Welcome to the Friday Five Challenge
Rosie Amber’s Friday Five challenge only takes five minutes, so grab a cuppa and join in!
In today’s online shopping age, readers often base their buying decisions on small postage stamp size book covers (Thumb-nails), a quick glance at the book description and the review. How much time do they really spend making that buying decision?
AUTHORS – You often only have seconds to get a reader to buy your book, is your book cover and book bio up to it?
The Friday Five Challenge is this….. IN ONLY FIVE MINUTES….
1) Go to any online book supplier,
2) Randomly choose a category,
3) Speed through the book covers, choose one which has instantly appealed to your eye,
4) Read the book Bio/ Description for this book,
5) If there are reviews, check out a couple,
6) Make an instant decision, would you BUY or PASS?
Can’t avoid the fact that Christmas is fast approaching – not that I’m complaining, I love Christmas. The staff at the company my husband is working for at the moment are buying extra Christmas presents to donate to the homeless charity Shelter. It’s awful that in this day and age we should have to do this, that people are in need like this, that children have to rely on charity for a bit of happiness this Christmas. But there it is. So I took the word Shelter as my search term this week.
Well, there are a huge amount of survival books. Lots and lots of advice and instructions on adapting your house to survive the end of the world, and building shelters in the wilderness. There are also an awful lot of romances tagged with shelter strangely enough. But I’m not a fan of (fictional) romance and I wouldn’t want to survive an apocalypse (no electricity for hair straighteners) so I scanned through until I saw this:
Price: £4.99 (kindle) £7.99 (paperback) in the UK (380 pages), $7.55 (kindle) $15.41 (paperback) in the US.
Book Description
Maggie’s father is ‘Mr Safety’. He knows the woods of Duchess Creek in Northern Canada like the back of his hand, and he has taught his daughter how to survive, how to find and make a shelter in all weathers, in any conditions. Along with her sister, Jenny, and their mother Irene, they are safe from the outside world. But when an accident at work goes fatally wrong, Irene struggles to look after her daughters alone. Wild, imaginative and unpredictable, she billets the two girls with a family, promising to return once the summer is over and she has earned more money. But the summer turns to winter, which rolls round again and again. When the letters stop, the two sisters realise that they can rely on no one but themselves – but what kind of shelter can two young girls make for themselves?
Reviews
There are eight reviews on Amazon.co.uk, three 5-star, three 4-star and two 3-star. Forty-five reviews on Amazon.com, mostly four star and five star.
Reviewers praise the beautiful, lyrical writing and the rich atmosphere that the author invokes. It sounds like a slow burner but is another one of those books that, it seems, if you love it you love it and if you don’t then you really don’t like it at all. But the positive reviews outweigh the negative.
Buy or pass? Yet another BUY (my TBR list can’t cope with too many more of these challenges!).
Analysis
I love the cover – it’s bright and very pretty. I have three sisters (I’m the youngest) so I like the idea of a story about the relationship between two sisters. And it’s published by Virago. When I was a teenager, discovering feminism and reading Ms, I would spend hours on a Saturday browsing through the Virago section in the local book shop (yes, I was a very weird teenager). So this is a definite buy for me.
If you want to join in the Friday Five Challenge pop over to Rosie’s blog to find out more.
And read some more Friday Five Challenges:
Cathy found some wonderful photos
Historical fantasy for Shelley
Rosie found a rather odd cover in her search for Black Friday
And if you would like to do something for the 100,000 children who will be homeless in the UK this Christmas (100,000!) then do visit Shelter’s website for more details. Thank you.
Alison Williams Writing 