their coffee, their money, their safety, their pleasure, their relief, their distraction, their meaning… the list goes on. Your work enters a mental space that is already full. A hook is what earns it a place there, even briefly.

This reality hits especially hard if you’re indie. Big traditional publishing comes with borrowed attention. An already established house gives you access to their lists, their channels, their bookstore placement, their budget, and everything else they could offer. You’re not just selling a book. You’re riding on infrastructure that already exists.

Indies don’t get that. There’s no institutional attention waiting for you. No paid visibility by default. No built-in credibility. What you have instead is much smaller and much sharper: your ability to make a single human being care. That’s the entire game.

Let’s talk about care, for a bit.

When people hear that word, they often imagine something soft and loyalty-driven. As if caring means liking you, supporting you, or wanting you to succeed. All of that is real, but it’s not the kind of care doing the work here.

The care that matters in writing and publishing is activated care. It’s the moment someone goes from neutral to engaged. From scrolling to stopping. From “this exists” to “this matters enough for me to stay.”

Care is not the starting condition. It’s the outcome.

People don’t arrive caring about your book, your voice, or your ideas. Even the people who love you don’t carry active attention for your work at all times. They have their own urgencies and priorities. Care has to be created in the moment it’s asked for.

For example, I have a brother who cares about me, but hell could topple over and he still wouldn’t spare a glance at my books beyond the covers. This isn’t indifference or lack of support. It’s mismatch. He’s not a reader, and he loves cars and motorcycles, just as I don’t care about those either.

But the right hook changes things. He could say, “This car makes no sound when it’s running,” and because I like silence, I’d lean in and ask, “What car?” Or if I say, “Brother, this story I read has a lot of cars,” he’d go, “Oh. What cars?”

Those are moments of aligned interest. They might slip away as quickly as they appear, or they might keep growing. That’s what hooks do. They create the conditions for care to exist at all, even when the starting point is zero.

Care doesn’t spread just because something is sincere. This is where a lot of writers get stuck. They believe that depth of feeling should automatically generate depth of response. But care isn’t contagious through emotion alone. It’s activated through interest, tension, recognition, relevance. Through making someone feel curious, unsettled, seen, or implicated.

When care clicks on, it doesn’t feel like obligation. It feels like investment. A small internal yes. A willingness to give time, attention, or thought. That’s the threshold you’re always trying to cross, whether you’re writing a social media post, a blurb, a pitch, or a book.

And care scales. A social post asks for seconds of it. A synopsis asks for minutes. A novel asks for hours, sometimes days. But it’s the same mechanism each time. You’re asking someone to keep going with you.

This is why care is such a sharp resource. It costs something. Time. Focus. Emotional energy. Even money. People protect these things instinctively. They filter hard. When someone gives you care, even briefly, it’s because something in your presentation made it feel worth spending.

So when I say this is the entire game, I mean it literally. Not reach, or numbers, or virality, but one human response at a time. One moment of care, earned honestly, without guilt or manipulation.

You don’t demand care. You don’t assume care. You build it.

There’s a difference between forced care and earned care, and once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere.

Forced care shows up when a writer tries to pre-load your emotional response. Blurbs and summaries that say things like: this is a thoughtful story that will make you cry, written from a very deep place in my heart, inspired by my best friend, my trauma, my healing journey…

The details change, but the move is the same. The writer places their own emotions on the table and asks you to adopt them.

The problem isn’t sincerity. The problem is assumption.

It assumes that because the author feels deeply, the reader will too. It assumes emotions are transferable. It assumes that telling you what to feel will save you the work of feeling it yourself.

It doesn’t.

As a reader, that kind of framing makes me resist. Not because I’m cold, but because I want to be trusted. I want space to generate my own response and to discover whether something moves me. Being told in advance that I will cry or break or be haunted feels less like an invitation and more like pressure.

And pressure kills care.

Earned care works differently. It doesn’t tell you how to feel. It gives you something concrete, strange, or specific enough to engage with. It creates curiosity instead of instruction.

Now, compare: This love story is about a fog monster and a fire breather who find themselves adrift in the middle of an arctic sea.

That single sentence doesn’t promise tears. It doesn’t mention the author’s heart. It doesn’t even guarantee meaning. It just presents a premise and trusts you to react. You might laugh. You might be intrigued. You might hate it. But whatever you feel, it’s yours.

That trust matters.

Because the truth is, an author’s feelings about their work don’t determine a reader’s experience of it. Someone can write a horror they insist will give you nightmares, and it might end up being your 3 a.m. pitch-dark comfort read because you find it funny. Someone can pour their soul into a story and still not connect with you at all.

That doesn’t mean the story failed. It means emotion isn’t programmable.

Earned care respects the reader’s autonomy. Forced care tries to bypass it.

And readers can feel the difference.

When you hook, pitch, or summarize your work, you’re not trying to smuggle your feelings into someone else. You’re trying to give them a reason to feel something on their own. Curiosity, tension, delight, unease. The feeling comes after the engagement, not before.

That’s the shift.

Not “this mattered to me.” But “this might matter to you.”

And then you let them decide.

And everything else flows from there.

Your story can be sacred to you. That part doesn’t need defending. But your presentation of it cannot be. The hook isn’t the story itself. It’s the door into the story. And doors aren’t built for the person who owns the house. They’re built for the people who might enter it.

For indie writers especially, hooks aren’t optional. They’re leverage. They’re how you replace money, reach, and machinery with skill. Not by being louder, and not by being more desperate. Just by being sharper.

Not “please care.” But “look.”

That’s the whole job.