I'd like your input. How do you shop for books? Before you started writing and joined the various online writing communities, how did you discover new authors to try out?
Robert Lee Brewer on his blog My Name is Not Bob has been having a platform building challenge for the month of April. I've been reading his posts everyday. And after arguing over the necessity of SEO, I started wondering how other people shop for books.
I go to the bookstore or the library and browse the shelves. First I check on whether my favorite authors have anything new out. If I don't have enough books in my arms, then I start looking at new to me authors. When a cover or title catches my eye, I pull it off the shelf and read the back blurb. If it sounds interesting, then I buy it or check it out.
I'm more likely to hear some buzz about a new book now, but even before I started hanging out with writers, if a book had buzz then I would check it out. I discovered Harry Potter through a newspaper article in the LA Times way back when.
To effectively market a book, you have to reach readers who are going to buy that book. So I am gathering information on book shopping habits. How do you shop for books? How do your friends and relatives shop for books?
When I buy books lately, it's been on one of two criteria, usually. One: is this book highly recommended, usually some sort of classic I've been meaning to read for some time? Two: have I read and enjoyed some other work by this person? Usually short fiction or comics, but lately also blogs and essays.
ReplyDeleteI depend a lot on recommendations from friends. I belong to a book club, and we read on our own and explore reviews before we recommend a book to the group. I also read reviews online and in magazines, but I find that I can't always trust the reviews; reviewers' tastes just may not match mine, and I'm wary of "hype" over a book. Those books almost always disappoint me in some way, maybe because my expectations were too high. I watch the "indie" book lists and subscribe to Goodreads and to a books newsletter called Shelf Awareness. Our good local indie bookstore sends out an email newsletter, and I love to go there to hear writers read from their work. I watch for new works by writers I know, but it's a lot of fun to "discover" someone's work I wasn't familiar with. And I have to confess that I like that "look inside the book" feature on Amazon! So, Diane, I guess I'm all over the park.
ReplyDeleteYou have a fabulous list of blogs here. Some I knew about; others, I didn't. Will check some of them out.
ReplyDeleteThank you. That's what the list is there for, as a resource for other writers. Whenever I come across one that looks interesting, I bookmark it for possible inclusion on my lists.
DeleteThanks to you both for sharing. When it comes to promoting one's own work, I think it helps to know all the different ways that readers find books to read. Then you can come up with an effective plan to get the word out and get people to buy and read your book.
ReplyDeleteThe way I have shopped for books most of my life is to go to a bookstore and browse the shelves in the genres I am most interested in reading at the time. I'd scan my favorite authors to see if they have anything new and then do a little visual scanning of titles to see if anything jumped out at me from an unfamiliar author. Sometimes I'd hit paydirt.
ReplyDeleteSad to say, I've bought a lot more books online in recent years. There aren't as many bookstores with fat fantasy/sci fi sections around as there used to be. I discovered online book retailing (Amazon.com) back in 1999 when I lived in a tiny college town with no bookstore! The hard part with online shopping (I tend to favor B@N.com now) is finding new authors, since there's no alphabetic visual scan of book spines. The author recommendations are hit or miss, but sometimes they're a starting point. At least they sometimes let you read a bit now before deciding. I did discover an author I'd never heard of before, Glenda Larke, because of an Amazon.com recommendation that if I liked Robin Hobb, I might like her. So sometimes it works. I've also started learning more about authors via various fantasy and sci fi writers and readers sites.
So I have a large stack of books on my nightstand and on my nook reader. My eyes have always been bigger than my reading speed when it comes to books, so I rarely run out of things to read.
When I moved to LA back in 2000, I was amazed to discover that there weren't very many bookstores for the second largest city in the US. It was a major expedition to go to a bookstore.
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