Guest blogger Mindy Klasky is the author of six fantasy novels, including the award-winning, best-selling The Glasswrights’ Apprentice and numerous short stories. Her latest novel, Girl’s Guide to Witchcraft, is a lighthearted, fictional tale featuring a love-struck D.C. librarian who discovers she’s a witch. A portion of proceeds from the sale of Girl’s Guide will benefit First Book.

With all the great discussion on the First Book blog about What Book Got You Hooked, I started to wonder about what practices bait the hook for readers — what makes us pick up a book in a store or library, and what makes us decide to take that book home.

To find out, I ran a brief and totally unscientific poll on my blog. The poll remains open — you need a LiveJournal account to vote in the poll, but if you don’t have a LiveJournal account you can still make your thoughts known in the comments.

The responses — approximately 425, as of the writing of this post — confirmed some of my suspicions, but they also offered some surprises.

First: By and large, people acquire books based on recommendations from “trusted authority”. “Authority” may be one’s own knowledge (having read an author in the past or sampling an author’s writing on his/her website).

Authority, though, can also exist in the form of a friend, or a book reviewer, or the author of a blog. We crave recommendations; we hope that people will help us to limit the thousands and thousands of possible reads out there.

Interestingly, the recommendation of a bookseller or librarian (lumped into one category in the survey) was substantially less important than other “trusted authorities” — possibly because independent booksellers, with their educated staff members, are becoming rarer and rarer.

Second: People do judge books by their covers, and by their cover blurbs. Despite traditional aphorisms, people routinely use cover art to select what they’ll read. Many people clarified in comments that cover art might attract them to a book, but other forces lead to actual purchase.

Sadly, the vast majority of authors have no control over their book covers, so this tidbit of information does not help most authors reach their desired audience.

Third: While attending an author’s reading or signing in person tends to lead to some greater sales, other forms of salesmanship or marketing between author and audience (sponsoring a contest on a website, sending promotional emails or postcards, providing trinkets or toys) do not substantially increase sales or library rentals.

Many authors, especially first-time authors, invest thousands of dollars in printed materials and “swag” that they give away to prospective readers, but the poll seems to indicate that money could be better spent in setting up readings.

So. What baits work for you? What makes you decide to buy a book or check it out from the library?