How major newspaper reviews help/hurt book sales

[B.R.Stateham]

I'm reading this novel which is more spy than mystery novel--and I chose to read it because of what the back cover filled with reviews from major newspapers and mags said. The praised it to high heavens, claiming the book was every accolade one can imagine.

It sucks. Hard to read. Hard to follow--frankly you need to have PhD. in psychology trying to figure out all the illusionary traps the writer is filling the pages with. But this was supposed to be a Great Book! A Modern Day Kafka! (or so the reviewers stated).

So the question is this; how effective are major reviews in selling a book? Are reviewers from Newsweek and the big city newspapers paid to give these kinds of reviews? Just how effective are these reviews in helping along a new author (or even an old author, for that matter).

[John Dishon]

Seriously though, what did you expect the reviews to say that were on the back of the book? If it's printed on the book, you know it's going to be positive.

But I can empathize with you. Ken Bruen gave an incredible blurb on the back of George Pelecanos' The Night Gardener, claiming that "nothing in mystery touches this novel. This is the pinnacle of what the rest of us only dream of." Talk about hyperbole. I think The Night Gardener is the definition of mediocrity. But it was my own fault for trusting the blurb on the back of a book because of course the blurb/review is going to praise the book.

But we all have different tastes too, so no matter what others say about a book, you never really know until you read it. The Guards by Ken Bruen is one of those novels that is almost universally praised, but I thought it was a shallow, cliche-ridden chore to read. That's why I like to take in a lot of reviews, particularly Amazon user reviews, to get a more broad sense of what people think of the book, and then also read a sample of it to see if I think I'll like it. But I also buy books blindly, just because the premise intrigues me.

I don't know how much the majority of readers are influenced by newspaper reviews; all I know is that for me, there is no single review that will act as a deal breaker. It does help to read the paper's full review though, because sometimes those excerpts in/on the book are just cherry-picked for a more mediocre review.

[John McFetridge]

I sometimes review books for the Toronto Star - there's no editorial input at all. I do pitch books I think I'd like to review and the editor either says yes or no. My reviews have varied from a non-fiction book about international crime to Roddy Doyle to a book by a writer who calls himself Minister Faust and so on, there's really no pattern. What I'm saying is, no one pays me to say anything specific, it's really up to me.

But friends who work in bookstores tell me that, yes, reviews go a long way to selling books.

Sales of my own books would not back that up ;)