Theoretical Background
Book Reviews
Impact on the Market
(Book) reviews constitute a form of electronic Word of Mouth (eWoM) which bases on the fact that customers tend to rely less on traditional Marketing strategies and more on the experiences and opinions of their friends and families who act as peers and are as such deemed much more credible. While all involved stakeholders may profit from online reviews, reviews are esp. valuable for their readers. One reason lies in the possibility for retailers to offer many more products online which creates a huge and convoluted product variety. This importance is reflected by current numbers: “more than 80% of online shoppers consult reviews posted by other consumers before making purchase decisions”1.
This trend has not stopped at the threshold of the book world, with online book reviews—a form of eWoM—standing right next to developments such as bookstagram, BookTok, FanFiction, etc. This applies even more when considering the amount of newly published books (over 67,000 in Germany in 20232). Thus, while the product variety may be overwhelming for customers, book reviews constitute an important instrument for orientation.
Book reviewing impacts modern reading practices. The rise of amateur criticism has created a digital reading sphere, which is characterized mainly by a transfer of social reading practices into the digital room. Generally, Social Reading describes an “online geführter, intensiver und dauerhafter Austausch über Texte”3.
This digital space offers many chances for book and review readers: esp. the exchange with other people about books, but also a decline in consumer search costs. Further, the traditionally clear line between readers and authors blurs drastically, and:
“Leser, Autoren und Kritiker rücken im digitalen Zeitalter auch in der etablierten Verlagswelt enger zusammen als jemals zuvor”4.
While this undeniably offers chances for readers and authors, other stakeholders may be confronted with a loss of their importance, e.g. professional literary critics or publishers. The latter have reacted to this shift, for example by establishing strategies such as review management. In this light, reader reviews are used as a marketing instrument to foster book popularity and—in the end—sales figures.5
Book Reviewers
Naturally, the rise of massively published online reviews is accompanied by an increase of persons who write reviews. Book reviews are often written by so-called content-creators, e.g. bloggers or influencers (but can also be written by occasional reviewers, of course). Book reviewers are often young, female and intensive readers that actively participate in the social book world.
Reviewer Motivations
Although there are many conceivable motivations to write online book reviews, this thesis uses the typology by Hennig-Thurau et al. Their 8 motivations were adapted to the domain of book reviews. The following list presents an overview over the most common motives for writing book reviews:
- Platform assistance;
- venting extreme feelings;
- concern for other consumers;
- self-portrayal;
- social benefits;
- economic incentives;
- helping the author and/or publisher.
Note that the book reviewers may write reviews due to multiple motives that could be of different priority.
LovelyBooks
Generally, there are multiple platforms and channels to publish (book) reviews. Next to traditional forms such as book review blogs or online forums, the currently most popular channel are social cataloging sites such as Goodreads and LovelyBooks.
Social cataloging sites offer many functionalities:
- Shedding a light on stories that readers would hardly elsewhere
- Discussion groups
- Individual book recommendations
- etc.
LovelyBooks is the largest social cataloging site for books in the German area. According to their own PR-data of 2024, LovelyBooks hosts over 500,000 readers (in terms of registrations), including 10,000 authors and publishers6.
LovelyBooks mainly provides a platform to share and browse book reviews. Each user has the possibility to create an individual bookshelf with books to read and books that have been read. Further, LovelyBooks organizes so-called reading rounds which are characterized by giving away free copies to chosen readers which then read the book and commit themselves to an active exchange with the other selected readers.
Incentivization of Book Reviewers: Free Book Copies
Due to the huge impact of reviews, marketers employ different tacticts to make use of the effects of reviews. One such exemplary strategy is incentivization which is defined as:
“the act or process of providing incentives to make something more attractive.”7
In its core, incentivization is supposed to be a mutual exchange: subject A gives something and subject B returns something else. In case of reviews, the reviewer usually receives an incentive and returns his/her opinion in form of a review.
Incentives can take different forms, such as monetary (e.g. receiving cash or a discount) or non-monetary (e.g. free products or event invitations), material or immaterial.
Incentivized reviews can negatively affect the review’s credibility: The review reader now faces a situation where the reviews that are supposed to be helpful in his/her purchase decision can be potentially biased and misleading. To protect customers from biased, misleading reviews, there are legal regulative requirements to disclose sponsorship.
In the book market, giving away review copies to critics is a long tradition which has experienced a shift towards amateur critics. The intitial scheme of blogger-cooperations looked like this:
With the rise of social media, new forms and cooperations came up. For example, review copies can be digital and the reviews are published on blogs, but also distributed via social media.
Considering the most common cooperation, namely that book bloggers ask publishers/authors for a review copy, it is important to note that it is not guarantueed that book reviewers will receive a free book (because of limited contingents). Therefore, publishers have more or less strict requirements for book reviewers, such as having a minimum number of followers and to regularly publish contents.
Importantly, from a legal perspective, this kind of cooperation is a form of advertising. As such, book reviewers are obliged to disclose the fact of having received a free product. According to the German media state authorities, the following content types are subject to mandatory labeling:
Beiträge über Produkte, Dienstleistungen, Marken, Unternehmen, Regionen, Events, Reisen, die kostenlos in Anspruch genommen oder erhalten wurden, deren Veröffentlichung aber an Vereinbarungen/Bedingungen geknüpft ist.8
Therefore, these book reviews must be labeled as “advertisement” by using the words “Werbung” or “Anzeige”.