Once again from Just One More Page... it is time for Musing Mondays.Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about new authors…
What is your policy when it comes to new authors? Do you feel comfortable purchasing a book or do you prefer to borrow new authors from the library? How often do you 'try out' a new author?
As someone who very much hopes to one day be a new author with her book sitting on the shelf of your local Borders or Barnes and Noble I, of course, have to say that it is very important to give new authors a chance.
Now to be completely honest I do get 98% of my books from the library, and it is quite a different thing to get a book you might not like for free, compared to shelling out ten or twenty dollars for it only to realize at page 50 that you cannot bear to read another page.
However, when I do have a few spare dollars, or even better, a lovely gift card - I am cautious about what I buy and try to make sure I will enjoy the book I purchase.
But instead of only staying with authors that I know, the way I gauge whether a book I am about to spend money on will be something that I enjoy is simply by: reading reviews, following the star guides on the major book selling sites, and the first page test. The first page test can tell you a lot about a book, but most importantly it tells me if I will want to flip to the next page and the one after that. There have been many times where I've been in the middle of a bookstore with a book in hand as the first page test turns into the first ten pages test just because I can't put the book down.
These days with a toddler who wants to play hide and seek in the aisles or pull books from the shelves, it is difficult to find the time to stroll through the bookstore, picking up whatever catches my eye and flipping through it, so I really enjoy the "Look Inside" feature on Amazon for this last one.
Finally, my one reason for not just sticking with authors I already have read and enjoyed is that no book is a sure thing. Yes, if I love an author I will search try to search out every book they've written, and make a point of marking their new releases on my calender. But a a book by an author you love also has to live up to their previous books and your expectations... and sometimes they don't. In fact, in my January reading round-up two of the books I read were by authors who I really love, but their latest books were disappointments for me, while the other books I read that month from new authors were the standouts.
What about you? Do you stick with the tried and true, or prefer to check out something new?
