Summer Challenge

Let me ask you a question. How do you decide what books to read? I'm serious. Do you spin around and point at a random book in a bookstore? Do you look on Amazon for good reviews? Do you read every NYT bestseller? I'm compiling a summer reading list (yup, it's that time of year again). How do books get on my list? They're recommendations or they're authors that I stay loyal to. Once an author gets a good fan base, things are kickin'. They can usually count on the same people to buy their books, providing they stay within their genre. And that's great news.

But that's not such great news if you're a debut author and nobody knows who you are. There are plenty of books that sit on the shelf of Borders, spines out, which makes it really hard for even the cover to catch anyone's attention. Being a debut author can be a hard life that involves a lot of promotion and hoping that word-of-mouth will pick up.

How many books by debut authors do you pick up every year? My bet is not a lot. And that is a pretty sad thing, because I will admit that I'm not a big new-author-reader either. This past year, I picked up a couple new books just because they caught my eye in the library and you know what? They were awesome! My favorite new find is Garret Freymann-Weyr. She has herself a new loyal reader and her other books are definitely on my summer list. It can be a fun thing to try something out of your usual reading circle.

So I'm setting a goal for this summer: for every two books on my Official Summer Reading List (OSRL), I will pick up one book that I've never seen or heard of before. Hopefully, by the end of the summer, I'll have a lot of new favorite authors and a whole crop of talent whose work I can look forward to for their entire careers.

Want to join me in my summer challenge? It's easy and pain-free! Let's do it.