Visibility

I'm a somewhat regular member of StackExchange's "WorldBuilding" site, a place for writers, game developers, and imaginers of all sorts to bounce ideas off of really smart people, and get answers to seemingly intractable questions.

A couple days ago, I asked a question related to my WIP; whether famine death of a billion people in a world with ten billion was reasonable. Someone reading an early fragment of the work called me out about that, saying that it was a preposterously large number; that society would collapse. I doubted his statement, but thought I should take it to the aforementioned smart people (no offense to the WF community) and see what they had to say. Maybe he was right.

So I asked, with the hookish title of "A billion dead?" I set up the situation (ten billion people), and asked if a global famine could kill off ten percent. What would the impacts be? Was I overreaching?

I got good answers from a lot of people, but what I really learned was the value of a good hook. A heady, short question that leaves so much unexplained has, in two days' time, drawn ten thousand views of the question. For comparison, most questions asked in the same time period have garnered between one and two hundred views, with a couple that have pegged view counts in the low thousands (2-4K).

There is little about this statistic, these ten thousand views, that has anything to do with the question I asked. Only a fraction of the setup and question are visible in the preview lines; just enough to lead the reader on. But other questions are presented similarly, and are just as interesting in the long form. I'm fully convinced that the hook is what has drawn people in.

This is something to remember when writing a bit of ad copy for our self-published works. Sure, a blurb is what will sell the work, but the hook is what gets them to read the blurb. Write the hook, sell the book.