Let’s Talk Bookish: How To Make Me Read Your Book

Last Updated on April 16, 2021 by ThoughtsStained

I’m back this Friday participating in another Let’s Talk Bookish post, as always hosted by the amazing Rukky @ Eternity Books and awesome Dani @ The Literary Lion! For this week, our topic is:

What Makes You Pick Up a Book?

This week’s topic is going to expose all of my superficiality (oops), but nevertheless, I’m excited to dive into what makes me read a book that I may not have heard of before, especially, back during the Before Times, when I used to peruse bookstores to find new reads to destroy my already-overwhelming TBR.

What makes me want to read a book? Read on to find out!

The Cover

This is where that superficiality comes in, but honesty? This is the BIGGEST selling point for me for authors whom I’m not already familiar with. If you have a shitty cover, I’m automatically less interested. Perhaps it is because unconsciously, I worry that, if the cover isn’t well put together, how can I trust what is inside of it to be any good? That might be a little harsh, especially when you zoom out and look at how expensive cover art is for self-published authors and how little control traditionally published authors have. I recognize that, and yet…

The cover is still the main selling point for me.

Some examples of my favorites:

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I’m a really big fan of Richard Anderson’s work (Kings of the Wyld and The Shadow Saint). Also featured here are Jung Shan Chang for The Poppy War, Magdiel Lopez for Winter’s Orbit and Tommy Arnold for Mother of Slag.

Book Blogger Recommendations

If I’m torn about wanting to read a book, sometimes I’ll search out and see if any of my fellow bloggers have read it and if they’ve liked it or not (as I trust my fellow book bloggers who I adore with their recs of new books I want to read).

But, more often than that, I’m not even looking for new books to add to a TBR list that will never end and instead, just the pure act of blog hopping makes me find books I didn’t know existed, simply because my favorite bloggers are excited for them.

Some examples of books I’ve added thanks to blogger excitement:

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The Never Tilting World by Rin Chupeco (from Shealea @ Shut Up, Shealea)
The Absinthe Earl by Sharon Lynn Fisher (from Justine @ Whispers + Wonder)
The Last Sun by (from Kathy @ Pages Below A Vaulted Sky)
A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (from Caitlin @ Realms of My Mind)
The Keeper of Night by Kylie Lee Baker (from May @ Forever and Everly)

The Blurb

If I’m waffling over whether to read a book or not, I’ll usually read the blurb. Ironically enough, I usually only do this if I’m pursuing through a bookstore and a book’s cover has captured my attention, but I’m struggled to bite the bullet and spend the money. Honestly, I’ve really come to rely on book blogger recommendations as my “new” source of browsing, tbh.

Auto-Buy Authors

For me, if I can financially support it, you know I’ll be buying all of the books from:

• Nicholas Eames
• Evan Winter
• R.F. Kuang
• Bec McMaster
• Becky Chambers
• K.S. Villoso
• Megan E. O’Keefe
• R.J. Barker
• Tasha Suri

Bonus: What Turns Me Away

And, just for a fun: a bonus section of quickfire things that will make me put down a book (or not even consider supporting it in the first place):

• A bad cover
• A problematic author
• Authors who abuse reviewers on social media
• Being onslaught by unsolicited marketing by authors (in DMs, for example)
• An author who’ve trusted book reviewers didn’t enjoy
• Misogynistic books
• Books that don’t pass the Bechdel Test

I want to hear your thoughts! What makes you pick up a book you’ve never heard of before? Or, what turns you away? Have I ever toppled your DPR thanks to books I’ve shouted about here? 👀 Let me know in the comments!