As much as you need good advertisement and marketing abilities for your book to be published and sold successfully, you need good content for the book. You need to grab your readers' attention and make them read every page with excitement, make them anticipate what is going to happen next. But how can you achieve something like that?
Well, you can't exactly make a whole book full of intensified and dramatic situations and scenes so you will have to decide when is the right moment for a scene like that. This scene will play an important role in your book's overall performance. To make a scene like that would require a lot of patience and a big set-up before the scene and strong follow-up scenes after it.
After we clarified our needs for making a captivating scene, we need to understand how can we create it. These scenes can be anything, a sudden plot twist, a fight between the main characters, maybe even one or more of the characters' death. This might sound a bit drastic, but it will surely do your book a good favor, and let's explain exactly why.
Everyone gets a bit bored with a book after reading it for an hour or two, but when you put these little scenes in between you make sure that your readers will be always focused and waiting for the next epic moment in your story.
Of course, like everything good in life, you should not overuse them or you will make your book look kind of dull and poorly written. As an author, you never want to disappoint your fans with a book full of plot twists or dramatic scenes all the time. Everything should be used with the right timing to make sure that you will receive the results you seek.
We will give an example. Imagine you are writing a book about two characters who love each other, but their feelings are forbidden for some specific reason, e.g. they are from two opposing families. You can always expand the story by giving them lots of scandals, but after a little while, everyone will get bored of reading about them, because the scenes are going to look alike and there will be no positive attention towards them anymore. You would want to reduce these scenes up a bit, give the characters some moments of happiness and then maybe ruin it for them with a surprising turn of events.
Of course, the shorter your story is, the better these moments will be accepted by the readers. Bigger size does not always mean better quality. Sometimes longer books are not going to be fully read by the readers, because of their repetitive stories. If you feel you can't make the story long and at the same time captivating, then go for a shorter one, it will be in your favor. You will save a lot of time and thinking, but with shorter stories, you have to be very careful, because you have less time to achieve the same effects as longer books. You will have to choose your words wisely and try to cut unnecessary things like dialogues that don't really contribute to the flow of the story.
After all, it is better not to place all your ideas in the story than to make it long and boring. No one likes repetitiveness or pointless scenes, everything should make sense or be a little bit mysterious. You can always make a book full of short stories if you can't think of anything that has a consecutive story. If you worry too much about the length you can always try and give the book to one of your friends for feedback. This method might give you an idea of your book's chances of success.
Having the ability to write stories that make people want to read more and more is a real talent. If you can't do it from the first try, DO NOT stop writing! Having the time and the patience to write will always give you the best results possible, it is better to waste more time and effort than leaving the job half done. And remember - the best story is the one that you have written with the biggest joy and energy. It is important that people like your book, but you should never give up on your ideas and your likings so that you can please someone else, always write what you want and you will always achieve the biggest success possible - being proud of your work!