Friday, August 10, 2007

Anatomy of a Purchase


Like pretty much everyone I have a busy life. With all the ours taken buy work on one side and all the hours taken by sleep on the other what remains is divided many ways. I have to do all those normal life things, commute, pay bills, look after the dog. I write, of course, a non-fiction book, fiction and some poetry. There are the three webs sites and of course book reviews.

So reading time is limited and what I have is spread over a good many genres. My commitments to read for review sites are piling up and... yesterday I bought yet another book. Now as it happened to be a self-published book I though it might be interesting to explain why this book managed to squeeze its way in and part me from my money to boot (after all, review copies are free, one of the few perks of this gig).

1) I have a special interest in rats. It's a quirk. I was searching for rats natural history books.
2) The book was on amazon, it popped up
3) The cover art is striking, it told me that was a noir/detective theme, which I like too:


4) The premise is interesting and the amazon reviews were positive but not so positive as to be implausible
5) The cover price is reasonable for a trade paperback


One click purchase and it was all over. That only sour note IMHO was the back cover note that the author is 20. It's a prejudice I know but I hesitate to buy from authors more than a decade younger than me. I like to think authors get better with age. Or maybe I just resent the ones who are already good when they are young :)

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