Kerry Allen's Blog

Sep 09 2007

Natural selection

Tag: Marketing, Reading — Kerry Allen @ 1:00 am

I buy books online. I buy because I hear good things. I buy because I hear bad things from people I know to have no taste. I buy because it showed up in my Recommended for Kerry list on Amazon and sometimes they’re not totally wrong. I buy on impulse. I buy a lot.

Prior to buying, I read the description. I read a couple of reader reviews. I never read an excerpt (which is crazy, but I hate reading online that much).

But I remember my bookstore shopping days, when I could get my hot little hands on the books and stroke them and sniff them and call them George… and flip through them a little to find the Buy Me Now, Dammit incentive. My TBR pile has almost as vast a selection of reading material as my local book vendor. I wanted them all at one time or another. How do I decide what to read next? Yes, mood is involved, but if my mood demands a steamy vampire romance with gritty suspense elements and I have four books meeting that description, how do I choose one over the other?

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of that little excerpt when you flip open the front cover. Two of the four books nominated for consumption today had no such excerpt. Straight back to the shelf. The third was a seduction excerpt. Sorry, I don’t know you yet, I don’t want to watch you gettin’ it on.

The fourth took only a few lines of the excerpt to reel me in:

“Sit down,” said J.

I did. When he continued staring in silence, I raised my eyebrows and looked up at him as if to say What the hell is your problem?

A girl with some attitude. Gimme.

(That’s from Beyond the Pale by Savannah Russe, by the way.)

I have never understood why every book doesn’t have that little excerpt up front. How nice for you that you have 50 reviews lauding your last book as “sparkling and sinfully delicious,” but frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn about your last book or what anybody had to say about it. I have this one in my hands, and I want a taste before I commit to ordering a whole plateful.

Am I the only one who pays any attention to that page, or are the books lacking them missing out on a crucial opportunity to snag reader interest?

2 Responses to “Natural selection”

  1. Kimberly Anne is SO pretty.
    September 9th, 2007 at 10:29 am

    The excerpt page is vital to me, especially when the book is by an author I don’t know. How else can I get a feeling for the author’s style? The back cover blurb gives an idea about the storyline, but for me that’s only half of what I need to know. I need to be pulled in, to feel that, “Well, dammit, what happens next?” And it is often the author’s writing style that tugs me into the book. A great style can save a mediocre plot, but rarely does it work the other way round.

    There are no new plots, but millions of voices in which to tell them. Show me why I should listen.

  2. Kerry Allen is SO pretty.
    September 9th, 2007 at 4:27 pm

    Exactly! I have an ever-growing stack of books I bought because the stories intrigued me, but I just can’t slog my way through the writing. (Guess I REALLY need to start reading sample chapters when available… :oops: )

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