On the academic side, most books don’t get reviewed. That’s too simple. They’ve been thoroughly reviewed before publication by whatever committee has chosen the book for publication. The reviews of them you’re most likely to encounter are blurbs on Amazon that are basically culls from the book’s back cover.
Not so with trade books, and I confess, I looked for a way out of trade publishing mainly because I could not bear to read the reviews of books I copyedited. By the time you’ve completed a copyedit, you feel that the book is partly your own – you’ve left fingerprints on it, even if you’re the only one who can see them all, you are rooting for it to do well, and you take it to heart when some reviewers pan it, which some always do. Besides which, a pan is unlikely to help you hold on to a client.
I took on trade books from time to time knowing full well they should not have been published. Sometimes I would try to talk publishers out of taking books on: “You really don’t want to do this one, Joe.” “What? Why not? What’s wrong with it?” After a while, you develop an eye for these things. But heck, I was being paid. (A yardstick of success for most freelancers is, quite simply, “What did I invoice this month?” – paranoia makes one mercenary.) I knew this particular trade editor did all right with business books and popular histories but also had the worst possible judgment when it came to fiction. It worked the other way as well. There were novels that I knew worked really well but for some reason he did not see it. He made noises about publishing one of mine. That thought was depressing as hell. I didn’t know my own book was that bad.