Found out last weekend that editors at publishing houses reject most novels based on the first page alone

I was browsing some stats on a writer's website after I couldn't figure out why my short story kept getting passed over. Apparently something like 80% of agents and editors decide to stop reading after just the first page. Not the first chapter, not the first paragraph, the first page. That blew my mind because I always thought they gave you at least 5 or 10 pages to hook them. It made me go back and look at the opening of my story and honestly it was super slow. I started the thing with weather description like a total cliche. Now I'm rewriting the whole opening scene to start right in the middle of action. Has anyone else gone back and totally redone their first page after reading this kind of stat?

2 comments

2 Comments

angelarivera4d ago

People get really worked up about stuff like this, but I think the real story is more boring. Of course they stop reading if the first page is bad. That's not some shocking new rule, that's just how reading works. You don't need a publishing degree to know that boring weather paragraphs are a bad way to start. My guess is the writers who get rejected already had other problems on page one besides just being slow. The whole "start in the middle of action" advice gets thrown around a lot, but it doesn't fix a story that just isn't very good.

smith.nancy4d ago

@angelarivera nailed it, really. Reminds me of a critique group I was in years back where someone spent three pages describing a sunrise. Good story underneath but nobody got to it because they were bored stiff by paragraph two. Pretty sure the problem wasn't the opening strategy, it was that they didn't trust the reader to figure out it was morning without the whole weather report. Sometimes it's not about where you start but what you leave out.