I absolutely do. These covers aren’t random. Someone paid a fair bit of money to create a cover that entices the target audience. I guess I should say I absolutely did but they have started doing fantasy covers for romance novels that have a thin veneer of fantasy. If you put a dragon on the cover it should be a book about dragons not a book that inexplicably has two main characters banging in a doorway out of nowhere.

This has occasionally backfired. Elizabeth Moon is awesome and her covers always looked terrible to me. But this also means that deep in the pandemic I had a whole new author with a nice back catalog to read.

In a general way, I check the cover, I see who they got to give blurbs, I read the back (this is often less helpful than the first two). If I was wrong and I would have liked it, someone whose taste I respect will mention it later and I’ll give it a go. But there are more books published than any one person would ever have time to read. So if I miss a couple, oh well.