#oneperonsexperience If I think about how I pick books, they are either bought for me (serious Book Forum type reccos), or I get an idea and then read the first few pages using the A****n sample feature. I can usually sense if I am going to vibe with author's voice/overall quality of writing in less than a page, but have sometimes gotten to the end of the sample and gone, meh, I don't care. But that 10+ page sample feels hard to share or consume in any format other than book club?
On Pop-Ups – the one time my work was featured I think I was in a non-genre specific week iirc, which made things like titles a bit of a crapshoot (Lee Child and his blues music come to mind, never mind Cooking with Fernet Branca, which is either a contemporary satire, or a cookbook, depending where you find it in the store/site) and it was interesting to get negative feedback on a very deliberate piece of writing.
<read on if interested / show don't tell moan>
Interrupted machine guns fire in a hard to mimic way, and so I went with "syncopated staccato", which was apparently hard to read... which was exactly the point, it was how the machine gun was firing. This is perhaps an example where Show Don't Tell doesn't really work [i.e. everyone knows the moon sparkles on the ice, but not everyone knows how a gun fires, or what it means when you leave chopsticks in rice, or whether the number 14 is unlucky etc etc]?