What I’ve Learned from Kindle Freebies

For the last couple of years, I’ve been sampling the hundreds of free Kindle books I’ve collected. My methodology is to look at the cover, and the description, then download the book if anything is even mildly interesting. Once I download the book, I start reading it. I quit well over 90% before making it more than a quarter of the way through. To be fair, some are probably perfectly good books, but I have weird tastes and never know what will grab me. Others have flaws that stop me. 

Here are some tips that might help you catch readers like me.

Get a good cover that fits the genre and looks good as a thumbnail. The cover is the first thing I see when I’m going through my Kindle library. If the cover is bad, I go in with low expectations.

Have an actual description. I don’t want an excerpt, and I don’t want to know what awards this book has, I want to know the plot I’ll be getting. 

Have a good hook. I’m not going to read past the first chapter if I’m not hooked. Action isn’t necessarily a hook because if I don’t care about the characters, I’m not interested. Often, injuring a character is a good way to get me interested.

Even so, don’t use cheap tricks to hook a reader. Once I realize it’s a cheap trick, I’m putting the book down.

Unless it’s the prologue, start with the main character or at least someone who has a large POV. When I read the book, I’m often deciding if I want to go on a journey with that character. If the first chapter doesn’t follow a main character, I’m likely to put the book down before I find out that’s not the main character. 

Don’t label your prologue as a first chapter. The prologue title tells me that the scene I’m reading is likely set in a different place, time, or POV of a different character. Once, I read a book that started with a chapter that should have been labeled the prologue. Right when they opened the door to the alien ship, the chapter ended. The next chapter jumped back months in time when the characters were starting the mission. I felt so cheated that I put the book down. If the first chapter had been marked as a prologue, I wouldn’t have been so mad.

Another point: if I don’t like the prologue, I might give the first chapter a shot since I expect it’s set in a different time, place, or character’s POV than the prologue. If I don’t like the first chapter, I’m not going to read the second. Essentially, a prologue gives an author two chances to hook a reader.

Keep the prologue as short as you can. I know I’ll be moving to a different time, place, or character. I don’t want to be spending a ton of time on it. 

Don’t start with the character doing something immoral. If the character is sleeping around, is gay, getting drunk, or doing something nasty, I’ll decide this isn’t the sort of person I want to spend hours of reading time with. 

The reverse is also true. If the character is showing him/herself to be someone moral, that will make me more interested in following him/her. The more unique the morals are, the better. In one book, a runaway kid never stole anything, not even a two-dollar map that would have been easy to take. This left me impressed. Most authors would have had a hungry kid turn to petty thievery. 

Don’t have a bunch of f-bombs or other nasty stuff. While I will read a good book that has those, if I find the f-bombs or other nastiness, I’m likely to put the book down well before I’m hooked. (This includes sex or nasty gore.)

Don’t preach. Even worse is if the preaching is something I disagree with. I’ll sometimes tolerate preaching I agree with, but I don’t like it. I’m especially tired of overdone stuff involving a girl who is oppressed because of her gender or environmental messages, but on the Christian front, evil Russians/Muslims/Chinese get old too.

If you do have a political message in the book, try not to depict everyone who disagrees as a bad guy. If every guy who thinks women shouldn’t be in combat is an idiot, that makes for a boring story. A story where the guy isn’t a straw man and has good reasons for wanting to keep women out of combat is much more interesting. The same goes for armies at war. Maybe the soldiers on the other side are simply trying to protect their families too.

Characters should be relatable. In one story, government agents told a girl her boyfriend was a Chinese spy. She believed these strangers from the government and was mad at her boyfriend, not seeming to care if he got in trouble. If I had a friend and some stranger from the government started telling me my friend was a spy or something, I’d want to hear my friend out, not immediately throw him/her under the bus. This made me unable to relate to the character so I put the book down.

Make sure your formatting is good. I put down one book because the formatting meant that the book didn’t tell me how much time I had left in a chapter. I use that function a lot and not having it made me feel lost.

What are some things that make you put a book down? What are some things that will keep you reading?