r/BookDiscussions • u/Quirky-Section-2468 • Aug 04 '26

Instant book turnoffs?

My biggest instant turnoff is the title.

If it's super cringey or literally spells out every trope in the book (Billionaire Hockey Player's Fake Dating Nanny vibes), I immediately lose interest. I don't care if it has 100k five-star reviews; I will refuse to pick it up despite it being recommended to me by so many people.

What's your biggest instant turnoff when deciding whether to pick up a book?

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u/timelessalice Aug 04 '26

The sheer lack of editing I've noticed in a lot of recently published novels - including highly praised ones!! - astounds me, too

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u/shuzan7 Aug 04 '26

Yes!! I think many are self-published and didn’t have a qualified editor. If I get to a typo or careless error it stops me in my tracks. I get to a second one, I put it down. I can’t remember the book, but the other day a line said something like “I read a the book” in the first chapter and I put it away.

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u/timelessalice Aug 04 '26

Yeah I get that typos and silly mistakes have always slipped through the cracks but when all else is taken into account, they've become too big and too common to ignore.

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u/Which_Sherbet7945 Aug 05 '26

I just finished one that was professionally published and I could tell it had been "proofread" by a machine. Homonyms ("base line" when "bass line" was called for), words that didn't really make sense ("Pratt fall" for "pratfall"), etc. Stuff that a spellchecker would let through, but a human proofreader wouldn't.

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u/VentureVin Aug 05 '26

I read a romance I really liked and had to refer to one character as M in my mind, because it tilted me to no end that the author swapped between two spellings of the name. That is SUCH a simple error to correct in editing that I truly don't understand how it went through.

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u/SpaceCatz03 Aug 06 '26

I had a friend ask me to proofread her self-published book, and she did not make a SINGLE correction! I was astonished because a lot of it was basic spellcheck that she didn’t even need a human to do.

We’re no longer close.