copywriting-hooks

copywriting-hooks is a skill for Claude Code from samber/cc-skills. It costs 172 tokens per session (6,705 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A writing guide for opening long-form articles and choosing their titles. It covers blogs, newsletters, essays, professional posts, reported features, and deep-dive articles in English or French.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write or improve a hook, introduction, opening paragraph, first sentence, title, or lede for a long-form piece. It applies to platforms such as Substack, Medium, dev.to, LinkedIn, and paid newsletters.
Why use it?
It helps make the first sentence or paragraph give readers a reason to continue. It focuses on concrete openings, such as a question, an unexpected claim, a scene, a promised result, or a relevant authority.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions Claude Code; mentions Codex.

Part of the cc-skills plugin — 21 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to write or improve a hook, introduction, opening paragraph, first sentence, title, or lede for a long-form piece. It applies to platforms such as Substack, Medium, dev.to, LinkedIn, and paid newsletters.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/samber/cc-skills/copywriting-hooks
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add samber/cc-skills --skill copywriting-hooks
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/samber/cc-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install cc-skills, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 21 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for copywriting-hooks

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/samber/cc-skills/copywriting-hooks/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/samber/cc-skills/copywriting-hooks)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/samber/cc-skills/copywriting-hooks"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/samber/cc-skills/copywriting-hooks/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for copywriting-hooks

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/samber/cc-skills/copywriting-hooks"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/samber/cc-skills/copywriting-hooks.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 172 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 6,705 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 20 May 2026
  • Snyk pass 20 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00172 $0.06705
Opus 5 $0.00086 $0.03352
Sonnet 5 $0.00034 $0.01341
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00671

Measured 5d ago against content hash 53d2d421e168, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

copywriting-hooks scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/copywriting-hooks/SKILL.md · 485 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 485 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Copywriting Hooks

The method

A hook's only job is to make the reader want sentence 2. Voice, structure, formatting, all of it, follow from that one job.

What makes a reader want sentence 2 is one of five levers:

  1. Open a gap. Pose something incomplete that the reader needs to close. Curiosity gap, question, open loop.
  2. Break a prediction. State something that violates the reader's prior. Contrarian, definition reversal, surprising statistic.
  3. Drop into a scene. Load sensory or specific detail that builds a vivid frame. In medias res, concrete detail, time anchor.
  4. Promise a payoff. Name an outcome the reader wants. Benefit, "if you... then this", direct problem.
  5. Borrow weight. Lean on a name, number, or quote that carries embedded authority. Authority hook, statistic, quote with disagreement.

A strong hook usually pulls two levers at once. "Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon..." is scene plus open loop. "Most people think X. They're wrong." is prediction-break plus gap. Single-lever hooks can still work but are easier to ignore.

Three further principles:

  • Specific beats abstract every time. Replace "many companies" with "Stripe, Shopify, Vercel". Replace "recently" with a date. Replace "studies show" with the actual finding or cut the claim.
  • The first sentence must force the second. Read each candidate cold. If you would not click sentence 2 after sentence 1, rewrite.
  • Match technique to article type. Personal essay does not open like a tutorial. See the type-fit table below.

Behavior

When this skill triggers:

  1. Confirm the brief. Topic, audience, target language (EN, FR, or both), approximate length, where it will be published. If any of these is unclear and material, ask before generating.
  2. Pick 3 to 4 hooks from the catalog below that are genuinely different. Different levers, not three flavors of contrarian.
  3. Write 2 candidates per hook, specific to the user's article. The two candidates within one hook should explore different angles (different anecdote, different statistic, different scene), not be rewordings of each other.
  4. Present using the Output format below.
  5. Ask through the question tool. The choice is a small fixed set, which is what that tool is for.
  6. Wait for the user's pick. Do not pick for them.
  7. After they pick, name what the choice commits the rest of the article to. A contrarian hook commits paragraphs 2 to 3 to defending the non-consensus claim. A scene opener commits the next section to either resolving the scene or productively delaying it.

Read the full file on GitHub · 485 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago Changed · +8 lines · -59 tokens per session 53d2d421e168
  2. 10d ago First seen · 477 lines · 231 tokens per session scan A feaf886c5e21

Subscribe to this mod's changes

copywriting-hooks is a skill published in the GitHub repository samber/cc-skills (208 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 172 tokens to every session and 6,705 once invoked, about $0.0009 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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