How soon does a heroine have to be likable?

I'd say she doesn't have to be completely likable from the start, as long as she's interesting enough for readers to want to spend time with her. You can do that a lot of different ways, from making her snarkily funny to letting us glimpse a few cracks in her armor to making the situation she's in so intriguing we have to read on to see what happens. But if it's a slow-starting story and the main character nasty in an off-putting way, I'd put it down quickly.

I don't have alpha FMC = beta MMC, but you don't even have to have that for readers to wrinkle their noses at alpha FMCs. It *IS* a double-standard, and a fine line. Alphahole males can be alphaholes for 7/8 of a book and it's fine, but let the FMC come on strong for 2 pghs and it's "book-->wall" time. So frustrating.

That said, it sounds to me like you're doing what's (unfortunately) needed, and that's to see her taken down a peg pretty early. (Other standard options...have her pat the picture frame containing a dog (or cat or goat) she loves as she walks out the door, or have her stop for a moment to talk to the homeless woman who has been on "that corner" outside the building for three years.) The point is, showing a soft spot or uber-humanity to give a tiny glimpse of a vulnerability always helps (for M or F) and might give the reader pause before hitting the eject button. (I do think this is also true of the not-alphahole alpha males, too, and I am unfairly comparing your FMC to the worst of the MMC stereotypes rather than where she belongs, with the normal strong characters.)

I will add, write the book you want to write, how you want to write it, with your characters laid out the way you want them. If betas alert you there's an issue, then you'll have to consider what to do, or if you're asking here because you have a niggling suspicion in your mind you've gone overboard with her in chapter 1, listen to your instinct. Reading your post made me think immediately of the movie The Proposal. This CAN be done.

I would want to see a glimpse of her vulnerability or yearning for intimacy.

Her anger may provide an opening for the reader to connect with her and like her. She may be angry for a good reason - perhaps trauma, isolation, betrayal - any number of things a reader can identify with and grow to like her for her for the vulnerability masquerading as anger.

kssmith626 said:

In my current work, the heroine is an alpha female- career driven, confident, not shy about her sexuality- and she meets a beta male when she takes yoga classes due to required anger management classes. My question is, how soon in the book do you think she has to be traditionally likable in order to catch a reader? I like these kinds of women, but it seems like these qualities on the page just seem unlikable and potentially grating (stupid double standards). Right now, my first chapter is her trying to schmooze her way out of actually taking the class and being irritated about being there and about the guy not letting her out of it.

Do you think she needs to be more traditionally relatable in the first chapter? Again, I can relate to her and do like these kinds of women, just wondering for readers.

Are any of your leading ladies alphas to a beta man?

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I'm confused, you have an alpha female career driven, confident and yet she has to take anger management classes? Sorry right there I would be pissed off and not read any further. Strong independent career confident women do not need anger management. But that is just me...for me it would be a turn off to have an independent woman forced to take anger management.

Never mind her trying to schmooze her way out, she threaten discrimination lawsuit because I guarantee there are gobs of alpha males who aren't sent to anger management.

Just a little food for thought

What popular romance novels can you think of where the heroine is an alpha female of this type? There are a couple on my keeper shelf where the heroines come close in terms of confidence and independence, but I don't read much if any contemporary, and it seems more difficult to find this kind of heroine in historicals.

It's important for me to like the character straight away. I like strong heroines and ones not at all traditional. I provide anger-management classes (among a multitude of other services lol) and there have been some successful women to come ...you'll be amazed by the number. So I would find this scenario very believable as I have encountered it a time or two. But do I think it may be a hard sell or an uphill battle for you? Maybe. I say just continue to write her as you envision her and the love story you imagine. That way you know what is an important trait or behavior to the character. You can smooth her rough edges out when you're editing.

There have been a few novels where the mc was hard to stomach, where she did things that came across as hurtful etc, but then the more I got into the book and discovered why she was doing those things I understood. These weren't romance novels but women's lit. I think as long as the reader can view the person as real they will give her a chance. Or if there is a counter balance to that person.

Emily Griffin the woman in her novel Something Blue, she's not a likeable person at all, very self centered and manipulative. But you want to like her and you want to see her grow so you stick with her. It can work, just give us a glimmer of hope that the mc is on the right path, or will find the path

Laura Kinsale's For My Lady's Heart has a heroine who is an absolute witch to the hero (and most everyone else) for the first third of the book. It took a while for Kinsale to reveal what is driving the heroine to be so unpleasant. She paired the heroine with a hero who was the noble/brave/honorable/upright/uptight/DudleyDoRight type, and she made it work.

Relatable and likeable aren't necessarily the same thing. When a character has abrasive traits, or traits that are less than admirable, readers will often accept them anyway if they have an interesting voice and their reasons for being who they are seem authentic. Since it's Christmas, I'll point out that one of the most beloved of all holiday classics features a protagonist who is a pretty awful human being for most of the story. Of course there's set up early on that implies that there will be a comeuppance, and that the person will change. This is one approach to take with an arc that will involve personal growth and change on the part of an unlikable protagonist, but there are other approaches as well.

Sometimes a protagonist can just be a jerk because that's what the story requires. Heck, I just was over in another thread where there was an excerpt where the (male) pov character swore every other word and was talking about coercing women into sex acts in return for back stage access. I hated the guy so much I couldn't offer commentary, but everyone commenting in the thread loved the character and his voice (the writer did a great job of capturing the voice and personality of that kind of guy, it's just a matter of which heads I want to spend a lot of time inside).

Sometimes it really is a matter of target audience, but it can also be about context. There are contexts that could be established where I wouldn't mind spending a lot of time with an a-hole. Perhaps the above mentioned story would do this for me if I could read from the beginning.

Having said this, women (and men) seem to be harder on female characters who are hard headed, competitive and "in your face" about things sometimes than men (or many women) are on male characters who are. I still think it should be possible to make her interesting enough from page one that it won't matter if she's likeable to many readers.

One way to do this is to give the unpleasant person a code of ethics or sense of honor which may be a bit "off" to most of us, but to which they reliably adhere, even at personal cost. Another is to give them some kind of soft spot, or to hint that one exists. And of course to drop clues that there's a good reason for why they are how they are, that there's some subtext or conflict that is interesting.