5 Reasons Readers Will Bail on a Book

by Carla Douglas

Image by barefootedgirl (CC BY-NC 2.0)

How often do you begin reading a novel and then abandon it, unfinished? How far do you get before making this decision? Do you have a personal number? For example, I know people who will give a novel 30 pages. Some will give it 50, and if they’re not engaged by that point, they walk away.

Those numbers seem almost quaint by today’s standards – some advice I’ve read online goes so far as to say that you must hook your reader on the first page! I don’t think it’s fair to judge a novel based on so little, but there it is – readers are becoming more and more impatient, and writers had best listen.

How many of us stop to analyze just why we’ve put a book down? This past weekend I attended a seminar for fiction editors, where we spent a good part of our time talking about just this: what are the things that can go wrong in a novel? Here, in no particular order, is a partial list of what stood out in that conversation.  

The novel has weak or unconvincing dialogue – especially when the author attempts to replicate regional accents or dialects. A host of other issues crop up in dialogue. Readers can become confused about who is saying what, and they are easily exasperated by too many chippy dialogue tags, such as “she quipped” and “he chortled.”

The novel is full of clichés. It’s bad enough to rely on a cliché once, but when it appears a second time in the same book, you are probably pushing the limits of a reader’s tolerance. Here’s an example. Does your handsome male protagonist have “translucent blue eyes”? A tired expression like this is the literary equivalent of an earworm. Readers will judge you for not trying hard enough to invigorate your prose.

The novel lacks internal consistency. Hair colour, eye colour, spelling of names, the town a character is from – all these things must be carefully checked for consistency. Readers notice when these things don’t add up (and they love to point them out, too). Worse, though, is if an underlying premise in the novel fails the consistency test. For instance, the main character in a fantasy novel has x-ray vision. Yet in a crisis in which her life is in danger, she can’t find her keys at the bottom of her purse, and she wastes precious time groping around looking for them. Huh?   

The novel contains one or more information or research dumps. Yes, the main character may have a remarkably interesting job, and it might benefit the novel to include some background information. But readers want to absorb this knowledge by the way. That is, they don’t want to be told, in long descriptive passages, about the engineering challenges of coal mine construction in the 1890s. They would rather look over the shoulder of a miner as he descends the mine shaft for the first time.

The author cannot resist the urge to teach, or worse, to preach. Readers read for a number of reasons, but I think it’s safe to say that they don’t read fiction in order to learn facts or to be told what to think. When the author’s voice intrudes in a narrative to make a point, you can almost hear that author protesting, “This is really interesting and important! Pay attention!” Readers can be insulted by this – they sense first that the author doesn’t trust them to “get it” on their own, and second, that perhaps the author should have written another kind of book.    

Much of what these five points boil down to is about the nature of the author-reader relationship. Readers put their trust in an author to deliver a satisfying reading experience; authors, in turn, need to trust and respect the reader to draw whatever conclusions she chooses as a result of that experience. It’s not easy to build a relationship with the reader, but the effort is worth it.  

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