From Anne R. Allen’s Blog:
I never have as much time to read as I think I will, and my trusty old Kindle is pretty loaded up. So I’m a picky book-buyer. Unfortunately, there are a lot of readers like me out here, and you don’t want to lose us.
I’m often intrigued by a book’s cover and blurb, and sometimes a glowing review on Facebook or a book blog will send me to a buy page.
But I never buy without checking out the “LOOK INSIDE!” On most retail sites, that’s 10% of the book—which anybody can read free.
That “LOOK INSIDE” freebie is your most important book sales tool.
Make sure it’s going to snag readers, not kill book sales just as you’re about to close the deal.
With many books—not only self-published, but trad-pubbed as well—the first few pages will stop the sale for me.
. . . .
I’m a grammar freak, so a misplaced apostrophe or verb/object disagreement will stop me. I know not everybody is such a stickler. But I think all readers want to see that a book looks professional and polished. They don’t want to invest time in a book—even if it’s free—unless they feel they’re in competent hands.
. . . .
1) Consider Chapter Titles
The first thing the reader sees when he hits LOOK INSIDE is your “Table of Contents” (unless you have a formatter who will put it at the end. Unfortunately the Big Five don’t ever seem to do this.)
Why waste your first four pages with Chapters titled:
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Etc?
You might consider going back to the old-fashioned device of text in chapter titles. Yes. I know they’ve been out of fashion for a century or so. But ebooks are bringing them back.
You don’t have to go all 18th Century and write:
“Chapter the Tenth, In Which Our Intrepid Hero Encounters Several Not Terribly Nice Ladies, Some Very Strong Spirits and a Face Full of Gravel, as he Searches for his Long-Lost Brother Murgatroyd, and their Father, who May or May Not be Lord Mayor of London.”
But modern chapter titles can give an idea of the action to come.
Chapter titles can also be a major sales tool. Here are the first four chapters of my rom-com mystery The Best Revenge
- The Color of Fresh Money
- Debutante of the Year
- Something in the Woods
- King of the Chickenburgers
You know there’s something weird going on with rich people, and it’s probably funny. Isn’t that more informative than a list of numbers?
Link to the rest at Anne R. Allen’s Blog
PG doesn’t use Look Inside very often, but he may be aberrant.
PG would be interested in knowing how many visitors to TPV are regular users of Look Inside and what they are particularly looking for when they do.
I often use Look Inside, always to get a feel for the writing. If it grabs me, I buy. If it doesn’t, I pass.
For fiction, there are a few authors for whom I buy any book they put out (and the same goes for one or two series) and these mostly are bought as pre-orders where there is no “Look Inside” available. For almost any other fiction – unless I’ve already read the book and am just picking up an e-book version – I always look inside and what really decides me is if I want to keep reading when the extract ends. So I want to see the extraneous fluff at the start of the book eliminated as far as possible, not because I’ll read it – Look Inside normally starts at Chapter 1 and I don’t scroll back to see the TOC, a list of the author’s other works, or whatever – but because it cuts short the sample.
Non fiction is another matter. I still use Look Inside to see whether I want to buy but also to try to work out whether an e-book will do or whether a paper copy might be better. For the former a TOC with text in the chapter titles is often a useful guide as to the book’s coverage. The latter is harder to evaluate though sometimes clicking for the “Print Book” version of Look Inside can be helpful. It just revealed to me that the maps and genealogical charts in chapter 1 of a history book had not made it to the e-book.
I always check the LI feature as most commentators do here, and it has helped me save time. I found Anne’s advice on this to be spot on.
Yet, bottom line, let’s face it, the LI feature simply tries to duplicate the experience of walking in a physical bookstore and opening a book that has drawn your attention because of the book cover and title. It’s nothing new or unusual for any book lover to use the feature…And all rules for writing a good opening apply – regardless of LI!
FWIW, I’ll evaluate a book normally – does it look like something I want to read, and are the reviews reasonable. I either pull the trigger or request the sample. In the sample cases they might sit for months before I open them and try them. For me, a sample is sort of a placeholder. It’s “I might want to try this book, but I don’t feel like thinking about it right now, maybe later”, and IMHO, it works very well for that. Never bothered with look inside, although in at least one recent case I probably should have.
I always check the Look Inside feature, to make sure the story is well-written. I don’t read first person present tense, for example, and absolutely despise the modern insistence on misusing (and overusing) participle phrases.
I use the “Look inside”, but even that is no guarantee. I bought a book that drew me in in the first couple of chapters and was awful the rest of the way. Didn’t have the heart to leave a bad review or return it. I think I only paid 99 cents.
For what it’s worth, I probably buy 100-150 Kindle books a year and I have never once used ‘Look Inside.’ What’s more, I don’t know anyone who has.
I have a hard enough time coming up with book titles that aren’t horrible. If I had to come up with chapter titles, too, I’d never publish anything 🙁
i usew LI and samples regularly. For fiction, to see if the story interests me and the writing doesn’t put me off. For non-fiction to tell if it’s something I’d actually read – I read non-fiction for my own interests so dull writing means no sale.
I hate, hate, hate samples and LI that show only front matter: prefaces, acknowledgements, TOC, why-this-book-is-wonderful, etc. I want to get a look at the meat of the work. Even for non-fiction I want more than a table of contents, especially if it’s on a subject I’m mostly ignorant about.
“…misplaced apostrophe or verb/object disagreement will stop me. I know not everybody is such a stickler.”
Maybe I’m being too much of a stickler, but perhaps she actually meant subject-verb disagreement here? 🙂
I don’t generally use the Look Inside feature for casual fiction because I either know the author already or have seen the book or author favorably reviewed by someone I trust (i.e., not an Amazon reviewer). I do sometimes use it for a new-to-me author who turns up in the also-boughts, and I’m more likely to use it if the book is expensive.
I definitely want to see a thorough and descriptive table of contents in non-fiction books. For novels, I can take them or leave them alone.
Having been caught out one too many times by a highly ranked book with glowing reviews and an interesting blurb, which turned out to be terrible, I now read the Look Inside religiously. Simply can’t afford the time, money and disappointment of buying a ‘dud’. 🙁
Thanks so much for the shout-out PG! And many thanks for all the kind words, everybody.
I forgot that the ToC at the end is now verboten for KU because of KU gamers. I’ll add that to the post.
Anne,
I posted on another thread about Kindle Create. The videos they use do not show them forcing an actual page for the TOC.
When I tried out the software with a clean copy of Great Expectations, the program did not force me to create a TOC “page.” It simply created a standard ebook TOC.
Look at the videos on the link and see what I mean. Thanks…
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GHU4YEWXQGNLU94T
I feel you need a TOC even just for numbers chapters, just to make the navigation easier, but there’s no reason for it to take up valuable real estate in the front of the book.
I provide a “short TOC” at the front which gives a link to the “full TOC” (in the back) and a few entries (the 1st chapter, Glossary of names, excerpt from next book). Takes up half a page, at most.
I purchase non-fiction mainly. Whatever I think to purchase, I use Look Inside. Yes, grammatical mistakes will kill the deal for me, but more importantly I look for layout.
I’ve found that that correlates well with quality of writing–not perfectly, since some beautifully arranged books are worthless and some ugly books are worthwhile. But, on the whole, layout has proved to be a good indicator of an indie author’s writing skills.
Always do. Why not? Though I must admit that I am usually unfamiliar with the author’s work, so it really pays to get an idea of what the story and writing is like. And sadly, being a crotchety old man who knows what he likes, and what he doesn’t, what I find almost never induces me to buy the book, be it indie or traditionally published.
I collect titles and authors that I want to check on, not necessarily purchase, from articles, etc. Then I check the LI to see if I like the writing.
I also tell people to check out my books by Looking Inside if they’re not interesting don’t press the buy with a click button.
I could download a sample but anything you download eventually has to be deleted and how many snow days are there for projects like deleting files.
Look Inside gives a quick clean look at the contents of the book with no strings or labor attached.
I always use the “Look Inside,” and, yes, it is a deal-breaker for me. Not so much for typos and punctuation, but for the story.
The narrative voice has to compel me, right from page one. I generally loathe first person, especially present tense, so a story in that POV has to stand out to overcome my built-in bias.
I read mostly women’s fic, romantic comedy, and chick lit, and I encounter a lot of the same old, same old. If the plot, characters or writing are cookie cutter, I pass, and I usually decide by page two or three.
Reviews come second to the L-I. I find the three-stars to be most helpful and best thought-out. Few books with lots of five-stars live up to their hype.
For example…
… I like what Karen said here, so I downloaded a Look-Inside of her book, SPARE ME THE DRAMA. I will give it a try.
🙂
Every time I’ve been so beguiled by cover and blurb that I’ve skipped the Look Inside, I’ve regretted it.
What do I look for?
1) Do the first few paragraphs draw me in?
I’ve found that inexperienced and unskilled writers tend to leap right into either pure action or else pure description. Sometimes pure dialog (characters talking with no indication of who they are or where they are). All these bore me. What I need is action plus a heavy dose of character opinion or setting plus character opinion or dialog plus same. Or some mix of action/setting/dialog plus opinion.
2) Are there grammar errors?
I don’t specifically look for these, but if they are present they leap out at me and throw me out of the story. I figure if the author can’t manage grammar in one of the most important sections of the book…then I’m not in good hands and don’t want to waste my time.
3) Do I feel interested and intrigued and desirous of MOOAR? 😉
If so, then I’m very likely to click that buy button.
What you said about the inexperienced writers, yes. I hate being told that a character introduced on the first page is acting out-of-character on page 2, and the narrator drones on for five more pages to establish this point.
Sorry, but I need to see Mr. Spock being cool and unemotional long before you claim that a comedian is so funny and insist it’s true because Mr. Spock is rolling on the floor laughing out loud, “and he never does that!” I’m looking to see how the writer establishes characters rather than having them try and argue me into believing X, Y, or Z about them.
I’m in the read the low-star reviews, then check the Look Inside camp. Since, as Andrea Pearson pointed out, putting the TOC at the end of the book is against Amazon’s TOS (and they were pulling books where it wasn’t at the front for a while), I don’t count a numbered TOC in the beginning against the book.
I always use the LI even if I know and like the author’s work. Even the best produce duds and I can usually tell from the LI excerpt whether it’s going to be worth my time.