Book Reviews - Do You Read Them and, If So, Where?

A 2009 Verso Advertising Survey of book buying behavior found that readers place more stock in an author's reputation and recommendations from friends than book reviews. 37% of the readers based their buying decisions on reviews.

Yet, from the last I heard, sites like GoodReads continue to grow and prosper. So to book review blogs. I post reviews on my Malcolm's Round Table blog, most recently The Tiger's Wife and The Seas.

Predictably, books that already have a lot of buzz get more hits on Malcolm's Round Table than small press and self-published books. Malcolm's Round Table covers a variety of subjects, so I tend to get more hits on book posts via searches on the title, author or subject than by people who regularly stop by the blog every week to see what books are being covered.

I write reviews because I buy the books and like talking about them and because authors and small publishers send them to me. While I enjoy the buzz and the comments associated with "name" authors and books, I prefer reviewing small press books. Why? Because the struggle to get reviews.

Mainstream reviewers and critics are going to cover most of the BIG BOOKS. So, pretty much everyone is going to be aware of new releases such as "The Tiger's Wife," while my author friends at Vanilla Heart Publishing, Second Wind Publishing, Chalet, Weaving Dreams and Fisher King cannot count on anyone at Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly, Book List, New Pages, or the San Francisco Book Review for any coverage, much less the prestige literary magazines.

I don't kid myself. A Malcolm's Round Table review isn't going to ramp up the buzz for any book. For one thing, I'm not getting the books multiple months before the release date. For another, a hundred hits on one of my reviews isn't going to have a lot of impact on a new title compared to the thousands of people who see a Kirkus review on a book's Amazon page. But, I hope it helps.

What about you? Are you drawn to book reviews written only by professional critics? What about reviews written by bloggers who simply like books? And when you read those reviews, are you looking for new books or are you drawn to posts about books you've already heard of somewhere else?

--Malcolm