How to Choose the Next Book to Read

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo did not appeal to me at first.  Despite being a #1 NY Times Bestseller, it failed to attract my attention.  Admittedly, initially my interest was piqued because the word 'dragon' in the title brought to mind fantasy associations which led me to speculate (foolishly) that it was of the fantasy genre, but when a synopsis put that theory to rest I lost interest and moved on to other things.  Modern, crime fiction is not well represented on my bookshelf.

What a mistake that was.

Best sellers don't necessarily make great books, as I learned with The Da Vinci Code, which--don't get me wrong--was certainly a page turner, but by no means something I would consider to be "great literature."  So I don't put much stock in a book just because it's sold a lot of copies.  (In all honesty, I was hesitant to read Harry Potter too for this very reason, but of course that turned out to be a worthy read.)

A recent trip to the movies allowed me to realize the mistake I made when I saw the trailer for the movie version.  First of all, I love Daniel Craig (most will recognize him as the recent incarnation of Bond, but personally I will think of him as Lord Asriel from The Golden Compass).  Second of all, the trailer looked amazing, and absolutely instilled a desire to see the movie and, consequently, the book.  I'd hate to be one of those people that saw the movie first, you know?

So, even before I started reading the book (which was last night), I started thinking--would it be at all worth it to have commercials for books?  I see them from time to time, but they're not like movie trailers.  Because the trailer for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was really compelling and really sparked my curiosity about the book, in a way that previous encounters had failed.

The next piece of the puzzle was to decide if I was going to continue to follow the adventures of swashbuckling swordsman D'Artagnan, and read Twenty Years After, or interrupt that trilogy in order to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before the movie came out.  After much debate, Lisbeth Salander beat D'Artagnan (or at least, the deadline of a movie release date beat D'Artagnan). Although I was excited to see the next chapter in the life of D'Artagnan, I wanted to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo before seeing the movie.

In comparison, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is probably equally as long as The Three Musketeers, or at least close, but that is where the comparisons will end.  It will be refreshing to read a novel with a protagonist like Lisbeth Salander, who already finds herself "different" from today's society and would be even more out of place in a Dumas novel.  (Yes, I'm still bitter about the poor representation of women in The Three Musketeers.)

What all this proves is that you never know where exactly your interests will take you--proved by the drastic change from a nineteenth-century novel about the seventeenth century to a modern crime tale.  Also, more importantly, is that it's important not to judge a book by its cover, genre or even plot synopsis.  What I learned from a movie trailer was much more compelling that the short blurb I probably read on Amazon a year ago.  I'm intrigued as to what effect "book" trailers might have on selling a novel.  People like video.  They could probably be compelled to watch a three minute video, which could be an opportunity to sell a book. But I suspect that I'm a unique person and probably the only one who finds this thought intriguing.

Another thought is that online video is a pretty good marketing technique for other types of companies. I don't know if it would work for the book industry, but video can go viral and help raise awareness about a book's existence.

I guess the other strategy to sell a book is to make a movie out of it.  I find that thought amusing because my screenwriting professor once advised the class that if we wanted to see our story come to life on screen, we'd have better luck writing a novel and having it get adapted into a movie.