Cliffhangers get a bad rap in the novel writing world.
Anecdotally, some authors say that cliffhangers can cause trouble with readthrough.
They can get us some lower star reviews.
I think there are still a lot of places for cliffhangers in books, but that’s a topic for another day.
When it comes to writing your book descriptions, however, there are a couple of key places where you need to leave the reader wanting more.
Because after all, the goal of the book description is to get them to go buy the dang book.
So you want them to be wanting more of your book.
At the end of each Best Page Forward book description paragraph, we make sure that the last sentence qualifies as a cliffhanger.
Now usually that first cliffhanger has something to do with either the inciting incident of the book or the midpoint kind of conflict of the book…
And that cliffhanger is meant to basically bring the energy over from the first paragraph to the second paragraph.
Because you need to have some line breaks.
You need to have some white space in your blurb because it can’t just be a wall of text.
But you still need to give the reader a reason to continue on.
So you add that cliffhanger there.
Then you have that big cliffhanger at the end.
Will they or won’t they get together?
Will the guy save the world?
You need both of those cliffhangers in there in order to keep the energy and the momentum going.
With the energy transferring over from one paragraph to another…
You significantly increase your changes of the reader clicking the Buy button.