Happy Monday, Reader,

Last month we spent a lot of time talking about identity and values. The internal stuff. Why you write, what you believe about your work, and the things that shape the choices you make on the page.

This month I want to talk about something different.

I want to talk about what actually happens on the page itself, and why readers sometimes disappear from a series without ever saying a word.

I ran into this recently while reading License to Curse, the first book in the Merlin Mysteries series by Kim Richardson.

Before I say anything else, I want to be fair here. The book currently has a 4.6 rating on Kindle Unlimited, and there are some things it genuinely does well. The characters are quirky and fun, and there were several moments that made me laugh out loud. Kim Richardson clearly has an audience that enjoys her work, and that’s real.

I finished the first book.

But I didn’t continue the series.

And the reason why is interesting, because it’s not the reason most writers assume when they hear something like that.

Mystery stories live or die on the investigation. That’s the spine of the whole book. Everything else can wobble a little if that central thread is solid.

In this case, it wasn’t.

The red herrings were so obvious they stopped functioning as misdirection. The villain was identifiable the moment he appeared. At one point the main character promises to return to a crime scene after being interrupted, and then simply… never does. That thread just vanishes.

There are also details introduced about the main character that seem important in the moment and then go completely unresolved by the end of the book.

And then there was one scene where I genuinely had to stop and reread because I couldn't believe what I was reading.

A body is moved from a crime scene by rolling it in a carpet, and then accidently dropped when they were going down the stairs. No gloves. No attempt to conceal evidence. No awareness that this might be, you know, a forensic disaster. Even within a magical world where the rules might be different, the story never bothers to establish what those rules actually are.

At that point I wasn't charmed anymore. I was confused.

Because the issue wasn’t pacing. It wasn’t character likability. It wasn’t even the basic premise of the story.

The issue was that the book kept introducing things that felt important and then quietly abandoning them.

There’s actually a name for this. Writing teacher Daniel David Wallace calls it narrative abandonment.

The idea is simple. When a story activates your attention, you expect that attention to matter. If the writer points you toward something that seems important, you assume the story will eventually come back to it.

Every time that doesn’t happen, the reader feels the gap.

Most readers won’t sit down and write a technical critique explaining exactly what went wrong. But they feel it. The story starts to feel loose, almost unreliable, like the writer isn’t quite tracking everything that has been set in motion.

And once that feeling sets in, something interesting happens.

Readers drift.

They may still finish the book, especially if the characters are entertaining enough to carry them through the final chapters. But when they look at the next book in the series, nothing pulls them toward it.

Which brings us back to that 4.6 rating.

Reader engagement researcher Sarah S. Haas spent years studying why readers continue reading some books and abandon others. One of the ideas she talks about is something she calls writer attitude.

Not the writer’s personality, but the reader’s sense of whether the writer is paying attention to the story they are telling, to the craft behind it, and to the fact that a real person is spending time reading their work.

When readers sense carelessness, they disengage.

Not dramatically. Quietly.

The readers who loved the characters in License to Curse stayed engaged long enough to leave positive reviews. But the readers who noticed the abandoned threads and unresolved setups simply left the series behind.

No comment, no explanation; they just move on to something else.

And if that was the only book of yours they happened to pick up, you may never get another chance with that reader.

Now compare that to something like The Hunger Games.

The opening chapter is actually pretty quiet by modern commercial standards. Katniss wakes up and moves through an ordinary morning, hunting in the woods, trading at the Hob, and thinking about Prim and the coming reaping.

Nothing explodes. Nobody dies.

But Suzanne Collins is doing something extremely deliberate during those pages. She introduces Prim, shows exactly what Prim costs Katniss emotionally, establishes the tesserae system, and quietly builds the tension around the reaping long before the drawing actually happens.

Every thread Collins activates matters later.

Nothing is abandoned.

That difference matters more than most writers realize.

A lot of writing advice right now focuses on initial engagement, the hook in the first line, the conflict on the first page, the momentum that carries a reader through the opening chapter before they have a chance to drift away. And those things do matter, because convincing someone to start your book is already an achievement.

But continuing engagement is a different problem entirely.

Readers keep reading when they trust the writer. When they believe that the questions being raised will lead somewhere meaningful. When they feel that the story is actually paying attention to the promises it makes.

Once that trust cracks, readers rarely announce it.

They simply drift away.

Which means the writer may never know it happened.

Next week we’re going to look at why narrative abandonment has become so common in commercial fiction, and how some of the most common writing advice unintentionally encourages it.

For now, try something simple.

Go back to the last chapter you wrote and ask yourself one uncomfortable question.

Did you introduce anything the story quietly forgot?

A detail that seemed important and then disappeared. A question that never came back. A thread that never led anywhere.

Because whether you realize it or not, your reader is keeping track.

Even when you aren’t.

P.S. If you want to see this idea in action, borrow a technique from reader engagement researcher Sarah S. Haas. When she was trying to understand why certain texts made her dread reading them, she started marking engagement as she read. A checkmark when the text flowed easily. A single slash when the reading slowed down. Two slashes when she found herself wanting to stop. Three slashes when she actually did.

Try doing the same thing when you read your own chapter. Don’t edit yet. Just track where your willingness to keep reading changes. When you look back at the page afterward, those marks will show you exactly where a reader’s trust begins to wobble.

P.P.S. Writing teacher Daniel David Wallace suggests a second exercise that pairs beautifully with this one. Take a chapter you’ve written and grab two highlighters. Every time you introduce something that feels important, highlight it in one color. Every time that same element is developed, returned to, or resolved later in the chapter, highlight it in the other color.

If you see a lot of the first color and very little of the second, that’s usually a sign that the story is activating reader curiosity without following through. Wallace calls this narrative abandonment, and it’s one of the easiest ways to quietly lose a reader.

These are the kinds of patterns I track when I’m alpha reading a manuscript, because they reveal exactly where a story is holding attention and where it begins to slip. If you’d like that kind of detailed feedback on your own manuscript, you can learn more about my alpha reading services here.​