How Emotional Hooks Sell Books

When we are writing our hooks for organic marketing, I find that most people I know tend to just write a blurb and call it done. I see it in our Q&A's every week. However, I find that blurbs don't really work for organic marketing nearly as well as throwing people right into a scene from the book.

The way that I write hooks is a bit different than I see in those massive self-promo FB groups day to day, and I find that it works for both my paid ads and for my organic—IE TikTok and Instagram reels and stuff like that. I've already talked quite a bit in the past about how I use emotional hooks on TikTok and like to go into the emotion of the book in order to sell it, but I don't think I've gone into enough detail on how this actually works.

So, I'm going over that now, because I think this would be very helpful for a lot of people, especially with an example from one of my actual books. (Okay a few books, so strap in, y'all)

(Keep in mind I haven't just done this for my own books I have written hooks that sell books for dozens of authors, and I tend to use the same formula for pulling these emotional hooks from the book, I just do a different length depending on how we're posting it. I’m not taking clients at the moment, just wanted to explain why what I’m saying is not just for my own stuff. For example: for TikTok, I want the video to last at least a minute, so if I'm using their photo slideshow function, I am doing at least 20 to 30 slides.)

Onto the examples.

One of my books is a paranormal romance with a human girl and a werewolf. You might think that I use these really intense scenes with werewolf battles, or maybe the scene where she gets kidnapped toward the end of the book in order to draw the werewolf out, but I actually don't use any of that. The biggest thing that I find in selling books is that when I'm creating my hooks, people want it to be smaller and more relatable.

*Spoiler for TV show The Good Place*

If you've ever seen The Good Place, it's like the scene where they're trying to teach the Bad Place architects to create these scenes for the afterlife, and what I often see is that someone will take their chainsaw bear and make it smaller and more relatable with its bacon T-shirt. However, as they say in The Good Place, we are using the emotional chainsaw bear to attack their biggest insecurities.

*End of spoiler.*

The way that this relates to my book is that I don't use anything to do with werewolves, or a paranormal war, or monster hunters, or anything like that. In fact, my best selling scene that always gets a lot of views and has gone viral a few times is one that doesn't even mention that he's a werewolf or that they are fated mates. The scene is the morning after they ~do things~ together and she recalls that she told him that she loves him several times, but he did not say it back. When I am posting this scene, I use the dialogue directly from the scene AND some of the narration directly from the scene to share it with this audience.

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So I might start it with, “When she accidentally told him she loves him, but he didn't say it back.” Notice how that doesn't say anything about werewolves or magic or fated mates? It's just a scene that hits on the massive insecurity that all of us feel deep down inside of the possibility of rejection. I then do not reveal what he says to her when she confronts him with this information. The scene I post is ONLY the confrontation without a resolution. This is because I want people to feel like they need justice for my main character. She's feeling insecure, she's feeling scared, she is wondering if the man who loves her actually loves her back. And they need to read the book to find that happy ending.

Sure, they are in the middle of a paranormal war where her own mother wants to kill her, but that is not something that most readers are going to immediately relate to. (Sure a few people have been in a situation where someone has tried to harm them severely, but these aren't the main things that are going to sell on a massive scale.)

If we look at another example like the oh-so-controversial Twilight, the big thing that really sold about it is that this character Edward wanted Bella so badly because part of her would sustain him for the rest of eternity, but he also knew that taking this part of her would result in her death. So what that hits on and why this book became so massively popular and spanned into a franchise of five movies is simple! It’s that we all want to feel wanted. We want someone to care extraordinarily deeply about us, and the exaggerated depth of his desire is something especially intriguing to people who feel unappreciated and even lonely in their real lives. (Listen, I was so mad when I was 14 and my dad got me a Team Edward shirt instead of a Team Jacob shirt from Hot Topic lol)

This also works in contemporary non paranormal works. Including non-romance books.

Let's look at the book The Perfect Marriage by Jeneva Rose. The gist of it is that a woman is a defense attorney and has to defend her husband after he's been accused of murdering his mistress. However, she did not know beforehand that he was even cheating on her. The reason that this hits our emotional core is not because most of us will ever be in a situation where we are a defense attorney who has to defend a loved one in a murder case after they deeply betray us. The reason that it hits is because we all know what it is to be betrayed by a loved one. A lot of people have been cheated on, and just imagining that we then have to save the person who betrayed us so horribly is enough to get a lot of people reading this book. (by the way everything that I've said is just in the blurb of the book).

So basically, when you're looking at creating your marketing material, I want you to consider the small relatable things that might even feel like filler when you're writing them and see how these emotions might affect your readers because of how they relate to them.

Of course, these examples are very fiction oriented. However, this is also something that nonfiction writers use to sell their own work. When someone is writing a self-help book, they are selling it from the point of view of “How can this help YOU? How does this relate to YOU?”

I read a lot of books for entrepreneurs, and every single one of them tells me how this method or technique or psychological trick can change my life. And it does this in detail. It doesn't say “You could have a 6-figure bank account, and you could have a wonderful retirement account and lots of stocks and investments.”

No, it says, “You could finally buy the mansion that you want. You could spend more time with your family. You could go on regular family vacations. You know that dream car that you want? You can absolutely have it.”

The reason that this works is because it's still putting us into the metaphorical driver’s seat. It's putting us behind the controls so we can try to reach our personalized destination.

I hope that this cleared thing up a little bit and helped you with your book marketing strategy even more. My goal is always for authors to become super rich by selling a ton of copies of their books. I'm not a bajillionaire yet, but I've definitely found a marketing formula that works for me and wanted to share it.

If you haven't yet, go find your emotional chainsaw bears!