Watch someone shop for a nonfiction book and you’ll usually see the same routine. They read the title, turn the book over for the back cover, then open to the first page of chapter one. They read a paragraph, maybe a page. Then the book goes under their arm or back on the shelf. Online the routine is even shorter: a tap on the sample, a minute or two of scrolling, a decision.
When I worked at a Christian bookstore, I saw this play out time and again as customers browsed the shelves. And to be quite honest, I shop at a bookstore the same way. I’ll bet you do, too.
An editor reads your opening much the way that shopper does, with a pencil in hand. On a first pass I’m not hunting for typos. I want to know whether a reader who has never heard of you will turn to page eleven. Here’s what I look for, roughly in the order it shows up.
The warm-up
Most first drafts start a few pages before the book does. The author opens with how the book came to be written, or a dictionary definition, or a paragraph about how confused our culture has become, or a tour of what the coming chapters will cover. The writer needed those pages, because writing them was how the book got found. The reader doesn’t need them, and a reader with a sample open and a busy afternoon won’t wait for them.
Try this: cover your first two pages and start reading at page three. A surprising number of manuscripts begin there. Whatever was useful in the opening paragraphs can be folded in later, once the reader has a reason to care.
Front matter deserves the same scrutiny. Online samples usually start at the front of the book, so a dedication, two pages of endorsements, a foreword and a long acknowledgments section can use up most of the sample before chapter one appears. Keep what belongs up front and move the rest. Acknowledgments sit perfectly well at the back.
The promise
By the end of the first couple of pages, a reader should be able to say what problem the book takes on and who it’s written for. If they can also guess why you’re the one writing it, so much the better.
A book on prayer for people who have quietly stopped praying is a different book from one written for the church prayer team, even if both end up in the same Scripture. The opening should tell me which one I’m holding. An opening that tries to speak to everyone leaves each reader unsure whether it’s speaking to them.
The promise also has to be one the book can keep. “This book will transform your marriage” sets a bar no book clears, and readers have learned to discount it. A modest promise stated plainly (“If you’ve been holding your church’s volunteer schedule together for years, this book is for you”) earns more trust than a large one stated loudly.
A person on the page
Here are two openings for the same imaginary chapter on forgiveness:
Forgiveness is one of the most misunderstood concepts in the Christian life.
Ellen had rehearsed what she’d say to her brother for eleven years, and he interrupted her in the first minute.
The first sentence is true, and most readers have met it many times before. The second makes them want the next sentence. Both chapters might arrive at the same theology, but the second has given the reader something to hang it on.
Nonfiction can open with a person, a scene, an object, a decision or a problem. It shouldn’t open with a summary of its own conclusions. When the abstract statement comes first, the reader has to take it on trust. When it comes after a concrete case, the reader has watched it hold weight.
One caution, because Christian authors run into it often. If the story is about a real person, change the identifying details or get permission, and say which you did. If it’s a composite, label it as one. An editor who suspects a story has been improved in the telling will start doubting the rest of the book.
The sentences
An editor reads the first pages partly to find out whether the author can carry a whole book. The habits that wear a reader out over two hundred pages show up early, and they’re far easier to fix in ten pages than in ten chapters. These are the ones I see most:
- A quotable line at the end of every paragraph. One earned line in a chapter lands. One per paragraph trains the reader to skim for them.
- Rhetorical questions in a stack. “What if God isn’t finished? What if the waiting is the work? What if…?” By the third question I usually suspect the author hasn’t decided what they think.
- Everything in threes. Three adjectives, three parallel clauses, three short sentences in a row for emphasis. Once is a choice; on every page it’s a tic.
- Stiffness. A conversational book written without a single contraction reads like a legal notice.
- A borrowed voice. Long quotations from better-known authors in the first pages remind the reader whose book they could be reading instead.
A newer pattern belongs on the list. Plenty of authors now draft with AI tools, and drafts that come straight from them share a cadence: tidy triplets, “It’s not X, it’s Y,” every section closing on a neat moral. Readers are learning to hear it. Whatever tools you use, the finished sentences need to sound like you.
Habits of our own corner
A few problems show up more often in Christian nonfiction than anywhere else.
The illustration everyone has heard. The boy throwing starfish back into the sea, the man on his roof turning down the rowboat and the helicopter, the frog in the slowly heating pot. Anyone who has sat in church for a few years has heard them from the pulpit, and some don’t hold up as fact. If an illustration has a source, cite it. If it doesn’t, find a story of your own.
Verses in a pile. A parenthesis with six references on page two tells the reader you ran a concordance search. It doesn’t show them anything in the passages. One text, read carefully in its context, does more work than six cited in passing.
The sermon voice. Preaching and writing share a lot, but a sermon leans on the preacher’s presence, the room and the pause. On the page, “Friend, hear me on this” and an altar-call ending to every section come across as pressure. Let the argument do the persuading.
While you’re in the front of the book, look at the copyright page too. Bible translations carry their own permission terms, usually a limit on how many verses you can quote without written permission and a credit line you’re required to print. Find the notice for the translation you use and follow it from the start; it’s much harder to fix after the book is typeset.
Testing your own ten pages
You can run most of an editor’s first read yourself. It takes an evening and a printer.
- Print the first ten pages of chapter one. Problems that hide on a screen show up on paper.
- Cover pages one and two and read from page three. Ask honestly whether anything was lost.
- Find the first sentence that names a person, a place or a specific problem, and note how far into the chapter it falls.
- Write the book’s promise in one sentence a stranger would understand. Then look for the place where your opening makes that promise. If you can’t find it, a reader won’t either.
- Read the pages aloud. Mark every sentence you stumble over and every sentence you’d never say to a friend across the table.
- Count the quotations and Scripture references, and ask of each one whether the reader needs it here, this early.
- Give the pages to someone who owes you nothing. Your spouse, your small group and your best friend all want you to succeed, which makes them poor test readers. Ask your stranger to mark the spot where they’d have put the book down.
After the first ten
None of this guarantees a manuscript is ready. A strong opening can sit on top of a book that wanders off by chapter four, and a quiet opening sometimes belongs to the best book on the shelf. But the first pages are where most of these problems are easiest to see and cheapest to fix, and they’re where a reader decides whether to find out the rest. (The rest of the book needs its own kinds of editing, which I described in Small Ships, Small Churches, and the Authors I Want to Publish.)
If you’d like to look past the opening, our free manuscript readiness check takes about three minutes. Its ten questions will show you whether your manuscript is ready to send to a publisher, or what to work on first.