Thoughts On… Where To Find Good Books

For me, being a writer means being a reader. On average, I read a book/day. And it’s hard, but not from the reading side. My challenge is finding new books that I’m excited about.
Let’s face it. Nothing’s worse than a reading slump.
So, in the interests of sharing best practices, here are my favorite places to find new books that feed my brain…

iBooks

iBooks is what I consider curated content. In other words, the iBooks team work their butts off to find authors that are fresh, original, and about to ‘break through.’ I can say this from experience because they took a risk on promoting Becoming Alpha by Aileen Erin when she was a first-time author. My trick is to go to the categories page and see who they have in:

Romance
Science Fiction and Fantasy
Young Adult

Finding good books is as much an art as a science and the iBooks team does a great job.

Choose a category, open a world of fresh new authors and books!

BookBub and Freebooksy

There are a lot of book newsletters out there. As I said before, I’m a fan of hand-curated content. Both BookBub and Freebooksy are selective in who they accept. Their teams do a great job of making sure that the featured books are interesting and cool.

Freebooksy now promotes across retailers, which is awesome.

3. Goodreads

Hands-down, this is my top place to go. I have a short list of all-time favorite books where, every so often, I go to Goodreads and check out their “Readers Also Enjoyed” section. There’s always something cool in there. Always.

I also look at the equivalent on Amazon, but that doesn’t seem to work as well for me for some reason. I suspect it’s because the Amazon algorithm takes my personal browsing/buying history into account, which is a mess. I look into all sorts of books and genres as my ‘publisher self’ versus my ‘reader self.’ You don’t want to know the strange things I get recommended (hint: on occasion, it has included dinosaur porn!)

On a personal note, when is Grace Draven launching the sequel to Radiance?

4. Goodreads Friends

I also get TONS of great ideas from my friends on Goodreads (I’m talking about you, Carol!) Plus, it’s a lot of fun to see what people thought of the books that I’ve read, and vice versa. The bottom line? Goodreads is all-around awesomesauce.

5. Blogs, blogs, blogs

There are so many in the category that are killer, but here are some that are top of mind:

Maryse’s Book Blog
Functioning Insanity Reviews
Urban Fantasy Investigations
Literary George

So there you have it…my secret weapons in the war for finding new books to read. Hope you found some of them useful as well!

Enjoy this? Here’s some other random stuff that I blog about:

Shit I Swore to Do When I Grew Up
On being a chick who does shtick
Why Alan Lee is Awesome
Which Lord of the Rings is Best?
3 Reasons Why Tolkien Is The Bomb
Thoughts on Lawrence of Arabia
An open letter to the French guy I met in Geneva, Switzerland
I have a thing for William Powell
An Open Letter to My Brain

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