Friday Fives: Why THIS Book?

If you look on my Blog Schedule tab (which is near to the Giveaway tab, which you must go to in order to stand a chance of winning my Book of the Year [ahem]) you’ll see that I’ve tweaked the Friday schedule. My plan is to follow the Paper Hangover Friday Fives theme, unless for some reason I decide to go my own way. This week, the Paper Hangover question has to do with favorite places to write, and I really only have one–my office (see last Wednesday’s RTW). So this week, I’ve picked my own topic, and here it is:

Give FIVE factors that go into choosing a book to read or purchase?

And here’s my answer. Remember, these are not the only five factors, but they are important ones to me. In no particular order:

Recommendation: If a book has been recommended to me–especially by a respected source (e.g., literary agent, friend or family member that knows my taste, or a blog friend) I will at least check it out, if not go ahead and buy/borrow it. I will especially take note of books recommended by literary agents that I’m interested in querying. This helps me know what they like to read, and these titles can be used as a “sweetener” in a query letter (“My novel has a similar theme to AWESOME BOOK by Paige Turner, a book I stayed up all night reading”).

Popularity: Just because a book is popular, that doesn’t guarantee it’s a good book. There are books that have hit the bestseller list purely out of curiosity (“S/he wrote a novel? I gotta see what that’s like!”)–like people who slow down to stare at a crash site. While I don’t want the market to determine what I write, if I want people to read my novel, it’s useful to know what people are reading. Enduring popular authors like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, Nicholas Sparks, Stephen King, Tom Clancy, and many others, are popular for a reason. There’s something about their writing, whether its genre, or style, or structure, or some kind of ingredient-x that keeps readers turning pages and coming back for more. Why not read them? I might learn something!

Education: When I started back into writing fiction, I became interested in how popular authors wrote things that, to me, sounded challenging. How do you write a good car chase, for example? Or a creepy, suspenseful scene? So, I looked for books that I knew would have such scenes (enter Ian Fleming–I read the entire James Bond series, and Stephen King). I didn’t know if I would ever need to write such things, but reading people who have attempted them gave me some tips on how I might write them.

Premise: If I read a review, or the cover blurb, of a book and the premise sounds intriguing (especially if I’m thinking “how on earth does this author manage to pull that off?”), I’ll more than likely want to read the book. A recent example that combines this with the “Recommendation” point: I ordered NUMB by Sean Ferrell, because Sean is one of Janet Reid’s clients (and I have a lot of respect for Janet’s literary opinion), and the premise intrigued me. It’s essentially about a guy who has lost his memory and is numb–he can’t feel anything. I haven’t read the book yet, but from what I gather, the book is his journey of self-discovery that takes him through circus freak shows, etc. I look forward to reading it.

Author/Series: Any book by an author whose previous work I’ve loved will automatically be high on my “to buy” list. Especially books in a series. I thought LIKE MANDARIN was beautifully written, so I am positively disposed to check out WANDERLOVE when it comes out. DIVERGENT was my book of the year for 2011, so you can be sure I’ll be getting INSURGENT. And once the DIVERGENT series is finished, I’ll be interested to see what Veronica writes next. And who isn’t curious to see what J. K. Rowling’s next published novel will be?

There’s the list. And this list is very useful to me as a writer, because if I, as a reader, think about book purchasing like this, doesn’t that tell me something about how I, as a writer, should approach marketing my book? There are a lot of questions we might ask as writers about both how we write or how we market our work that can be answered simply by asking “What would I think/do if I were a reader? Would I buy this book? Is this something I would love to read? Why or why not?”

What criteria do you use when making book purchases?