What is a hook?
And why is it important in commercial fiction?
Hello and I hope everyone had a brilliant weekend! I managed to write 3000 words of book number six (which has been a S.L.O.W. process!) - I hope lots of you had positive writing experiences, too. Today’s newsletter is all about HOOKS!
The question I get asked the most at work about the books I am publishing is, ‘what’s the hook?’ It’s the question that I think about when I am reading submissions, when I’m looking at competitor titles, and when I’m talking to authors and agents about their upcoming works. The hook forms a crucial part of the acquisitions vision document that I talked about before, and in a good campaign, the hook will run throughout the marketing and the PR, and be the thing we use as publishers to reel readers in and make them want to read your work! So, what is a hook and why is it so important?
Essentially, the hook of your book is a one-liner that sums up the book’s USP (unique selling point). The more original and memorable the hook, the better. But why, you ask, do you need this hook? Isn’t it just a commercial term that takes away a writer’s creativity and integrity? Well, yes it is a commercial term – but publishing is a business, and you want your book to sell! And to my mind, it certainly does not need to detract from the author’s passion or from the nuances within their work. A good hook can do wonders for a novel, and hopefully this post will explain why.
A hook helps the sales team to pitch your book to retailers. In a publishing house, there is a dedicated sales team whose responsibility it is to secure support for your novel at retail – by that I mean with places like Waterstones, independent bookshops, WHS, the supermarkets, and special sales outlets such as The Works. The sales teams have meetings with the buyers from each retailer, during which they present the upcoming titles for each division. Now, in some publishing houses, there are quite a lot of books. The meetings are not that long – and so the sales people need to pitch the novels to the buyers in as clear, accessible and succinct a way as possible. They want the buyers to love your book and to place a strong order! That’s where the hook comes in. Combined with a strong jacket (jackets are very important too and I wrote about this here), a clear hook can help a book secure orders – if the buyer can understand the vision for the book, and see how it could entice and connect with readers, they are more likely to support it.
A hook helps an editor pitch your book internally, and get your book through an acquisitions meeting. When a manuscript comes in to an editor from a literary agent, the editor reads it and tries to assess whether or not they can see a vision for publishing it. In commercial fiction, a big part of this is the hook. What about the plot makes this book feel exciting? What makes it different from everything else on the list? What might make it stand out in the market? What sort of one-liner would really capture a reader’s attention when they are browsing online or in a bookshop? Why would they spend their £9.99 (or £18.99 for a hardback these days!) on this book rather than something else? We live in an era where there is a HUGE amount of choice, and we know that readers are not always as loyal to brands as they once were, so we have to ensure that each and every book we publish has a key selling point – i.e. a hook. For me as an editor, in order to acquire a novel, I have to convince the sales, marketing, publicity and senior management teams that it’s a good buy and a good fit for our list. If I like a novel, I ask others to read and see what they think as well, and I put together a vision document for the acquisitions meeting, which contains – you guessed it – a hook. I mean that there is literally a line on the document that asks me to clarify what the hook is, and if I can’t think of one, I start to doubt myself and to doubt whether I will be able to get others to love this novel as much as I do. I have definitely walked away from novels before, even though I love the writing, if I can’t see a clear way of publishing the book successfully – and that all begins with the hook.
A clear hook can kick-start a successful marketing plan. In a publishing house, the marketing team will often use Meta advertising to drive online sales – some publishers also use what we call ‘outdoor ads’ which are the ads you might see on the tube in London, but these are not something you can track (you can’t know how many people have engaged with an outdoor ad) so publishers usually turn to online (outdoor ads are also incredibly pricy). The ads will usually use a one-liner as a headline, and then the marketing team will copy test multiple lines to see which ones are the most effective – i.e. which ones readers are responding to the most. Often, these lines stem from the hook of the novel.
A good hook can make your novel stand-out in the media, in catalogues and in buyer’s guides. It can also help with word-of-mouth. Some of the biggest bestsellers have been word-of-mouth hits, e.g. The Girl on the Train – you know, the one where she witnesses an attack through a train window. You can hear the way people might have described this to their friends and passed the book on. Also, on a practical note, a lot of the industry media (bookseller guides etc) divides books up into small spaces, so if you can summarise your hook in that little section of text, you might just grab someone’s attention and they then might place an order for your book. The same goes for when your publicist is pitching your novel to the media – they want to be able to capture a journalist’s attention and make them prioritise your book over everybody else’s – and a great hook helps with that too.
A great hook can form part of the book cover. When we are writing the straplines (the line or two that goes on the front of your book, drawing the reader in) we often refer to the hook, or use it as a starting point. For one of the recent John Grisham novels, for example, (called The Exchange) I came up with the strapline: ‘Ten days to save a life. One second to end it’ after looking again at the blurb we had and trying to work out what the main hook really is. This can be a really useful exercise when thinking about positioning and ideally, every element of your book gives the reader a strong message as to what they will get and why it will be exciting to read.
So, what does a hook look like? I always think a good way of explaining this is to look at the Sunday Times bestsellers chart, as they will often basically list the hook next to the novel. Sometimes, there will be big brands in the chart so they will flag that instead, or award wins etc. but if you get into the habit of looking at it, you will see that very often they do summarise the story or provide the hook. Let’s take this week (week ending Sunday 1st June 2025) as an example:
Fiction paperbacks
1 We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (Penguin £9.99)
A private security officer calls her father-in-law for help when framed for murder (28,235)2 The Hotel Avocado by Bob Mortimer (Gallery £9.99)
Gary Thorn is tempted to help his girlfriend to open a hotel in Brighton (17,035)3 Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Faber £9.99)
In the wake of their father’s death, two brothers grapple with their grief (12,400)4 The Tenant by Freida McFadden (Poisoned Pen £9.99)
A desperate landlord rents out a room to a seemingly sweet, innocent woman (12,180)5 Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty (Penguin £9.99)
Passengers on a plane receive unsettling predictions about their future (10,470)6 Midnight and Blue by Ian Rankin (Orion £9.99)
In prison for murder, John Rebus probes the death of an inmate in a locked cell (10,315)7 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (4th Estate £9.99)
A journalist bonds with a serial killer of lonely businessmen over a love of food (9,360)8 Precipice by Robert Harris (Penguin £9.99)
On the cusp of war, the prime minister Herbert Asquith has an affair with a socialite (7,025)9 The Housemaid by Freida McFadden (Little, Brown £10.99)
A live-in housemaid uncovers unsettling secrets at her new home (6,765)10 A Secret Escape by Sarah Morgan (HQ £9.99)
Estranged friends reconnect but a bombshell could jeopardise their friendship again (6,340)
And the hardback list:
Fiction hardbacks
1 The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig (Orbit £19.99)
A prophetess is forced on an impossible quest with a handsome knight (21,080)2 By Your Side by Ruth Jones (Bantam £22)
An employee at a council’s unclaimed heirs unit takes one final case before retiring (7,795)3 Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros (Piatkus £25)
As war heightens in Basgiath, loyalties are tested; sequel to Iron Flame (7,615)4 A Song of Legends Lost by MH Ayinde (Orbit £20)
A commoner invokes a spirit that could hold the key to ending a centuries-long war (5,610)5 Nightshade by Michael Connelly (Orion £22)
Exiled to a low-key post, a detective uncovers a dark heart to a serene island (4,355)6 This House of Burning Bones by Stuart MacBride (Macmillan £22)
Logan McRae juggles cases with a skeleton staff of misfits and malingerers (3,190)7 The Chemist by AA Dhand (HQ £16.99)
A pharmacist lands in the middle of a turf war between drug cartels in Yorkshire (2,790)8 Tyrant by Conn Iggulden (Michael Joseph £22)
As Agrippina gains power, her son Nero enters a world of bloodshed and betrayal (2,575)9 Vianne by Joanne Harris (Orion £22)
Prequel to Harris’s bestselling Chocolat, revealing the origins of Vianne Rocher (2,110)10 Crossfire by Wilbur Smith and David Churchill (Zaffre £22)
In 1943, Saffron Courtney hunts a spy who could derail the Allied advance (1,745)
You can see that for each of these, you quickly and clearly understand the genre of the book and very roughly what it is about. The non-fiction lists are the same (you can see them all on The Times website, but you do have to be a subscriber I think). I might do another post at some point about the bestseller list and how it works, if people would find that of interest (comment below if you would!) Other examples of brilliant hooks are below (these are just my examples and I hope the authors won’t mind my using them!):
Our House by Louise Candlish — A woman comes home to find strangers have bought her own house without her knowledge.
The Holiday by TM Logan — Three families go on holiday together, but one of them is a killer.
What You Did by Claire McGowan — A woman accuses her best friend’s husband of rape.
The List by Yomi Adegoke — A high-profile female journalist's world is upended when her fiancé's name turns up in a viral social media post.
The Housekeepers by Alex Hay — a group of housekeepers plan a heist on the house they look after.
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides — A woman shoots her husband and then never speaks another word.
Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid — A young black woman in Philadelphia is wrongly accused of kidnapping while babysitting a white child.
The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena — A child disappears when its parents go for dinner next door.
Girl A by Abigail Dean — A teenager escapes from her parents’ house of horrors and survives to tell the tale.
The Flat Share by Beth O’Leary — Two people share a bed but have never met.
I could go on, but hopefully these examples show you what I mean – I don’t think it is a coincidence that they are all bestsellers.
The thing I want to make very clear is that of course, your book is MORE than your hook. As publishers, we want to find talented writers, those who can bring passion and nuance and detail and colour to the page. We want your plots to feel layered, we want your characters to feel real and 3D and memorable. But in commercial fiction, we do also value the hook, and I think it’s helpful to know why. Sometimes, I might get a manuscript in that I love but that doesn’t really have anything that makes it feel different. If that happens, I might spend a few days brainstorming possible ways into the book – and then potentially discuss with the agent and author. I’d never want to make an author hook a novel on something they were not comfortable with, but I have at times suggested making changes to a manuscript in order to pull out a more hooky proposal. It’s also worth saying that when I receive emails from agents, I am more likely to push the manuscript up my to-be-read pile if the hook feels clear and accessible to me from the pitch.
If you are struggling to think of a hook, try a few options and running them past someone else. What is at the heart of your story? Imagine being in an elevator and someone asks you what your book is about - what would you say in those thirty seconds? What do you want the reader to know? If you strip away all the subplots and extraneous detail, what is the thing without which the story itself would not function?
I hope this is helpful, and remember, you are more than your hook, but it is worth thinking about!
Happy hooking.
Phoebe x
This is super-helpful, thank you Phoebe! The importance of hooks to the industry is obvious, and to many writers embarking on a project too: they can't find the huge amounts of time and effort to develop a project if they're undermined by the fear that at the end it won't, actually, be pitchable like this. And it's also helpful to literary writers, I'd argue, even if the hook is less obviously plotty: what kind of experience will the reader have, if they read this?
What doesn't get said so often, perhaps, is that thinking about hooks can be helpful even if you're one of the many process- not product-driven writers, who just don't know what the product will be till they've followed the process; demanding that they work out the hook, then structure and write the first draft to fit it, shuts down their creative mind.
Thinking about your hook - tentatively, like a pencil sketch, watching lines emerge and evolve, some which you gradually thicken up as they look like the important ones, and others which you ignore, can be a really help. Then second-draft is like gradually inking things in, and erasing the rest...
Hi Phoebe! Thank you so much for your posts - so incredibly insightful to peel back the layers of the industry. I'm a young writer working on a WIP, but I'm worried that a)the hook will lose timeliness, particularly if centred on something like remote working/return-to-office and b)not too sure how to proceed once I have that hook. Appreciate one half of this is a publishing question and one half a writing question but happy to hear any thoughts at all, if you have the time. Thank you!