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For me, it breaks down like this
- Familiar author - Cover needs to be distinctly different but it helps if it is stylisticly similar to covers of other books. This lets me quickly pick it out from a display.
- Unfamiliar author - Cover needs to be indicative of genre to persuade me that it is worth picking up to check the blurbs.
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that there are somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 books in the house and I remember most of them by the cover. That is, when I see the cover, I recall a precis of the story. This leads to my occasionally buying duplicates of books when they are released with a new cover (especially books by a familiar author that did not make a memorable enough impression to cause me to remember the title). The other is that, despite being a voracious reader, there are too many books and too little time. Thus the clues to genre in the cover are the first filter to be applied to anything by an unfamiliar author.
If there is no picture, the filter will be applied to the layout and font choices. However, the lack of an image means that the book will only be considered on a second pass. The second pass will only happen if I have not blown my budget on my first pass and if I have time to spare to make a second pass.
Word of mouth can get me to look at something that I would otherwise pass over, but that is hard to arrange.
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