The Writer's Gradebook | Closed For Requests

━ 010. The Prep's Diary: How the Prep became so Preppy by Superwicked

Obviously I'll start with the COVER & DESCRIPTION. My first impressions of The Prep's Diary gave me flashbacks to when I was in middle school and reading Dork Diaries. The cheesy subtitle ("How The Prep Became So Preppy") sets a cute and campy tone that matches the description fairly well. (I am not personally a fan of the title, but I understand what it sets out to achieve.) However, the presentation of the book makes me worry that people are not going to click on it. Having read it, I know that it's a teen chicklit novel heavy on drama, which is quite popular on this site, but from the outside it looks like it's aimed at a much younger demographic than it actually is. In other words: girl. You need to get yourself a better cover, stat.

I'm not going to sugarcoat it, because that wouldn't be conducive to your improvement and success. This cover is not good. This book needs something that will make people want to click on it, because Wattpadders are scrolling thoughtlessly and judging everything by eye. The all-caps sans serif slightly off-centered isn't working for me, and it's far too small and rendered kind of unreadable by the artwork in the background anyway. The subtitle being in lowercase would be fine if it was a cute, fun font, but it's just like!!! A generic serif font!! The fact that the illustration of the protagonist isn't centered on this cover also makes it look wonky, and the extra graphic choices feel a bit basic. There are a lot of amazing cover shops around Wattpad, and this is obviously just my opinion, but I think you could really improve your chances of being found by readers if your cover was impressive, colorful, memorable, and fun.

To break down the description properly I'm going to display it here:

⋆

"So, I'm guessing you're just friends, right? Because we all know friends kiss, right?"

Being a teenage girl isn't for the faint of heart. And nobody knows this better than Rosetta Hazel, after seeing her boyfriend, Andrew Thompson and best friend, Mckayla Queens be too friendly and gets thrusted into being a loner for the summer, she meets people that get her while fighting against her past. Will she let the control of her past get to her or will a new prep emerge?

⋆

The description has a very specific problem. For one thing, it's far too short, but the much bigger issue is that it gives off the completely wrong impression of the story. I'll explain. The book's blurb tells readers that the main character catches her boyfriend with her best friend—straightforward enough. But in the story, this doesn't happen until Chapter 13! The way it's presented in the description made me think it would be one of the first major plot points, and I guessed it would occur somewhere between chapters one and four. That would be fairly reasonable. Thirteen chapters is a long time to set up the main event hinted at in the description. If something is mentioned in the description, it should be the catalyst that sets off the rest of the story somewhere towards the beginning. Otherwise, you're just telling everyone your whole plot.

The other line that gives mixed signals is the bit about being thrust into being a loner for the summer. Again, this would make sense if it weren't for the fact that thirteen out of thirty chapters occur during the school year! That's 40% of the book. (Side note: Okay, uhhhh there's no Chapter 10 apparently, and it's not like there's anything missing chronologically the story just skips from 9 to 11 presumably by accident lol. But we'll pretend there's thirty chapters anyway.) Just going off of the description, I went into this story expecting a couple of chapters at the end of the school year and then the rest of the timeline to progress throughout the summer. I won't harp on about this anymore, though, because I'm going to talk about pacing later.

Alright, so let's dive into CHARACTERS.

Obviously, first and foremost we have the main protagonist, a graduating eighth grader named Rosetta Hazel. One thing that this story gets right is how middle schoolers actually act. They're basically short, slightly less mature highschoolers who walk around thinking they're the sh*t. They swear a lot and have ridiculous melodrama, far more, in fact, than their high school counterparts. In middle school every five minutes there's some new couple getting together or breaking up, there's some girls getting into a catfight, or there's some scandal going on schoolwide. In fiction we try to dumb them down and make middle schoolers out to be a lot more tame than they actually are, and even media that is more honest about it tends to be aimed at children (i.e. Diary of a Wimpy Kid) so it obviously has to shave down a lot of the unpleasant jagged edge. The truth is that middle school is a nightmare, it feels like everyone hates you, and the world as you know it is constantly falling apart.