Recent comments in /f/books

licorneours t1_j8araso wrote

Reply to comment by KittyLord0824 in Do you judge a book by its cover? What do you look at when deciding whether to rent or buy a book? by KittyLord0824

Yeah, but there is very few authors that I will buy/read a book just because there is their name on it. The only ones that comes to my mind are Rick Riordan and Agatha Christie, but for her, I would only buy her Hercule Poirot books for now, once I'll have them all or close too, I'll let myself buy other books of her.

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fourstarlasagna t1_j8apdaq wrote

Reply to Do you judge a book by its cover? What do you look at when deciding whether to rent or buy a book? by KittyLord0824

I absolutely do. These covers aren’t random. Someone paid a fair bit of money to create a cover that entices the target audience. I guess I should say I absolutely did but they have started doing fantasy covers for romance novels that have a thin veneer of fantasy. If you put a dragon on the cover it should be a book about dragons not a book that inexplicably has two main characters banging in a doorway out of nowhere.

This has occasionally backfired. Elizabeth Moon is awesome and her covers always looked terrible to me. But this also means that deep in the pandemic I had a whole new author with a nice back catalog to read.

In a general way, I check the cover, I see who they got to give blurbs, I read the back (this is often less helpful than the first two). If I was wrong and I would have liked it, someone whose taste I respect will mention it later and I’ll give it a go. But there are more books published than any one person would ever have time to read. So if I miss a couple, oh well.

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RebelAirDefense t1_j8an44g wrote

Reply to Do you judge a book by its cover? What do you look at when deciding whether to rent or buy a book? by KittyLord0824

Being on the other end of the stick , I can tell you that the majority of folks do look first at the cover. My publisher re=covered one of my books with much better artwork and the online sales took a hefty bump. This is why I caution any self-pubber not to get cheap with their cover. If it looks like ameture hour on the outside, readers may make the same judgement about the inside as well.

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LilJourney t1_j8am04r wrote

Reply to Do you judge a book by its cover? What do you look at when deciding whether to rent or buy a book? by KittyLord0824

Yes? Kind of?

Been playing a game with myself to get me out of a reading rut. I buy books based on their spine color in the order of the rainbow. I go into the used book store, scan for whatever color I'm on, pick out the first 4 books I see and buy the one that sounds the best. If I like the sound of more than one of them I'll do as you do and skip a couple chapters in and read a paragraph or two to get a feel for the author's style to help me pick.

I will be honest and say I've still ended up with some real duds / dnf's. But I've also stumbled across some great books I'd never have picked up otherwise which let me add to my list of "favorite authors" and thus expand my reading repertoire.

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