[Xanthe]

My red flags:

Front Cover:

• A close-up of a naked male chest

• When all the book titles in a series start off with the same word

• Authors who only use a single name on the book cover

• Images of alien beings with cat-like heads

Back Cover Blurb:

• When blurb consists of three sentences and nine author recommendations.

• When the blurb describes what you should feel when reading the book, instead of what the book is about.

• The male protagonist is listed as working with a beautiful and brilliant female (fill in obscure specialty) (fill in foreign nationality)scientist to solve whatever the danger is

• The blurb includes the words "hot", "sizzling", "tantalizing", "sexy"

• Authors who list the names of their pets in their bios

Other Red Flags:

• The main character is a female age 16

• The story is set in an academy for children with special paranormal talents

• Main character is forced by circumstances to work with an ex-spouse or an ex-lover

• When the description of the main character matches the photograph of the author

• A young teenage boy, either orphaned or raised by relatives, who has to undertake a great quest

• Characters who immediately fall into lust before the 25th page of the book

• Law enforcement personnel/private investigators with a drinking/drug problem and/or a dead partner

• Any character named after a spice or sweet

• Any book with all characters having plain vanilla WASP first and last names

• Misspellings on the first few pages

• Obvious factual errors

• Dragons

• Family sagas involving a young woman/man coming over to the US from Ireland to work as a servant at the turn of the 19th century

• 50-something woman, newly divorced, with adult children

• Non-fiction books where the footnotes/citations are so numerous that they disrupt the reading experience

• Books with either tiny type or large margins

• Sentient ghosts