After I posted a blog piece last week asking people Why Did You Buy That Book?, it turned into a nice little mini-meme. In addition to the discussions here and on my MySpace blog, there were also discussions on Jim Hines’ LiveJournal, Alma Alexander’s LiveJournal, John Joseph Adams’ blog and guinwhyte’s LiveJournal.
I know that there are scientists and pollsters vomiting blood when I say this, but based on the 40+ responses spread around these various locations, I’m ready to declare a winner.
Here’s how I kept score. I went through the comments one by one and gave one vote for each influencing factor. Multiple factors were allowed per book. So if a commenter said they purchased Book X because they had heard about it from a friend and liked the cover, I gave “friend recommendation” one vote and “cover/packaging” one vote. A lot of the comments were fairly nebulous, so I simply used my best judgment. (Mwuuah-ha-ha!)
- Familiarity with the author’s previous works (50 votes). Based on the evidence, this was the biggest factor by far. Science fiction and fantasy readers tend to be very loyal to the authors they like; or I suppose you could also characterize this as conservative. But once you’ve written a book or short story or even blog that’s knocked someone’s socks off, the bar for inspiring a purchase of your next book lowers considerably. That’s good news for already-published authors, and good news for those who tend to write series. On the other hand, it underscores the difficulty new authors have breaking in to the market.
- Recommendation by a friend or acquaintance (35 votes). Validation of the commonly held belief that word-of-mouth is what sells books. Get people to talk about your book, and you’ve got a leg up on the competition. Extra credit goes to MySpace user U is N as I is X who says, “I know a few people (over ten, but below twenty) that have bought your book as well as Mr. [Michael J.] Cavallaro’s book [Cybernetica] based upon me telling them about it and lending them a copy to preview.” Everyone, please whip out your checkbooks and send U is N as I is X twenty bucks immediately.
- Liked the cover and/or packaging (16 votes). In most cases, this seemed to be a secondary consideration or a reinforcing factor. Few people claimed to have picked up a book solely because they thought the cover was bitchin’; but many said that a bitchin’ cover helped convince them to buy a book that they already had a good feeling about.
After this, there were nearly identical scores of 7-8 votes each for:
- read a glowing review of the book
- impressed by the author’s blog and/or website
- heard about the book from someone else’s website
- spoke to the author in person or saw him/her at a public appearance (e.g. a con)
- Amazon recommendations
Receiving 1-5 votes:
- read good press and/or an author interview about the book
- the book was nominated and/or won a major award
- the publisher has a good reputation
- impressed by the cover blurb
- familiarity with film adaptations of author’s work
- heard about the book by the author adding him/her as a MySpace Friend
- book was on sale
How representative is this sampling? Well, again, this is a highly unscientific poll based on unscientific methodology, so if you work for the Nielsen company, you can feel free to snigger behind your cupped palms all you’d like. For one thing, all of the folks that responded to this survey are plugged into online SF communities to some degree, whether mine or Jim’s or Alma’s or John Joseph Adams’.
But what of the majority of science fiction and fantasy consumers that have never set foot in an SF convention, never logged onto an SF fan website or read an SF bulletin board? Consumers like, well, my dad? Obviously, I didn’t have any way to reach them. I heard somewhere — wish I could remember where — that 4 out of 5 SF/F consumers have no connection whatsoever with the so-called “science fiction community.” How are all those people choosing which books to purchase? Probably in much the same way, but this poll provides no evidence for that.
It’s also interesting to see the things that nobody claimed as an influencing factor in buying books. Such as:
- seeing an ad in a trade magazine
- book had prominent placement in the bookstore
- book was recommended by a bookstore clerk or librarian
- picked up a free promotional CD at a convention (alas)
Any marketer can tell you that just because nobody listed these factors doesn’t mean that they’re not pertinent. Quite to the contrary. Another statistic about book buying habits that my brain has spongily absorbed (while discarding the source where I heard it): some 70% of books sold by the major bookstore chains are sitting in a 20-foot radius of the front door.
So obviously there’s a lot more to the book buyer’s decision of what to purchase than the factors that the book buyer herself is conscious of. It’s all part of the shadowy underworld/seamy underbelly/sausage-like process/backroom manipulation of publishing that you and I don’t see.