The Law of Diminishing Awesome: Why (I think) Review Averages Go Downhill

I noticed a trend with pretty much every book I’ve seen that hits the Top 100 best seller list on Amazon or some of the sub-genre best seller lists.  If the book is good, the first wave of reviews are all five and four stars.  Then after the book has received a lot of attention, the review averages go down, down, down.  I wondered what was at work there and considered a few reasons why this might be happening:

It’s just a math thing, the law of averages and statistics.
Expectations are set unreasonably high by other reviews.
Critical people are motivated to automatically be harsh towards things others are excited about.

Because I pretty much suck at math, I took at look at the things I could evaluate without hurting my brain.  Those were numbers 2 and 3 above.

It’s not just a math thing…

I believe that when a reader comes to a book after reading many glowing reviews, she has very high expectations for the book, perhaps higher than she might have had if she had not read the reviews first.  My theory received support recently when I read a few later reviews of my book Shine Not Burn, where the reviewers specifically said that they’d expected something that would blow them away based on the excitement they read in other reviews.  One even said she probably would have rated the book higher if she’d just come to it without having those set expectations.

Books that don’t “measure up” to expectations will receive lower reviews.  That makes sense.  But what should the book be measuring up to?  Standards set by reviews or something else?  My answer is that a book should measure up to what the reader hopes to find after checking out the blurb, the cover, the sample, and the feeling the reader gets when introduced to the “bare bones” of the story.  If you’re a reader and you want to truly enjoy a book from your own perspective, un-colored by someone’s review of it, focus on the bare bones before you read.  Don’t read a bunch of reviews first and hope to recreate their exact experience.  Reviews are important for sure. But at some point, they go from being important to affecting the enjoyment of the actual story and that’s not a good thing.

Critical people can be doubtful and unreasonably harsh…

I also believe that once a book receives a number of great reviews, there are certain people out there who have this natural inclination to just be critical of things others are enjoying.  Maybe they don’t even realize they’re having this reaction; I don’t think it has to be a conscious process or effort.

If I were to guess as to the psychology behind this (taking into account that I have zero qualification to do that), I’d say that they do this because it makes them feel like they’re a more critical or discerning reader.  Some people, when reading a dearth of 5-star reviews with glowing recommendations, will read the same book with the main goal of picking it apart rather than just reading to enjoy the story.  They start on page one with this idea floating in their minds:  “A hundred glowing 5-star reviews?  Well … we’ll just see about that.”

Another reason we may be seeing this kind of overly critical reaction is because of all the fake reviews that are out there.  It’s not as prevalent as it once was, now that Amazon has gotten smart about it, but it’s frequent enough that some people are automatically suspicious of any book that has a lot of good reviews.  They therefore go into the reading searching for clues of false satisfaction on the part of possible sock puppet reviewers, instead of having the goal of reading to enjoy the story without playing detective.

So what’s the point of this post?  My goal in presenting my theories is to help readers enjoy books without the influence of reviews coloring their reading experience.  The side benefit would be that book reviews would reflect a true reader experience and not one influenced by things that have nothing to do with the book.

Book reviews only work to help us find good reads when they reflect the actual content of the story.  There are other things that influence reviews beyond what I’ve mentioned here, but those are topics for another post.  I’ll be covering “reader assumptions and misunderstandings” in my next post on this subject!