Quote:
Originally Posted by graycyn
The soliciting of reviews also has the potential for a "Be careful what you wish for" situation.
I read a lot. I write reviews seldom. [...]
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I find this sort of thing (people with bad experiences being more inclined to leave negative reviews to help protect others from making the same mistake) across many products, not just books. Does anyone know if this phenomenon has a name?
In fact it is so much the case that I am sometimes sceptical of negative reviews because the bad side of the bell curve is not necessarily representative of the product: most product lines produce some failures, and most books have some people that despise them for one reason or another.
Of course, if many reviews are negative then that suggests the product line is producing a high proportion of failures, or the book is upsetting many readers. But a few negative reviews are to be expected, which feeds into...
All positive reviews can be a problem because many people, including me, don't trust them. It looks like all the friends and family have been in leaving reviews, or the publisher has perhaps paid for reviews. In Goodreads I regularly filter to score 3 because I find these fence sitters often offer the most balance in their reviews (I ignore those that don't leave a reasonably detailed review), but I'm probably not going to buy a book that is all 3s, either.
I look at my own fairly whimsical way of choosing books to read and I despair of ever finding a good way present books for sale.