It's not just about the positive reviews

Among authors, there is a big debate:  do on the positive reviews matter or can readers be swayed just as much by the negative ones?  I asked TV programming strategy pal (and fellow bookworm) Judith Orlowski to weigh in on this-- and think about at least one book that she found online.  (You can find her on Linkedin.) 

Here's what she has to say:

I was looking for a book at a time when life was just not as much fun as it used to be. 
Normally I don't read comedy but thought this time, why not?  

I scanned the Usual Suspects -Amazon, Bookbub and so on.  Then on Goodreads, a certain (unknown) reviewer mentioned that Tim Dorsey had another novel out with his demented serial killer protagonist Serge. The novel was called Atomic Lobster.  I knew that this wasn't going to be just any old killer.    

I bought it-- and then I read by tiny kindle light while my husband slept.  By the time that Serge and his drug addled sidekick were debating the relative aesthetic merits of straight-to-video release of "Bum Fights" vs. the sequel to "Clowns versus Mimes", I surrendered to tears of laughter.  I have read others in the series (there are over a dozen) -- but few are as funny as this one, in which Serge rids the country of scumbags.   

Here is what I did not mention: the Goodreads reviewer hated the book!  But he or she described it in a way that it sound like "my kinda thing."  I don't remember the name of the reviewer or the phrases that made me snag the book.  But let me say thank you-- wherever he or she may be.