The inciting incident in your book is the point at which the action truly kicks off.
In other words, where your protagonist or protagonists are thrown into the plot, and things just really start moving.
In a book like “The Hunger Games,” it’s when Katniss volunteers as the tribute, and it throws her on a path towards the Capitol and towards the games.
And maybe not every book has a inciting incident that intense.
But either way, when you are writing your inciting incident into your book description, you want to have it leave your readers hanging as much as it does in the book itself.
In the Best Page Forward book description format, we have a hook, and then we have a synopsis, which is usually two to three paragraphs.
And that inciting incident, we usually place that in the last sentence of the first paragraph.
Why do we do that?
Well the whole point of the blurb is to get people moving all the way through to the point that they have to buy if they want to find out more.
Every jump from one paragraph to the next comes with its own challenges, and we want to make sure that a reader doesn’t stop at the end of a paragraph and just click away.
So that’s why we have the most exciting moment from the first third of your book, right there in the bridge between paragraphs.
This keeps readers wanting to read your book, and to do that, they have to click the buy button.
Can you sum up your story’s inciting incident in one sentence?