Almost every potential reader will judge whether or not to buy and read your book before they have read one single word inside the book. Based on loads of empirical research and decades of experience in the book business, we have a clear picture of what happens in the mind of a potential reader when judging a book. Even though we have a pretty good map of how people decide to buy a book (which we will outline soon), you must understand a key insight: this process is almost never conscious. These buying decisions are a series of instantaneous and mostly unconscious judgments. They are made in less than 60 seconds, and they are made together, each influencing the other, not individually. The reader often doesn’t know (or believe) they’re evaluating the book this way—but they are. These judgments are real and substan- tive; in most cases, they are the main evaluation and purchase triggers. A potential reader will consider these pieces of information about a book, (usually) in this order: 1. The title 2. The recommending source 3. The cover 4. The book description 5. The blurbs 6. The customer reviews 7. The author bio and picture (depending on where the picture is placed) 8. The length of the book 9. The price (though this can come sooner) 10. The book text itself (the “see inside” function online) We’ll cover how to create each of these pieces in more depth later on. For now, let’s walk through each step and unpack the reader’s judgments around it. 444 · ThE SCriBE METhOD