How to Write a Book Review: A Step-By-Step Look at the Process

A book review is a common assignment across many colleges. But how do you write a good book review? Do people even read reviews anymore? Is there one right way to go about it? And most importantly, how can you stand out from your classmates and avoid sounding like everyone else? See this article for tips on how to write your book review.

What is a book review?

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A book review is a thorough analysis of a book. It explains and evaluates the quality and importance of a book and does not just summarise the content. A book review may evaluate the book on the basis of personal taste or point out the book’s shortcomings.

Before you start, you’ll need to know your book goals. Find out what the book is about, and what the reader will benefit from. As well as a solid assignment strategy, there are a few things a book reviewer should consider before they begin their review:

When reading rather than hearing about a book, a reviewer needs to imagine what it is like to be the reader. Readers love being fully engaged in a book. They want to be immersed in a character’s thoughts and imaginings so that they become closely involved in the story. People enjoy reading fiction, but very few choose to read non-fiction books. In the age of instant online information, it still feels like reading a novel. What a reviewer needs to imagine is a situation or situation in a completely new way. The reader must enter a different world.

To do this, the reviewer needs to put themselves in the author shoes

Finally, the reviewer needs to imagine themselves as the reader and most importantly as the instructor who will grade the book review.

As you can see, a book review takes effort. You might not feel like it, but it’s worth the time and effort you’ll need to put into it. Good reviews are essential for anyone who’s considering writing one.

Good book reviews have a significant impact on people. I’ve noticed that because of all the negative reviews out there, as many as two-thirds of people decide not to visit a site because they’ve found a bad review.

How can you stand out from the crowd and avoid sounding like everyone else? The following tips will help you make book reviews more effective:

You can’t copy a format or factor in the opinions of other people. Good reviews can embrace any style or factor in overlap with well-known personalities.

How to write a book review

There are tools that aggregate and scrape reviews from other places and publish them. This is an unavoidable by-product of the book publishing process; these publishers expect it. Any reader can write a review. They can submit it to these tools. The tools then aggregate all the reviews into analysis, ratings, and recommendations for readers to pick from. You could do this yourself with a simple review blog. Lots of professional novelists and bloggers already do this for other publications and traffic. So why not collaborate?

Review tools are a wonderful way to share your knowledge and experiences with others, get feedback and encouragement, and give back to the reading public. This is in the form of professional book reviews. Rewards that come along with being a professional reviewer include networking, touches, and visibility. Also, review sites generate approximately $50 billion in annual online revenue.

In her 2018 book, The Outsiders: Givers and Takers in the Name of Creativity, Pulitzer-prize winning poet and essayist Alice Walker tell the story of a literary scandal that rocked the writing and publishing world. The University of California Press unintentionally published a collection of writings by Clement Moore that contained serious plagiarism. While the crime had already been uncovered before the press published, they went ahead and published anyway.

Moore revealed he had plagiarised from Walker, Eudora Welty, and T.R. Spencer. The debacle leads to calls for greater plagiarism accountability in the publishing industry, and eventually resulted in the Association of American Publishers (AAP) created the Spelling and Grammar Checker, an acronym that still exists today.

What makes a good book review?

A book review should be personal. It should engage the reader and make them want to read your review. The review should have a beginning, middle and end. The beginning should capture the reader’s attention and make them want to read the rest of the review. The middle contains the key takeaways from the review and provides the reader with good information to make an informed decision. And the end is where you take the reader inside your review and tell them what you liked or disliked about the book.

It’s important to remember that nobody remembers the specific events or techniques that you used to write your review. What they remember is the book in general and your review in particular. In fact, almost all book readers feel it’s their obligation to read all the reviews before making up their own opinion. A good book review follows the same structure. If you follow it, you should be able to stand out from the crowd. You’ll increase both how useful your reviews are and the chances that readers refer you to others without you needing to do much work.

No two approaches or materials will be the same, but what you use to build your review should be broadly similar regardless of format or location. Unless you actually discuss the book in detail or put it in context with other reviews, you’ll likely look like an extraneous party compared to the readers who took the time out of their day — or even from those who are just searching for a good book to read — to read your review.

You’ll also want your review to have a consistent style and tone, especially when you’re writing the overview at the beginning of the review. Don’t change up your copy or pictures throughout the review to keep it consistent; it can make your review unreadable and confusing for anyone who’s reading it to navigate.

Where to publish your book reviews

Don’t worry about where you should publish your book reviews — just get them published. It’s better to publish them anywhere and everywhere than it is to have them all sitting in your computer, unpublished.

Writing reviews is an awesome job if you ask me. I love reading book reviews and I keep seeing more and more posts from authors which encourages me to think that I should be doing the same. After all, it’s 2017 and people are still reading what they publicly and authoritatively say about books, right?

I decided to make a go at it and so here’s a step-by-step guide on how I did it.

Good reviews are everything and will help your book get a better chance at getting noticed by studios and editors. Moreover, reviews will increase your visibility and help you build a loyal fanbase.

So get the reviews done. Great. You now have a way to amplify your own power and promote your book. But here’s the real secret: Some people use Amazon as their main way to get reviews, but you should do whatever works for you. I recently reviewed my book on They Write Stories, and I learned one of the best ways was to email my review to them directly. It helps a lot if reviewers can find you and can tell right away whether or not they want to be linked in the post.

Good book reviews are great, but sometimes the internet is biased. Even other reviewers have other opinions and may have a grudge against you. How can you combat bias? By being a strong, well-researched, and objective critic. Read other reviews and take notes, add your thought into the review, and respond to each one. Moreover, you should judge your own book on a higher standard than other books out there.

A good book review can help you establish yourself as an authority on the subject matter, make connections with other reviewers, and help jump-start your future career as an author or expert in the field.

The reviews they get, like good content, speak for themselves: Reviews can be self-promotional in their own way, but they can also help editors, agents, and potentially even publishers determine whether their reviews should appear in print or online. Whether it be flipping through your work folder or submitting an article for publication, reviews can add to your writing and provide invaluable information to other creators for which they’ve written them.

As their names suggest, book review blogs are run by and for readers. All of them run free, or offer a small subscription fee with their platform. (Copywriting platform LaunchOut charges $15 per month if you sign up before the end of the first quarter.) Reviewers master the art of being engaging in their personal space (their personal blog) and respond to as many comments — often many, many comments — as possible within their review window, usually a couple of hours. I will invest time into a review only to see inadequate or downright negative responses leave me feeling like the reviewer is having a personal last laugh at my writing. Even if I don’t end up publishing the review on my own site, it can still add to my credibility and that of my author, especially with another influencer’s review popping up.

Reviews can range in length, from a couple of paragraphs to 9,000 words, sometimes with images added in for context. Some reviews let you lead with a question you might want to ask the author, other reviews demand an answer right at the start, and a few others can overlap with a question pending your own review.