A young woman I know once read six books in a day. She read all day, every day, and combined reading with all sorts of other activities, like eating, watching telly and engaging on multiple social media channels. When I asked how she got through so many novels she said: ‘I only read books with short chapters.’

In our busy lives we have so many competing demands on our time, our concentration spans are getting ever shorter. So serving up a novel in bite-sized chunks makes it easier to digest.

Since launching Blue Tide Rising, I’ve been in a reading phase, averaging a novel a week. But one book on my list stubbornly remains unread. That book is Milkman, winner of the 2018 Man Booker prize for fiction. I can see it’s a work of genius – and I really do want to read it – but each time I pick it up I’m faced with an oppressive block of text with barely even a paragraph break and I abandon it in favour of something lighter.

By contrast, Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time took me just two days to read. So did B.P Walter’s A version of the Truth – a thriller I picked up from a book exchange on holiday. Both have short chapters. Both jump forwards and backwards in time and both end each chapter leaving you wanting to know more.

Short chapters seem a clever yet obvious way of getting people to turn the page. It’s simple psychology. You think, ‘I’ll just read one more chapter… oh go on then, I’ll read another.’

Journalistic training taught me to keep my copy tight. In fact, when I started writing creatively, tutors told me my prose was too sparse. I had to be reminded to insert description. I write in quick bursts, too – most of Blue Tide Rising was written in half-hour stints between waking and getting up for work. So when it came to putting the pieces together, it lent itself naturally to short chapters.

Feedback I’ve had on the novel so far suggests this approach is working. People are reading to the end and doing so quickly. One reader read half the novel on a flight to New York, another read the whole book in a day. Comments like: ‘Once I started I couldn’t stop,’ are music to an author’s ears.

It isn’t all about short chapters though, the content, balance and structure has to be right too. In my early drafts I got the structure all wrong. The balance of back-story and front-story didn’t work. It took a lot of reshuffling of the pieces to get the narrative to flow right.

So what’s the secret of gripping the reader right through from start to finish? I asked a few other writers (and readers) what works for them. Here’s some of their top tips on what keeps readers turning the page:

• Draw the reader in by creating a question right from the start.
• Keep chapters short and finish each one on a cliff-hanger.
• Keep paragraphs short too, and vary the length of sentences.
• When it comes to description, less is more. A few choice words works better than lengthy chunks of prose. Let the reader’s imagination fill in the gaps.
• Use dialogue – it adds pace, balances description and brings the story to life.
• Shift points of view between two or more characters if it works for your narrative.
• Alternating time zones can work too, as long as the structure is clear for the reader to follow.
• Introduce twists and turn into the plot to keep the reader guessing.
• End the novel with a little something left unresolved.