I spend about 2hrs on the road everyday and have picked up a habit of listening to books. Over the past 4yrs, I have listened/read an average of 40 books a year.
I am a reader who reads purely for entertainment, so it’s mostly horror, crime, travel, thriller, sci fi genres.
So when I start searching for a new books, i usually depend on Goodreads and Google for recommendations. And there are so many reccos that I generally just chose a book which has a cover which sort of connects with me.
So while there are some initial level of filters and search words I use, the final selection is pretty much based on the cover. So I am literally just judging a book by it’s cover and reading.
Even among authors whom I like, I end up reading a bit of summary but summaries always sound good for most of the book. So I just see which one has the most intriguing cover.
How is everyone else tackling this ?
Rarely will I spend much time with the cover, I’m usually interested in the title. Only once did I buy a book on the basis of the cover, and that was because the artist was fairly famous in certain circles and I figured maybe they’d only put their art on a book they felt was worth it. That was the last time I did that as the book was decent but fairly forgettable. That said, a good cover can pull you in. One series of books I have liked have fairly unique covers that portray the feel of the book perfectly. They look like old pulp magazine covers, and it fits the tone of the book perfectly. If you like the hard-boiled detective genre mixed with supernatural thriller. I’d check out this site Blackshadowdetectiveagency.com, apparently, the first book just got an audio edition