At first glance, today’s topic seems like one that is too obvious to have a discussion around. Who actually likes spoilers? No one, right? But there are different aspects of the topic of spoilers to discuss. 

For one, I always try to avoid reading any reviews of a book before I read it. Not even from people that I trust not to give anything important away. This is because I want to avoid having someone else’s opinions of the book influence me to develop a predetermined opinion of my own before I even start reading it. 

Then there’s the people who drop spoilers in their reviews without any warning. I love how Goodreads offers people the option to blur out spoilers if they choose to discuss them in their reviews, and I’ve seen it on blogs as well. Unfortunately, not everyone chooses to do that. There are some reviewers who just summarize the whole plot of the book—not many, but I’ve seen at least a few. Others just don’t care and drop spoilers without marking them as such in reviews.

Hands down, the place that I see spoilers the most often is social media. I often tend to stay away from social media as much as I can around the release date of a new book I haven’t read yet but really want to, like my preorders and favorite authors. Some fandoms can get especially careless about sharing spoilers and discussing theories, so it’s always a risk going on social media when there’s a new Sarah J. Maas book, for example. 

Sometimes sharing a content warning could be a spoiler. I’ve read some books where the major twist in the story has the potential to be a major trigger. At first, I struggled with whether to share it as a content warning, but I decided that it was more important to  let people be aware of triggering content. I wound up sharing it at the bottom of my review, with a notice above it that it the content warning included a spoiler for the story (only because I’m not tech savvy and don’t know how to blur out info unless it’s clicked on for my blog.)

Writing reviews for books other than the first in a series is basically guaranteed to involve sharing a spoiler or two. Sometimes, the blurb on the inside cover includes a spoiler, making it even more difficult to avoid sharing any kind of spoilers. I used to put a warning label on my reviews, saying in big, bold letters: WARNING! DOESN’T INCLUDE SPOILERS FOR THIS BOOK, BUT INCLUDES SPOILERS FOR PREVIOUS BOOKS. I figure a little warning never hurt anyone, and if someone didn’t want to know what is going to happen in the previous books, they’d know that this isn’t the review for them.

I’m sure there’s more to discuss when it comes to spoilers, but that’s all I can think of for now. Did I miss any? What do you think?