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I’m taking part in Rosie Amber’s new Friday Five challenge. As she explains in her fabulous post here:

“In today’s online shopping age, readers often base their buying decisions from 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?”

Rosie’s challenge is to take ONLY FIVE MINUTES to browse an unfamiliar category and select a book based solely on the cover art.

The new-to-me genre I chose (because really…how could there even be such a thing?) was adult coloring books on Amazon. [Books : Self-Help : Coloring Books for Grown-Ups] As I paged through the covers of do-it-yourself mandalas, I have to admit I was tempted by a couple of them. First, of course, it was Unicorns Are Jerks, which promised “a coloring book exposing the cold, hard, sparkly truth”. I was briefly tempted by the Fetish Coloring Book (which helpfully promises NSFW bizarre and kinky fetishes of all kinds) but ultimately chose Coloring Books for Grownups: Dia de los Muertos because…well…who doesn’t love day of the dead DIY coloring pages?

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BUY LINKS: AMAZON US | AMAZON UK

Book Title: Dia De Los Muertos: Coloring Books For Grownups by Chiquita Publishing (November 4, 2014)

Book blurb: none (!)

Price: $6.99

Reviews: 47 (with 65% as 5-star)

Pages: 102 (identical)

BUY or PASS:   PASS

Analysis: The price was a bit off-putting, but (for obvious reasons) this only comes in paperback form. Then I looked at the description which was… not there. Huh. Okay, I took a look at reviews, which ranged from one to five stars. Many praised the quality of the paper, the fact that the designs were printed one-side to a page, etc. But the complaints were uniform and a show-stopper. There was only one design. One. The same one that appears on the cover. No thanks.

Rosie Amber's Friday Five Challenge. Get yourself a cuppa and give yourself 5 minutes.

Rosie Amber’s Friday Five Challenge. Get yourself a cuppa and give yourself 5 minutes.

Here is Rosie’s Friday Five Challenge. It only took five minutes and a couple more to write up, and was a ton of fun. I hope you’ll consider joining in. All Rosie asks is that you link back to her original post here so we can all join in viewing your challenge results.

AUTHORS – You often only have seconds to get a reader to buy your book, is your book cover and book bio up to it?

My 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, and any other details.

5) If there are reviews, check out a couple,

6) Make an instant decision, would you BUY or PASS?

I’ll be back next week with another Friday Five Challenge, do feel free to join in.