Book Beat Babes

Book Beat Babes

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Award Winning Cozy Mystery Author, Lois Winston, Offers Advice on Cliffhangers


I'm happy to welcome the talented mystery author, Lois Winston, wearer of many hats and names. Morgan Mandel
Award-winning author Lois Winston writes mystery, romance, romantic suspense, chick lit, women’s fiction, and non-fiction under her own name and her Emma Carlyle pen name. 

Kirkus Reviews dubbed her critically acclaimed Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery series, “North Jersey’s more mature answer to Stephanie Plum.” 

In addition, Lois is a literary agent and an award-winning craft and needlework designer who often draws much of her source material for both her characters and plots from her experiences in the crafts industry. 

Visit Lois at www.loiswinston.com, visit Emma at www.emmacarlyle.com
and visit Anastasia at the Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers blog, www.anastasiapollack.blogspot.com

Follow everyone on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Anasleuth and 


Cliffhangers
by Lois Winston

Early in my writing career I received a valuable piece of advice that I have always followed: Never end a chapter with your character going to sleep.

As an author, you never want to give your readers a reason to close your book. You want them to get to the end of the chapter and be so involved in your story that, no matter how tired they are, they absolutely, positively must turn the page to find out what happens next. This is known as the chapter-ending hook.

The chapter-ending hook is a great way to keep your readers turning pages, but what happens when they come to the last page of your book? If you’re writing a series, you want readers to pick up the next book in the series. One way to do this is to employ a cliffhanger ending.

The cliffhanger format was used with much success in the early days of cinema. Along with two weekly feature films, theaters would screen serials, longer movies that were broken up into weekly episodes. Each episode would end with the hero or heroine facing imminent death. Common scenarios included, among others, the hero or heroine dangling over the edge of a cliff (a literal cliffhanger and source of the term,) trapped in a burning building, tied to railroad tracks as a train steamed toward them, unconscious in a plummeting airplane, or bound to a chair and staring helplessly at a lit stick of dynamite. Moviegoers would have to return the following week to see if they escaped in the nick of time. They did, of course, but only to be plunged into a new peril at the end of that episode.

Cliffhangers have continued to be popular, especially in TV shows where it’s common to end a season leaving viewers guessing what happens next. Only with television shows, fans have to wait months, rather than a mere week.

Cliffhangers have been around long before television and movies, though. In Homer’s Odyssey, book four ends with an ambush being set for Odysseus’s son Telemachus, but readers don’t learn what happens to Telemachus until nearly the end of the next book.

As a writer of a mystery series, along with wanting readers to keep turning the pages of my books to find out what happens next, I want them to buy my next book, along with every other book in the series, as I continue to publish them. One way I do this is to employ a cliffhanger at the end of each book in the series.

Of course, I don’t keep the reader hanging as to the identity of the killer. I know that every book must have a resolution to the plot, and by the end of each of my books, my amateur sleuth has figured out whodunit. Mystery readers don’t want to get to the end of a book to find the murder hasn’t been solved or the killer hasn’t been caught. That’s a surefire way to lose readers.

However, I take a page from old movie serials by setting up the next book at the end of the preceding book. I do this with ongoing character arcs. My books end with a cliffhanger involving one of the continuing characters in the series. This becomes the lead-in to the murder that occurs in the next book. I’d give you examples, but I’m not one to supply spoilers of my own books. I’d rather have you read the books to find out for yourself. (How’s that for a cliffhanger ending to this article?)

About Decoupage Can Be Deadly 
by Lois Winston
In the fourth Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery, Anastasia and her fellow American Woman editors are steaming mad when minutes before the opening of a consumer show, they discover half their booth usurped by Bling!, their publisher’s newest magazine. CEO Alfred Gruenwald is sporting new arm candy—rapper-turned-entrepreneur and Bling! executive editor, the first-name-only Philomena. During the consumer show, Gruenwald’s wife serves Philomena with an alienation of affection lawsuit, but Philomena doesn’t live long enough to make an appearance in court. She’s found dead days later, stuffed in the shipping case that held Anastasia’s decoupage crafts. When Gruenwald makes cash-strapped Anastasia an offer she can’t refuse, she wonders, does he really want to find Philomena’s killer or is he harboring a hidden agenda?


Visit Lois at www.loiswinston.com, visit Emma at www.emmacarlyle.com
and visit Anastasia at the Killer Crafts & Crafty Killers blog, www.anastasiapollack.blogspot.com

Follow everyone on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Anasleuth and 

Please welcome Lois Winston to Book Beat Babes by leaving a comment.


18 comments:

  1. Welcome to Book Beat Babes, Lois. I just love your cute Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mystery titles and covers! So very clever!

    Morgan Mandel
    http://www.morganmandel.com

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  2. Hi Lois!

    Wonderful advice! Enjoyed the interview too!
    Diane

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  3. I agree about posting the synopsis of the plot for the next book at the end of the current one as a tease. BUT I agree that each book MUST be complete within itself. to leave the current plot hanging is just WRONG!

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  4. Thanks for hosting me, Morgan!

    Diane and Lorna, thanks for stopping by and commenting.

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  5. I ended my debut novel (book 1 in a series) with a cliffhanger and have gotten mixed reviews. Some are fine with it as long as the next book doesn't take a year or more to be out (better if it's out at the same time) and others that hate it. The lesson I take from it is cliffhanger is ok as long as something in the book is resolved to satisfaction and not to make the reader wait forever for the next book :)

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  6. I ended my first mystery with a cliffhanger and received such a great response from my readers, that I do it every time.

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  7. Hi Lois,

    Welcome to Book Beat Babes! I love cozy mysteries and I'm going to definitely need to put yours on my TBR list.

    I try my best to end chapters with mini-cliffhangers. Gotta keep those readers turning the pages!

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  8. Andrea, one thing I've learned is that no matter what you do, you're never going to please every reader. There will always be someone who doesn't like your book for some reason, whether it's a cliffhanger ending, a character, a plot twits...whatever. For that reason, in the end you have to do what feels right to you. It's also why many authors don't read their reviews.

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  9. Thanks for stopping by, Angela. Glad you liked the post.

    Kathleen, I've found the only readers who don't like cliffhanger chapter endings are those who blame me for keeping them up at night. ;-)

    Thanks for the welcome, Debra!

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  10. Good advice on how to further develop the ending. I suppose having the following book come out soon after the first is key for the readers.

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  11. That certainly helps, Susan. It's easier for indie authors than it is for traditionally published authors who are at the mercy of their publishers' schedules. However, over the last few years, some publishers have taken to releasing series books closer together than the traditional once a year releases.

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  12. Welcome to Book Beat Babes, Lois!
    Your cozy mystery sounds great. I too leave my readers with a cliffhanger at the end of most chapters. It's a great motivator for my readers to keep turning those pages and a motivator for me to keep the story moving forward in an exciting way.
    Thanks for being with us!!

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  13. As a TV addict, I hate cliffhangers. It drives me crazy that they do it all the time, especially since I can often guess what the cliffhanger is going to be since I know one is coming. Not always, but sometimes. By about season six, I got very good at guessing the cliffhangers on 24 on a weekly basis. Fortunately, most shows don't give weekly ciffhangers because that would drive me crazy.

    I get why authors do it for the end of chapters. I don't always appreciate it since I'm fairly OCD about ending reading at the end of a chapter. However, I really hate it when a book ends with a cliffhanger. We have to wait an entire year to find out what happens next? If an author does it for every book, it really wears me down. The occasional cliffhanger is one thing, but do it too often, and it just wears the readers down.

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  14. Thanks, Deb. It's nice to be back.

    Mark, as they say, that's what makes horse racing. There are books out there for all types of readers. Some like the anticipation of waiting to find out what happens next. Others like everything wrapped up by the last page.

    I always watch the preview for the next week's show. My husband always leaves the room before the preview. We all have our viewing and reading preferences.

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  15. Hi Lois, enjoyed your article. I agree, I like "propelling" readers into the next book with a hook but it's also important to leave them with a sense of closure. I'm not a fan of books/TV shows with ongoing mysteries/secrets that are never resolved until the final episode--that gets annoying. Also, series books are not always read in order, so you don't want the reader who picks up book four to feel confused. Love your book covers!

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  16. Thanks for stopping by and commenting, Sally. You make valid points. I hope none of the cliffhangers I employ are considered annoying. I always resolve the main plot of the book at the end. The cliffhangers are more about the ongoing "shenanigans" of various characters. I'm one of those people who's a firm believer in reading a series from the beginning. I think readers miss out on a lot when they don't read in order, even though each book of the series might be self-contained.

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  17. Lois,
    Welcome to BBB. Wonderful post, enjoyed reading it.

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