Books book culture What Lures Readers Into Picking Up an Unfamiliar Book? What elements do you look for when browsing the shelves? By James Davis Nicoll | Published on February 9, 2026 Photo by Agustin Gunawan [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo by Agustin Gunawan [via Unsplash] One might expect that all one needs to do to convince readers to pick up your newly published novel is for it to appear in some appropriate venue (bookshelf, website, etc.). However, even if we were to limit ourselves to conventional publishing and physical books, an astonishing number of books are published each year. It’s easy—quite possibly inevitable—that your new book will get lost in the crowd. What works to attract attention? One possible solution is to ask your neighborhood Books Georg what induced them to pick up the books in the two weighty sacks they are carrying. Luckily for me, despite my very moderate reading pace, I am somehow a Books Georg1, which greatly simplifies the logistical challenges involved in questioning me. So: What will get me to pull a book off the shelf? Actually, make that “a book by an unfamiliar author”2. Obviously, authors with whose work I am already familiar have a leg up. I have long lists of authors for whom I keep an eye out. But how did I find them in the first place? Two main routes: first, methods that the author and sellers can control, and secondly, stuff that they cannot. What publishers, distributors, and authors can control… In declining order: Art: The art doesn’t have to signal much about the contents of the book. In fact, it’s probably best to assume that it won’t. As one publisher has established, the art doesn’t have to be good. In fact, as Penguin showed with its classic cover design, you don’t technically need art in the sense of illustrations at all, as long as the cover design is striking. If the cover inspires a browsing reader to pause and consider the book, the cover did its job. There are a few drawbacks to depending on art to catch the browser’s eye. First, you’ll need an artist (or in the case of Penguin, an inspired designer). But artists and designers want to be paid3. Artists are notoriously insistent on eating and living indoors, as if they were royalty. Second, the cover art will only be visible if the book is face out, rather than spine out. Blurbs: Blurbs are intended to entice the reader, to convince them that this is a book worth buying. Like cover art, conveying any sort of accurate information about the book is an optional extra, something a publisher might consider if the circumstances allow. Still, it’s bad if having read the blurb, the reader has no idea at all what the book is about or to whom it is supposed to appeal. I do need to carve out a special exception for blurbs so terrible they attract reader attention. The classic example is, of course, the back cover copy for Margaret St. Clair’s Sign of the Labrys, which famously read: WOMEN ARE WRITING SCIENCE-FICTION! ORIGINAL! BRILLIANT!! DAZZLING!!! Women are closer to the primitive than men. They are conscious of the moon-pulls, the earth-tides. They possess a buried memory of humankind’s obscure and ancient past which can emerge to uniquely color and flavor a novel. Such a woman is Margaret St. Clair, author of this novel. Such a novel is this, Sign of the Labrys, the story of a doomed world of the future, saved by recourse to ageless, immemorial rites… FRESH! IMAGINATIVE!! INVENTIVE!!! Does that convey anything beyond, perhaps, that the person responsible for the blurb had not read the book and had a deadline? No. It’s a trainwreck of a blurb, but it is so memorable I still think about it sixty-plus years later… and I do own that particular edition, so the blurb did its job. Proximity: It never hurts to be shelved right next to a popular author (or at least the author the reader was originally looking for). I no longer remember which of Simak or Silverberg I found first, but I do remember that I tried the second because their book happened to be next to the first. This is to some extent under the author and publisher’s control, depending on the author’s tolerance for pen names. Use a pseudonym starting with “Tol,” “Ki,” “We”, or “Ya” (to name a few) and your book will be shelved in well-travelled real estate4. Or since surnames tend to cluster, you might get lucky and not need a pen name at all. Eye level: When I ran my store, I was very aware that anything below knee level and anything above eye level was basically invisible to browsers. Does this inform my own browsing habits? It does not! A book that happens to be at my eye level is much more likely to be noticed by me than one that is not. Aside from not having a surname beginning with A or Z, I don’t have concrete suggestions about how one can ensure one’s book ends up at eye level. Well, you can try bribing the clerks, I suppose5. You can at least take heart from the fact that Poul Anderson and Roger Zelazny both had great careers despite the shelving handicap of their surnames. What sellers cannot control: Spontaneous word of mouth from someone I trust. Note the absence of “someone with whom I agree.” Someone doesn’t need to have the same preferences or views about books as I do to be someone whose opinions are useful to me. They just need to be coherent, consistent, and sincere. I can work out from what they said how I am likely to react to a book. From the author’s and publisher’s perspective, this is the most frustrating filter, because it depends on spontaneity and trust. Gaming this system destroys spontaneity and is a good way to annihilate trust. Therefore, to even try to influence word of mouth is high risk. Rather than convince readers that your book is worth reading, it could instead convince them to disregard everything from that particular source of book gossip. I’d name names of places I no longer trust to provide me with good reads, but I so hate being sued… Those are the primary filters I use. What are yours?[end-mark] Even though my review pace has slowed with age to the point that I am only forty-five times as productive as the median reviewer in the 2016 Clarksworld survey, rather than the sixty-five-fold rate I managed when I was at my peak. ︎I will also rule out one of the great drivers of my purchases in the 1970s, which was “it was the only science fiction or fantasy book the store had in stock.” Which had the advantage of introducing me to ambitious authors I would not have thought to try and the disadvantage of introducing me to Gregory Kern’s books. ︎“Gosh, can’t I just use a plagiarism engine to generate artslop?” Well, sure. That’s an option open to any moral vacuum. But why should a reader believe that the contents of a book were any less AI-generated than the cover? I employ numerous negative filters, elements that will absolutely get me to ignore a book. AI cover art is up near the top of the list. ︎There are some downsides. For example, when I went looking for James Alan Gardner’s Expendable, I couldn’t find it until I stopped to think where an overworked clerk might have mis-shelved it… over in mainstream, with the John Gardner books. Both John Gardners. Grendel was tucked in among Bond books. Poor Blofeld’s had an accident. So may you all. Another example: Walter Jon Williams and William John Watkins are not the same people, but their names are similar enough that I’ve had to add footnotes to reviews explaining that. ︎I knew of an author back in the days of spinner racks who made a point of being nice to the guys who delivered new books each week. As a consequence, her books would be left on the spinners when they should have been pulled, which had a measurable effect on her sales. ︎The post What Lures Readers Into Picking Up an Unfamiliar Book? appeared first on Reactor.