Do Negative Reviews Deter You? | Discussion

Hi everyone! Today on the blog, I’m talking about the effect negative reviews have on personal reading experience. Let’s get started!

I recently read SJ @ A Tree Grows In Bookland’s post about bloggers being afraid of writing negative reviews, which led me to think, what effect do negative reviews have on other people? And should we allow that effect impact our own reading experience and keeping our unbiased perception of a book?

I have a lot of books on my TBR (I’m not kidding. There’s a lot), and I also follow a bunch of people and their reviews. It’s not that I want to read a negative review of a book I’ve been anticipating for who knows how long, but sometimes it’s inevitable. Sometimes I’m intrigued and I read the negative review and then I actually consider taking the book off my to-read list.

But how can one negative review out of hundreds, thousands maybe, deter me from reading the book and enjoying it as if I hadn’t read it? How can one person’s opinion, no matter how strong and cogent the argument is, change mine so quickly? And shouldn’t readers, and bloggers especially, be unbiased to books and other readers’ perception of them?

It’s interesting to see how other bloggers react to negative reviews. I constantly mentions of other reviews in bloggers’ reviews, saying how they had lower expectation because this blogger didn’t like it or how they weren’t going to read it but ended up liking it anyway. But where does the line stand between keeping a generally unbiased outlook and trusting personally valuable opinions and other bloggers’ viewpoints? Where is the demarcation between keeping a distance from reading a review but also wanting to get a general outlook on the book? If we should always keep our distance from reading reviews and general opinions of the book, does that mean we should always go into a book empty-handed and open?

So I’m confused. I’m a little scared to pick up this majorly hyped-up book that I’ve had my eye on for a while and I’m a bit afraid to read this new release that I was so excited to read. Personally, I know that I shouldn’t allow a few negative reviews deter me from reading books that I’ve had interest in, but I think that no matter what, it’s always going to nag at me.

Of course, I’ve come up with the solution that I nonetheless will read these books despite the fact that they got a few negative reviews. Besides, I’m pretty sure every book has a whole spectrum of ratings. I just realize that I’m going to have higher expectations for them just to compare the actual book to the negative review. Moral of the story (for me, at least): don’t read bad reviews for a book. Why? Because they may deter you from a good reading experience and affect you more than you may want to admit.

Have you ever been discouraged from reading a book because of a negative review? Did you decide to read that particular book? What thoughts do you have? Let me know in the comments!