Your book’s main character guides readers through your story—and no matter how interesting your world-building or plot may be, if readers don’t care about your character, they won’t want to keep reading. Readers don’t always have to like them, book coach Rona Gofstein writes—“characters can be difficult, selfish, prickly, or completely awful and still have readers desperately turning pages.” So what’s the key to keeping your audience invested? In this installment of her Ask a Book Coach guest series, Gofstein explores how authors can ensure their readers care enough about their characters to keep turning the page.
One of the concerns writers often bring to me is about making readers care about their characters. Maybe it’s that your critique partners say they aren’t connecting with your main character. Maybe beta readers tell you they like the book’s world-building but aren’t particularly invested in what happens to the protagonist. That kind of feedback can be frustrating—and confusing. You know this character. You know what they’ve been through, what they want, and why their journey matters. So why isn’t that coming across on the page?
Readers want to connect emotionally to the characters in the books they choose. Making readers care doesn’t require making a character likable. Characters can be difficult, selfish, prickly, or completely awful and still have readers desperately turning pages to find out what happens next. As the author, you choose how you want your readers to react to your character. The important part is that you make them feel something. Once they feel something, they have a reason to keep reading.
Give Us a Reason to Empathize
Early in the story, preferably in the first chapter, readers want to understand what it feels like to be your main character. Maybe your character desperately wants something we all can understand wanting. Maybe they’re being treated unfairly. They could be lonely, grieving, embarrassed, frightened, or trying incredibly hard and failing anyway.
Empathy comes from recognition.
Readers may never have been a detective trying to solve a murder, a fae warrior trying to save a kingdom, or a single parent unexpectedly raising their niece. But readers probably understand wanting to prove themselves. They understand loving someone, fearing failure, wanting to belong, or worrying they’ll disappoint the people who matter to them.
When you give readers an emotional doorway into your character, they’ll walk through it.
Make Them Vulnerable
One of the most effective paths you can give readers to understanding your character is through vulnerability.
Vulnerability doesn’t necessarily mean your character cries or confesses their deepest secret on page 10. Often, it’s much smaller. Your fiercely independent MC hesitates before admitting they need help. Your confident CEO rehearses what they are going to say before calling their estranged daughter. Your sarcastic teenager checks their phone one more time, hoping someone has finally texted. Those small moments let readers see underneath the armor that the character projects to the world.
Your character doesn't have to show their vulnerability to anyone else. Only the reader needs to see it. In fact, the contrast between what a character presents outwardly and what the reader knows they're experiencing can create an incredibly intimate connection—which, in turn, can make readers feel even more invested in what happens to your character next.
Make Them Relatable—and Remarkable
Vulnerability isn’t the only option for making readers care about your character. A character’s relatability also offers readers something to recognize about themselves on the page—and making your characters remarkable can then pull those readers into your book.
When a character is relatable, we connect with who they are and what they are experiencing, even if they live in a fantasy realm or on a space station. The struggle to find a job, deal with one’s mother, or figure out yet another meal for dinner can make the reader smile with the familiarity and have a “same here!” kind of moment.
At the same time, remarkable characters face situations readers may never have imagined. Remarkable doesn’t have to mean magical, though it can. Maybe your character is extraordinarily brave, talented, funny, determined, compassionate, ambitious, clever, or loyal. Maybe they have a fascinating job or an unusual way of looking at the world. Maybe they're willing to do something we wish we had the courage to do.
The best characters give us both. Elphaba in Wicked is magical—and green, but she’s also lonely and wanting acceptance. Elle Woods is popular and beautiful but aching to be taken seriously. Indiana Jones is a brilliant archeologist and talented with a whip, but he makes mistakes, loses what he gained, and has a terrible fear of snakes.
There's something about each of these characters that makes us think, “I know that feeling.” And there’s something else that makes us think, “I want to see what this person does next.”
Make Us Care
When you're introducing a character, especially a lead, don't only ask, “Have I shown the reader who this person is?” Ask, “Have I given the reader a reason to care?”
When you review the first chapters of your book, look for the moment of empathy. Look for the glimpse of vulnerability. Give us something in your character that’s recognizable enough to connect us and something remarkable enough to intrigue us. You don't need readers to love your character immediately. You just need them to care enough to turn the page.
Then you get the wonderful job of making them care even more.
