{"id":465,"date":"2008-04-24T08:10:00","date_gmt":"2008-04-24T08:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rbicmsblog.reedbusiness.com\/elogic_660000266\/2008\/04\/24\/whose-reviews-do-you-use\/"},"modified":"2008-04-24T08:10:00","modified_gmt":"2008-04-24T08:10:00","slug":"whose-reviews-do-you-use","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=465","title":{"rendered":"Whose Reviews Do You Use?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A confession: I rarely read reviews of books I haven’t already read myself. Kirkus<\/a> recently gave Gareth’s new Merchant of Venice<\/a><\/em> graphic novel a glowing, starred review and the celebration of that news at our house got us talking with other book world friends about various review sources and the question of who reads them and how much it influences their purchasing.<\/p>\n

As you know if you read my post about peeking<\/a>, I don’t like to have key details of a book given away to me in advance. On a more practical note, though, as a buyer I have the incredible luxury of being able to see most books and buy them based solely on my own opinions of them, at least in the case of picture books. In the case of novels, reviews could theoretically be influential to my frontlist buying, but the timing of them generally makes that help impossible. Usually when I’m meeting with my sales reps I’m buying books that haven’t been critically reviewed as yet, so I’m left relying on the advice of my rep<\/a>, my knowledge of an author’s prior books, and (first and foremost) my gut instinct.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I will skip a book in my frontlist ordering only to read rave reviews of it later and then decide to order it for our store. But generally the books that get the most review attention are the books I was most likely to have bought in my initial frontlist round. So, again, reviews don’t influence my buying much.<\/p>\n

If our customers read reviews with any regularity I’d obviously have to pay closer attention, but by and large the few who do are librarians who often do much of their ordering directly from Baker and Taylor or Follett — distributors who can do the processing\/cataloguing for them that, sadly, isn’t a service our store can offer. It’s really only a handful of our customers who come in the door looking for titles reviewed in the New York Times Book Review<\/em>, let alone PW<\/em> or The Horn Book<\/em> or Kirkus<\/em> or Booklist<\/em> or SLJ<\/em> or Kliatt<\/em>, which shares its own home base with our store, in Wellesley.<\/p>\n

For me, too, the review sources I find to be the most reliable are PEOPLE I know personally. At our New England Independent Children’s Booksellers Advisory Council<\/a> meetings it’s always the "title sharing" portion of the day that I find the most useful. It’s particularly helpful for me to hear reviews from booksellers whose tastes tend be similar to mine, because I know that if if they liked a book, odds are I’ll enjoy it too. Or if a book sells well in so-and-so’s store, it’s likely to sell well in ours. With critical reviews, unless I know who’s reviewing a book and am familiar with their likes and dislikes, I have no sense of whether or not I’m likely to agree with them, so it’s hard to know how much stock to put in their reviews.<\/p>\n

But… that’s just me. What about YOU? Do you regularly read reviews and if so to what extent do they influence your purchasing (either for yourself or your library or your bookstore or… fill in the blank)? Do you pay attention to the names of reviewers so that you have some idea of their general preferences or does that not matter to you? What’s your favorite source these days for book reviews and why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A confession: I rarely read reviews of books I haven’t already read myself. Kirkus recently gave Gareth’s new Merchant of Venice graphic novel a glowing, starred review and the celebration of that news at our house got us talking with other book world friends about various review sources and the question of who reads them and how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}