What is a Hook in Publishing?
The “hook” in your book pitch is the line or two of text that captures attention, declares what’s unique about your book, and tells an agent or editor if your manuscript is something their audience is hungry for. The word “hook” is sometimes used interchangeably with “elevator pitch”. However, it can also be used in a broader way to discuss the book’s strongest selling point(s). “What’s the hook for this one?” “It’s a cottagecore sapphic romance with robots.” In this post we’re going to focus on the first use, but you’ll leave equipped for the second as well.
How to Write a Strong Hook
Authors often have trouble deciding what information belongs in their hook. Condensing your whole book into one line can seem like an impossible task when everything you’ve written feels equally important. To help you, I’m drawing on my twelve years of experience working at a publisher where I reviewed queries, edited manuscripts, and then adapted the authors’ original hooks to present at sales meetings and get the sales team excited about each project.
How does one capture the heart of a sales rep? By understanding the needs of the bookstores and wholesalers they will be pitching to. To pull it off, you need to know:
- who the market for your book is (Not sure? Try my Ideal Reader Avatar post.)
- what that market wants and needs
- how your book meets that want or need
Thinking about the needs of your audience in the way a publishing professional does can take some practice. To help you, I’m going to walk you through thirty sample hooks for seven book-market categories, each one built around a common need or want.
Different Types of Book Hooks
Fantasy Book Hook Examples:
Audience and Need/Want: Fantasy readers crave something that feels like A Court of Thorns and Roses but draws on folk tales from an underrepresented culture.
Hook: Relentlessly curious Asal peeks inside the wrong box and is swept into a world of magic and danger by a distressingly handsome snake-man.
Audience and Need/Want: After the success of Dungeon Crawler Carl, Gamers want to see more of their favourite tropes in literature.
Hook: When Matt wakes up inside his favourite RPG, wheelchair and all, he sets his sights on earning some epic fantasy upgrades.
Audience and Need/Want: Cozy fantasy readers in their 20s and 30s crave escapism and the wish-fulfilment of settling into a home.
Hook: Mara’s shelter for magical pets needs one more thing. It’s time to build her own forever home.
Audience and Need/Want: Middle-aged women want characters like them who are both empowered and real.
Hook: If you’d told Lorrie her menopause was a magical power, she’d have laughed until she peed herself. Then the dragons attacked.
Genre Book Hook Examples
These are not the only examples for each genre, but they’re a great place to start.
Audience and Need/Want: Thriller readers want to see familiar tropes in a new context that that taps into current real-world fears.
Hook: A social media influencer wakes to find all his accounts taken over by an AI fake with a terrible ultimatum.
Audience and Need/Want: Mystery readers want familiar tropes in a fascinating context that sparks their curiosity.
Hook: Bates must find out how artefacts are vanishing from an archeological dig site before they’re even dug up.
Audience and Need/Want: Cozy mystery readers want familiar tropes + their favourite things.
Hook: Fatima must unravel thirty years of knitting-group drama when a dead body shows up in the local yarn shop.
Audience and Need/Want: Adventure fiction readers want high stakes and high energy in a novel setting.
Hook: Agent X’s pursuit of a tigger-happy spy leads all the way to the International Space Station.
Audience and Need/Want: Fans of speculative fiction want to explore current real-world questions by imagining a version of the world that pushes them to their fullest expression.
Hook: Farmers-turned-vigilantes fight to save the country’s last farm field from AI datacentre encroachment.
Audience and Need/Want: Science fiction readers want rich, novel worlds and technology through which they can explore questions about what it means to be human.
Hook: ADHD in space. Ryv can redirect an asteroid or patch a wormhole, but they can’t fix their time blindness. Sorry, Mom.
Audience and Need/Want: Fanfiction lovers want to see the concepts they’ve enjoyed brought to full execution.
Hook: What if humans were the scary ones in the galaxy? Mary becomes an accidental tour guide to aliens on a thrill-packed trip through Earth’s everyday dangers.
Contemporary Fiction Book Hook Examples
Audience and Need/Want: Readers who have experienced [grief/anxiety/illness/divorce/etc.] want the catharsis of seeing a character work through the same thing.
Hook: Alphonse navigates grief for his mother as he restores her beloved bed and breakfast.
Audience and Need/Want: Readers of literary fiction crave high-concept premises that tap into current societal preoccupations.
Hook: What if an intersex person was born in a city where men and women were strictly separated?
Audience and Need/Want: Queer people want to see their joy and humour on the page, not just their trauma.
Hook: Dan and Raph’s honeymoon goes off the rails when their AirBnB is overrun by capybaras.
Audience and Need/Want: Readers of [x cultural background] want authentic representation within mainstream media.
Hook: Two sisters with very different relationships to their immigrant mother return home for their father’s funeral.
Picture Book Hook Examples
Audience and Need/Want: Parents want laugh-out-loud stories that will make kids fall in love with books.
Hook: Hilarity heats up when a cat gets trapped in a sunbeam.
Audience and Need/Want: Caregivers want to give kids a framework to help them through a new experience.
Hook: Emy’s relationship with the potty improves when she gives it a name and personality.
Audience and Need/Want: Educators need to efficiently combine literacy learning with other curriculum subjects for their grade level.
Hook: Kids start a school garden and learn how seeds grow through the seasons.
Kids’ Chapter Book Hook Examples
Audience and Need/Want: Caregivers need a read-alike for their child who is finally reading but only wants more of their favourite series.
Hook: Dragon Girls meets The Magic Treehouse! The Time Queen summons Janaka and her friends to solve a mystery in Ancient Egypt.
Audience and Need/Want: Older reluctant readers need decodable text with age-appropriate characters and problems.
Hook: Haruki’s leadership of the basketball team’s spirit squad is undermined by a new student.
Audience and Need/Want: Young readers want characters and concepts they can follow through book after book without them getting stale.
Hook: Zadie’s Pegasus Post can deliver anything anywhere in the Magic Forest. But today, the package is…a porcupine?
Audience and Need/Want: Kids need models for how to navigate sticky social situations.
Hook: August’s best friend met a new best friend at camp. Now he’s coming to their school.
Middle Grade Hook Examples
Audience and Need/Want: Middle Schoolers want relatable characters who succeed with the same kind of challenges the reader is facing.
Hook: Certain her new teacher hates her guts, Siobhan must choose from two possible plans: win him over as a model student, or embrace her Bad Kid era.
Audience and Need/Want: Kids need to explore big real-world problems in an emotionally safe space.
Hook: After a refugee family is attacked in their neighbourhood, Kent and Omar set out to drown out hate with kindness.
Audience and Need/Want: Reluctant readers need no-holds-barred humour to keep them engaged.
Hook: Franklin Short has been framed for the disappearance of every pair of underwear in Bacon Falls.
Audience and Need/Want: Kids aged 8–12 want to read about fairness and justice prevailing, even when the situation is complex.
Hook: A sixth-grade detective is hired to prove that a nasty rumour about her biggest rival is false.
YA Novel Hook Examples
Audience and Need/Want: Young Adult readers need to know that their experiences are not alien and their identities are valid.
Hook: Jocie struggles to keep up the pretense of a fake crush until the boy in question reveals that he’s ace too.
Audience and Need/Want: Teens need to explore the issues affecting them and feel hopeful for progress.
Hook: When a book-ban battle closes the high school library, students found the Contraband Book Club.
Audience and Need/Want: Young people need books that normalize the physical and emotional changes they’re going through.
Hook: The doctor says Abby’s menstrual symptoms are perfectly normal, but once a month she turns into a literal witch.
Audience and Need/Want: YA readers need to see other people successfully weather changes in important friend and family relationships.
Hook: The first time Jackson kisses a girl is the first time he lies to his mother.
Hooks Aren’t Just Marketing
Coming up with a hook is not just an aggravating final step between writing your novel and getting an agent or editor to give it the time of day. As a substantive editor, I encourage authors to articulate their hook before they even begin their second draft. That’s because the process of identifying who your book is for and what need or want it’s meeting for them will help you write a stronger book: one with an audience ready and waiting to read it.
Finally, once you do get to the point of writing your query, it will be a piece of cake to tell the agent or editor reading it exactly who a publisher can sell your book to and why they will want to buy it. And that’s what moves a query to to top of the stack!
Want more help sorting out your hook? Try the is-ness exercise in my free guide Self-Edit Like a Pro: Three Powerful Steps to Perfect Your Manuscript.
Erin Alladin 
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