“This is one of the many "how to write" books out there. The main focus here is on the literal opening of your story: mainly the first scene, the element that you need to hook a reader. In other words, the "Hooked" part refers to hooking your reader with the opening scene, which (for the most part) Edgerton says is the dramatization of the inciting incident.
Part of the books focus is on how the "midlist" has pretty much disappeared these days. (Midlist is a term that refers to books that aren't bestsellers but are good enough to justify their publication.) The problem is, given the sheer number of books I see in the book store and available via sites like Amazon, I find this incredibly hard to believe. And even if the "midlist" is gone, online publication has certainly opened up an avenue. (This book was written in 2006 so it's not like Edgerton could have been unaware of this.)
But there is a good point here, which Edgerton brings up: namely that the focus is on the bottom line these days. Publishers (and book stores) have a low margin of profit. Further, your book has to at least show the potential to be on the better side of the "midlist" (i.e., closer to bestseller than rubbish). Further, the focus on mainstream and/or literary works is just about gone, leaving the field to genre works. On that latter point: mainstream fiction tended to focus on relatively leisurely openings and characters that spent a lot of time in their head. Edgerton's whole book is a consistent set of advice against that approach.
One thing I found kind of interesting is that Edgerton's book tries to be formulaic and, granted, that's the case with most of these "how to write" books. In this case, Edgerton starts with "story structure" (composed, he says, of three elements), then the structural elements of a scene (of which he says there are four), the ten "core components" of an opening scene (of which four are "first tier" and six are "second tier"), the four goals of an opening scene, and so forth. But ... I found this ironic given that in the beginning of the book Edgerton mentions how too many books treat the art of writing by thinking of it in terms of "pieces." Well ... isn't that sorta what he's doing? For me, yes. His pieces are just a little more granular.
I like an honest line from the book: "Take what works for you from this book and forget what doesn't." The only problem is that if I'm allowed to "forget what doesn't" -- then that clearly wasn't all that important to making a good book, right? But if it is that important, then how can I just "forget it?" Wouldn't that make my changes of getting published a bit less?
Somewhat along that same line of thinking, like most of these authors of "how to" books, Edgerton seems to assume that many readers will just put down a book if it contains some of what the "how to" author considers to be a flaw. In Edgerton's case these flaws are bad openings. But then it's hard to explain the sheer number of books that I do see with some of these "mistakes" that actually sell pretty well. Or you can read reviews or comments on sites like GoodReads, Shelfari, and Amazon that make it clear that readers aren't quite that fickle. So why do all these book authors assume so? Once again, Edgerton is making what I consider a "mistake" of these how-to books: generalizing too much. (Yet another example of this is the admonition to mainly avoid prologues -- even though many books do still utilize such and when I hear comments from readers, it's rarely about the negative aspects of having a prologue.)
As with many of these books, Edgerton's is missing a lot of advice as to how to apply these concepts when your story has multiple characters. For example, I was mildly surprised that Edgerton didn't give any advice regarding whether each character should have an "opening scene" and then how that gets structured. I say this because he does give specific advice about how you should end an opening scene and how such scenes should transition. I suppose a logical supposition is just to follow that template for each character. But, as an example, Edgerton mentions that "first chapters should end powerfully." That makes sense. But if I have multiple characters, does *each scene* for *each character* have to end with the same level of power? Or should you pick a particular character that has the most "powerful ending"? So, again, I'm often surprised that this kind of advice is missing from thee books. But that's a personal concern of mine and I don't really hold that against this book overly much.
I've read a lot of books on "how to write" so maybe that colors my next comment, but I don't feel there's really a lot of substance to this book. What I mean is that I think you could basically distill the main points very simply:
(1) Establish a sense of time, place, and potential conflict. Give enough information to understand some basics about the protagonist of the scene.
(2) What the opening has to do for the reader is convince them that you can write; convince them that you can create a character; convince them that you can tell a story.
(3) Avoid backstory in your opening to the extent that you can.
(4) An effective opening scene is about one to four pages.
The book does, however, provide some examples here and there and those are certainly worth the reading time as well. But my overall point is that I really think a book like this could be encapsulated with bullet points like I just gave and then providing a list of those examples.
So, overall, I liked this book. I think Edgerton has an engaging way of writing but I have to say that ultimately I really didn't feel like I got a whole lot out of this book. Or, rather, I did get some good points out if it but it left me feeling I probably could have found those without having to read a whole book.”