Five ways to make your thriller stand out
When a manuscript is on submission, one of the most commonly heard reasons for rejection is that it fails to be ‘stand out’ enough in a saturated market.
With the number of books being published, there are few markets which don’t feel saturated these days. So how do you give your novel an edge that sets it apart?
1. Hook
Introduce an unusual hook or ingredient. Perhaps it’s a chilling or unreliable narrator, or heady nostalgia that captures a certain era. Gone Girl gave us the twist we didn’t see coming at the midpoint, rather than at the end of the book. Colin’s Walsh’s literary thriller Kala plays with strands of time in a haunting, lyrical way that gives it a class all of its own.
In my novel Two Little Liars, readers have cited the thread of witchcraft running through the story as adding something new and different compared with the average thriller. Whatever your element (or genre) is, aim to invoke a particular feeling or response in your reader, or a unique atmosphere that lingers long after the final page.
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2. Setting
One of the finest compliments a writer can receive about their setting is that it feels like a character in itself. There are many ways in which this can be achieved, whether it’s an everyday domestic setting that should be one of safety and routine, or something unfamiliar such as a lonely mountain lodge or remote island.
Homes, schools, and shopping centres can quickly become places of real menace when the uninvited is introduced: a window that shouldn’t be open, a noise where there should be silence, a nerve-jangling walk to the only car in a usually packed parking lot.
3. High stakes
In any thriller, the standard ultimate cost to a character is their life, their liberty or the life of one of their loved ones. But think about other ways to elevate the danger.
What sort of toll will the events of your story take, both physically and emotionally on your protagonist? What will it do to the fabric of their family, their person, their reputation, or their conscience? These things show us who a character is and what they stand to lose, and ultimately they are things that make us care about a character’s fate.
4. Characters you root for
Characters that feel real and authentic are flawed. They not only have surface flaws, such as being a bit clumsy or forgetful – they’re characters who are capable of making life-changing, catastrophic errors of judgement or doing terrible things in moments of madness or to protect the people they love.
My character Erin is haunted by a past mistake that affects every facet of her life and her family, but it is possible to be invested in her because of her deep regret over her actions, and the love she has for her mother. While she acknowledges that she might deserve whatever is coming to her, her mum doesn’t, and it is this love that drives her and helps us to be on her side.
And while we may not root for some characters, we can still be invested in their outcomes. I have never turned pages faster than when reading the diary entries from Colleen Hoover’s Verity, or despised a character as much as Beatrice Lacey in Philippa Gregory’s Wideacre, even though I understood what propels her to act as she does. We do not have to empathise with a character to care what happens to them next. In fact, a story is no less compelling when the opposite is true.
5. The payoff
With any book, we want the ending to be a satisfying experience. By definition, a thriller should be thrilling: exciting, high octane, and a little bit scary (or very scary, even).
A rewarding payoff could be as simple as a classic ‘kill or be killed’ showdown between your main character and the antagonist. It could do something that shocks or surprises the reader, such as offer a huge twist that turns the entire book on its head. It could have the villain seemingly getting away with it in a move that’s totally unforeseen. I barely breathed through the final scenes of Promising Young Woman, unable to believe what was happening.
The key to making these things emotionally gratifying is to thread obstacles to be overcome, and clues to be unravelled, leading up to this point. Twists that aren’t adequately seeded are more likely to leave a reader feeling cheated than fulfilled, so it’s vital there are breadcrumbs or double bluffs along the way to provide the ‘Aha, of course!’ moment as everything comes together. Ultimately, you goal should be to leave your reader feeling that their time with your book was well spent.
Michelle Harrison is the bestselling author of twenty books for children, published in twenty-five territories. Her debut novel, 13 Treasures, won the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. Prior to being a full-time writer, Michelle was a bookseller for Waterstones and then an editorial assistant for Oxford University Press. She lives in Essex with her son and cats. Two Little Liars is her first novel for adults. Released on 4 June 2026, it’s a chilling psychological thriller inspired by Osea Island, and the witch trials Essex was once well-known for.