What are deal breakers for you? piss me off, bore me, etc. and you will likely lose me. turn it into a grim treasure-hunt (oh, look, another goddamn exclamation point) for things I feel ridiculously over-used, and you lose me. get clever, not in a subtle and well-managed way, but in a ham-fisted way, and lose me. Basically, anything that pulls me outside the story runs a risk of it. I may go back in (I usually do) but I'm less likely to buy a second book. As examples, I found Practical Demonkeeping to be a very fun read sometimes, gratingly "aren't I clever" self-aware and capable of dragging jokes out far too long in others....so I haven't bought another book by Moore. I also found the mythos interesting in the first Anita Blake book....her fucking hair, not so much. So I only read one of those, too.
What kinds of things have to happen immediately for you to read past the first few pages?
something interesting. that could be a bomb going off, or a guy taking a leak.....it doesn't require an action or body-count threshold, but an ability to hold and draw me in, so there is no real metric for this.
How far into a book is the author still in danger of losing you?
depends how bad the book is. or gets. and as I said, I may well read the book start to finish, but they may still lose me for future volumes.
When you finish reading a novel, what kinds of things will determine how you qualify your experience?
did I like it? I might like it because it scared the shit out of me, made me sad, made me laugh, whatever, but I have to enjoy it. The why is less important. Weigh that against whatever I didn't like. I don't do a lot of in-depth analysis of my reading experience, other than on the fly (I may read "like sinuous sea beasts lurked below" and groan at the metaphor and alliteration, and this will be noted somewhere in my brain, but I don't write a mental treatise on the book and evaluate my experience in that manner), so at the end it is as simple as "did I enjoy it?". Some books, btw, I enjoy more for the ability to make me uncomfortable...I just finished The Cormorant and it was one of those. Still, I liked the awful book and told my wife to read it.
Just trying to find some commonalities in the reading habits of writers.
I doubt there are many. Different people "like" different things, and have different approaches as well as reasons. If you just asked "what have you read recently?" I could say I read Bridges of Madison County, bevause the jacket excerpt was so horrible and purple I wanted to study that book--I didn't enjoy it, but I did choose to read it. And someone else....they may well have enjoyed it. Folks here loved Twilight. Other folks here loathed it. I haven't read it, but if I did, it would be read to study it, which is a reading habit I have (studying books I think are bad to see why....and also, why they succeeded anyway), a lot of other writers do not. And very few recreational readers have. So I'm not sure how many commonalities there are....it would be like polling to ask what people liked to eat, to seek commonality.
Please feel free to answer one or more of the above, and also to address any issues I overlooked that you think relevant. Thanks. no others, good luck with the survey