I spend about 2hrs on the road everyday and have picked up a habit of listening to books. Over the past 4yrs, I have listened/read an average of 40 books a year.
I am a reader who reads purely for entertainment, so it’s mostly horror, crime, travel, thriller, sci fi genres.
So when I start searching for a new books, i usually depend on Goodreads and Google for recommendations. And there are so many reccos that I generally just chose a book which has a cover which sort of connects with me.
So while there are some initial level of filters and search words I use, the final selection is pretty much based on the cover. So I am literally just judging a book by it’s cover and reading.
Even among authors whom I like, I end up reading a bit of summary but summaries always sound good for most of the book. So I just see which one has the most intriguing cover.
How is everyone else tackling this ?
Covers, in my experience, are decently reliable at showing genre. Sometimes they’ll even that a book is in a niche part of a genre.
“Not just Fantasy, but Romantic-Comedy Fantasy!”
But they are there to sell the book, so won’t tell you much about the quality or writing or plotting.