How People Really Judge A Book

I see authors spend years writing their book, finishing the manuscript—and watching it never find an audience. It’s incredibly depressing.

The worst part is that this is completely avoidable. In fact, it’s possible to know with a high degree of certainty whether or not your book will find an audience.

To do that, you first have to understand how people judge books. After all, if the goal for the book is to find an audience, you have to understand how audiences perceive books.

This section will explain the mental process that a reader goes through when making a buying decision about a book, and will set you up to understand how to position your book to give it the best chance to reach the audience you want.

THE INFORMATION REAL PEOPLE USE TO JUDGE A BOOK

Let me lay this out for you in the starkest terms possible:

Almost every potential reader will judge whether or not to buy and read your book before they have read one single word inside the book.

Based on loads of empirical research and decades of experience in the book business, we have a clear picture of what happens in the mind of a potential reader when judging a book.

Even though we have a pretty good map of how people decide to buy a book (which we will outline soon), you must understand a key insight: this process is almost never conscious.

These buying decisions are a series of instantaneous and mostly unconscious judgments. They are made in less than 60 seconds, and they are made together, each influencing the other, not individually. The reader often doesn’t know (or believe) they’re evaluating the book this way—but they are. These judgments are real and substantive; in most cases, they are the main evaluation and purchase triggers.

A potential reader will consider these pieces of information about a book, (usually) in this order:

1. The title
2. The recommending source
3. The cover
4. The book description
5. The blurbs
6. The customer reviews
7. The author bio and picture (depending on where the picture is placed)
8. The length of the book
9. The price (though this can come sooner)
10. The book text itself (the “see inside” function online)

We’ll cover how to create each of these pieces in more depth later on. For now, let’s walk through each step and unpack the reader’s judgments around it.

TITLE

Most people think the cover is the first thing someone judges. That’s only true if they’re browsing a physical bookstore, which is rarely the case anymore. Most books are now discovered either by in-person word of mouth or online, and in both cases, what is the first piece of information they receive?

The title.

From that, people instantaneously assess whether the book seems relevant, it’s for them, and if it sounds interesting. This is why I recommend spending so much time making sure you get the title right.

Let’s be clear: A good title won’t make your book do well, but a bad title will almost certainly prevent it from doing so. Many potential readers stop considering a book once they have heard the title and nothing else.

RECOMMENDING SOURCE

If Marc Andreessen or Bill Gates recommends a book, then thousands of their eager readers rush out to buy it. If a random person with no followers on Twitter recommends it, no one buys it.

This is because the credibility of the source is a hugely important piece of the recommendation puzzle. In most cases, people will transfer the credibility of the recommender onto the book.

It’s all about who is doing the recommending. This applies to friends as well. If you have a friend who is very rich, successful, and intelligent, you’re far more likely to listen to their book recommendation than someone who is unemployed and living with his parents.

What’s great about this is that if the credibility of the referrer is great enough, almost any title will work, and you don’t have to worry about the rest of this list. But that is rarely the case, so you still want to make sure and give yourself the best chance you can.

BOOK COVER

If the reader is still interested after hearing the title and taking the referring source into account, they will now go to Amazon (or in rarer cases, a bookstore) and look at the book.

The potential reader makes more judgments about its relevance and their interest based on this information.

The most important thing at this point is that the reader not be repelled. Most people are looking for reasons NOT to buy the book, and you have to not give them any so far.

BOOK DESCRIPTION

At this point, if the cover hasn’t repelled the reader, they will look next to the book description on the Amazon page (or flip over to the back of the book in a bookstore). The book description should give the reader a strong sense of what the book is about, making it interesting while not giving everything away.

BLURBS

If the reader still is interested, they will now look at endorsements (sometimes for a physical book, they will do this prior to reading the book description).

Note that most readers look more closely at who the blurbs are from rather than what they say. They assume that the blurbs will be positive, so they want to see what level of social status the blurber is, and whether it’s someone they know and respect.

READER REVIEWS

If the reader is on Amazon (or barnesandnoble.com or GoodReads, etc., but not in a bookstore), they now read the customer reviews.

They will usually first note the number of total reviews—as a gauge of popularity—and then look at the average rating. They may then browse the content of the reviews. If they do, they normally read (more likely scan) one or two of them, and, if they are like most people, they skip the positive ones and read a negative one before going back to a positive one (if they even do that).

AUTHOR BIO AND PICTURE

Sometimes, but not always, people will look at the author bio. This is usually in situations where they have not quite made up their mind, are hesitant to buy the book, and need more information. Looking at the author page is about understanding the credibility and relative status of the author.

There are cases where this is one of the first things the reader looks at (when they’ve never heard of the author). Some readers immediately want to know about the author, and look at the bio first.

After collecting all this information, the vast majority of people have made their decision. Note that this is before they interact with anything inside the book. They have yet to read one single page, and they’ve already decided whether or not to buy the book.

LENGTH

This is one of those things that seems to be generational, or divided by socioeconomic status. Some people, generally voracious readers, never even think to check length. Whereas other people always check length. Many people do not want to commit to a 300+ page book.

There’s not much you can do here—your book is the length it is—but we’ve found in our data that, for nonfiction books, those between 100 and 200 pages sell the best and are read the most.

PRICE

Some people will look at price. For some reason, it appears that people are far more price conscious for eBooks than they are for physical books. The reason for this is value perception. Generally speaking, we recommend keeping your goals for your book in mind when you price.

THE BOOK TEXT

There are some people who actually use the “Look Inside” function on Amazon to check out the first few pages and engage the content of the book itself. If they’re in a bookstore, they flip the book open and read a bit. They might even do more research to find articles online about the book.

These are the high-information buyers, but they are a distinct minority. Probably fewer than 10 percent of your buyers do the thing that everyone says they want to do: judge a book by the content inside, and not the cover.