For My Paid Subscribers: More on the Introduction

If you want people to read your introduction,

Make it short, sweet, and compelling.

 I once worked with a woman who was writing about the death of her young daughter. She had been to hell and back and she had some valid knowledge to share about surviving loss, but in her intro, she kept repeating and rewording what she had said in the previous sentence. I knew that she was taking a huge leap to put her grief on the page, it was a delicate situation, but I had to let her know that her intro wasn’t working. I tried to do it in a tactful way, but she said, “I have to repeat myself. I’m sharing something very important and I need to make sure people are getting my point.”