Do Book Reviews Affect Sales?
Are book reviews a literary exercise in their own right and treated as such? Or are they mere marketing tools with nothing but ad copy passing off as reviews? Do newspapers actually take the trouble of finding a good book and arguing its merits? Or are book reviews also sponsored nowadays by publishing houses who see the exercise as a cheap marketing gimmick?
Do book reviews actually influence sales?
A blog I read in this connection makes a good case for argumentative book reviews.
…book reviews don’t seem to be moving copies as much anymore, in part because the general readership’s knowledge-base has shrunk. So, [the logic went], people reading book reviews don’t have the context in which to place a value on a critic’s conclusion about a book. Therefore, it’s simply just another opinion.