WRITING BOOK REVIEWS: Guide for Beginners & Starting Blogs!
If you’re new to blogging, then writing book reviews can seem daunting and difficult. Especially if you’re uncertain how to write a book review and what information to include before you publish it.
But whether you’re unsure where to start when it comes to writing reviews, or if you’re feeling quite confident and want to dive in; I hope you find this post helpful one way or another.
I’d like to preface this by saying that these are some of my tips and the things that I’ve learned; there’s no right or wrong way to write a review, and you can change it to suit your preferences. I’m also not implying that I know everything about writing reviews. This is just a guide from my experiences as a blogger which will hopefully help any new or aspiring bloggers out there. I’ll be sharing my experiences, past reviews and the information I’ve learned through blogging.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have anyone telling me how to write reviews or what to do when I started out. I would’ve appreciated any advice at the beginning but I kind of had to figure it out on my own and see what other bloggers did. If I can impart some of the blogging knowledge I’ve gained over the last four years and make it easier for you, then I’m happy to do so.
This post is an extension of my HOW TO START A BOOK BLOG post I wrote a while ago. If you’re new to book blogging or have been thinking about making a one, definitely go give that a read because I give a step by step guide on how to get started and what to do. Also, please remember to give that post a like and a reblog if you found in insightful. It really helps me out and means others can read it, too.
You’ll also have noticed that STEP #3 gives a quick run through on how to write a basic review. It’s a more concise version of what this post is going to be. So, if you’d rather follow those bullet points, then you can totally do that. But if you want a more in depth guide and to see how I’ve improved since my earlier reviews - keep reading!
1. REVIEW LAYOUT & DETAILS: What information should you include?
I’m going to show you the difference between my old reviews and new. And some of my earlier reviews are incredibly embarrassing, poorly written and short. It’s a mess.
I still look back on more recent reviews and think how I could’ve worded a sentence differently, or made an additional point. There’s always room for improvement - even if you think your reviews are better now than when you started.
Here’s my mortifying review of Looking for Alaska by John Green. This was my first ever book review. Please note the terrible layout, spelling and grammatical mistakes, and horrendous sentence structure. I’ve wanted to keep this buried, hoping no one would notice it all this time but you can see it was pretty bad.
Now here is my most recent review at the time this post is goes live. Of course, if you’re reading this months from now, then it’s no longer recent but it’s Daughter of the Pirate King by Tricia Levenseller. See the astounding difference?
Not going to lie, enormous effort goes into formatting it that way; there’s editing the html, editing cover images, making header images etc. Then there’s writing the actual content, making sure to cut out any unnecessary bits and proofreading before it’s published.
I’m not trying to scare you with this. Your aim isn’t to duplicate my reviews and make them look the same. I want to help you set out a basic template and from there, you can do whatever you want and change them to your liking.
The details you should add when writing a review is the header, title, author, your rating, book summary and finally your review at the end. The header is just the title for the entire review and usually consists of the book title and author name right at the top. It’s most basic review set-up and you don’t have to stop there. You can include the publisher, links to the author’s website/social media, buy links etc.
Some people have an entire ABOUT THE AUTHOR section at the bottom of a review. With this you can condense all the author information into one section of it’s own (author picture, their website/social media links, and a bio pasted from their website). I personally don’t like doing this because it takes a bit more time and I’d rather include that information (minus the bio and photo) along with the rest of the details at the top.
It’s good to add details but don’t overcrowd your review with every single piece of info about the book. You don’t need the ISBN, book format or release dates (unless you’re reading an early copy) in that case a book’s release date is advised.
My older reviews were really simple with hardly any information. But I did add a part where I described the overall book using adjectives…I don’t know why and it seems so unnecessary now.
But you might have noticed in my newer reviews, I sometimes include a Favourite Quotes section. That’s because I love memorable quotes or a funny moment in the book I want to share. I don’t always add this - it’s only when I find one I really like.
Little features like this a great and make a review unique. If you have an idea like this that won’t overcrowd the review, then go ahead and add it.
Once you know the details you’ll include on all your reviews, keep a template of it on a Word Document. Or like me you can save it in your drafts and copy and paste it whenever you need.
So, that’s pretty much the layout but feel free to make it look however you want. I use a list where I have the title, author, author’s links, publisher, rating, favourite quote (optional) and then the summary. After that I insert my review, and right at the bottom I promote my social media links. If you’re going to include your social media, remember to add it to your template as well.
Before we move onto the next step; you can take a look at the evolution of my reviews here. Each of them are different so, scroll through and click to the previous pages because I constantly changed the way they looked. I didn’t have a set template until much later on and even then, I kept on altering how my reviews looked.
2. SETTING OUT YOUR REVIEW: Spoiler or Spoiler Free?
Here are some tips on how to structure your review, and section it into different parts. This is down to how you want your review to be viewed by your followers. You want to make it simple for them - especially if your review contains spoilers.
Again, there’s no right or wrong way to set it out and you could choose do it differently. There’s even a chance you’ll get to writing your review and these methods might not work. In that case, you’ll have to figure it out; see what looks best and how you want your review to be set out.
But I’ll give you some ideas and tell you how I structure my reviews for those who read them. You can choose to go for a similar approach as mine, or find another way that suits you.
The way I like to write reviews are by having the first half of it spoiler-free, and the second half as a spoiler-y discussion. It’s what I do for a majority of my reviews but I sometimes like to post a review completely free of spoilers since their much quicker to write. And I very rarely post reviews that consist entirely of spoilers - I like to include an intro for anyone who hasn’t read the book yet.
Having said that, I have toed the line with spoiler-free reviews. A few of the moments I want to write about border on spoiler-y sometimes, but I do my best to not give anything away. That’s why I prefer to separate my review into two sections, or write an entirely spoiler-free one depending on how much I want to talk about the book.
I do this whenever the mood strikes me or if the book/ending influence how I want my review to be. One day, you might want to get into the details and discuss the story. Other times, you want to give an overview of what happened and your thoughts without major plot points.
If you want uniformity with your reviews, stick to one method you prefer the most. My preferred way is having two sections, but I like being able to choose how much I want to write about - so at times, I opt to post completely spoiler-free ones. Below are a few methods you can use or to give you an idea:
You can do what I do and be flexible. Some reviews call to be written in two parts, others completely free of spoilers.
Or you can choose to section your review into two parts every time. Spoiler-free for those who haven’t read it and likely to be interested; and a spoiler discussion for those who have read and want your thoughts on it.
You can post ones without spoilers. These are usually shorter and easier, especially if you have a few backlogged reviews you need to write.
Or do the opposite, post a spoiler discussion right away. If you want to dive in and talk about the book without a spoiler-free intro, you can. But make sure to warn your followers that’s it contains spoilers at the start.
If you have the time and want to put in the effort, you could write two reviews for the same book and post them separately. One would be a full on spoiler-y discussion and the other without spoilers. I personally don’t like this method but the option is there if you want it.
Those are most of the methods I know. There might be another way or style but you can figure that out for yourself and see what works for you.
Quick Tip: When writing a review, do not mix a spoiler-free and spoiler-y review together. It can be hard and tempting to mention a plot twist when trying to explain something in a review without spoilers. But do your best to avoid blurring the line between spoiler-free and spoilers.
I mentioned that I somewhat did this when writing spoiler-less reviews. But you have to be careful with how much you tease and how close you come to revealing something.
Now you know how to set out a review. It’s important to have some form and structure to it and make it easier for people to read. I hope at least one method appeals to you, but you can always write your review and see what works best.
3. WHAT TO WRITE: From 1 star reviews to 5 stars.
It’s great when you’ve read a 4 or 5 star book - there’s so much to talk about, there’s plenty of things you like and discussions are a lot simpler when you have a good book to review. But it can get challenging when you rate a book 3 stars or less.
This is something I can’t tell you how to do. Each review is completely different, and the way you review a book is your own. But I can give some tips to help shape the way you write a review and ways to look at a book that’s 3 stars and below.
With reviews like that, I never tag the author when promoting it my social media. Or I’ll write a very quick and short review on Goodreads summarizing my thoughts. But it’s mostly the same; just issues with the plot and characters that I talk about.
Most of my reviews below 3 stars tend to have spoilers. I give a warning and jump in with what I didn’t like. I don’t feel the need to give a spoiler-free intro because it’s not going to be something I’ll recommend. It’s also much harder to review a book you disliked without giving away what happens.
You can still write your reviews as you normally would (perhaps following the second method in Step. 2) and instead, your intro would run through the problems you had and why you gave it a low rating. You can then proceed to discuss it more with spoilers. Your structure can change depending on the reasons. You might keep it the same regardless of rating, or like me you might change it up depending on how many stars you gave a book.
Moving on, there will be two sub-sections here. Disliked Because of Preference and Disliked Because It’s Problematic.
DISLIKED BECAUSE OF PREFERENCE: This is when you don’t like a book or have an issue with the plot, characters, romance etc. You might’ve found it hard to get into, slow and it just wasn’t the right book for you.
This is usually personal preference; that something about it wasn’t your cup of tea, which is fine. It’s okay to not like a book but there’s a good chance that someone else will enjoy it much more than you did.
If you dislike a book because of something you didn’t enjoy such insta-love or the writing, you can mention this in your review. By all means, write about how you had trouble getting into it or whatever issues you had.
But please remember to never be rude, or blame the author because their book had insta-love, for example. And definitely don’t tag an author for something like this. It’s very likely a matter of preference and the author doesn’t need to be tagged or linked to your 3 star (or less) reviews for something like this. You can keep this between yourself and your followers.
Another thing you could do is give constructive criticism. Even if an author won’t see your review, it’s good to talk about something that could have been improved or approached differently. Try to justify why you didn’t like a book - whether it’s a character or a issue with the plot etc. And 9 out of 10 times, you’ll probably say it’s down to preference anyway.
DISLIKED BECAUSE IT’S PROBLEMATIC: This is an entirely different issue and can be very difficult to deal with when writing reviews. A problematic book is where harmful themes/tropes and comments come into play and hurt a particular group of people.
This can be towards minorities; like racism and stereotyping, the LGBTQ+ community with homophobic comments or ableism, misrepresentation of disabilities. Anything that has bad rep for a group of people, whether the author meant to write it like that or not. Books like these are harmful towards readers, even if it’s not intended and down to lack of research. Authors need to be careful when approaching books like this, for example, a different culture where they might be stereotyping or bordering on racist.
When you get a book like this that can harm a group of people, it’s good to be vocal and warn other readers that could potentially be hurt by the content. Your review might be much longer with examples of the text you found to be problematic. The best approach is to make the author understand how their writing and book are harmful. You could opt to tag the author or send them a private email with your review and talk about the issues you found. Your best hope is to approach them with your concerns and discuss it with them; then maybe something could be done about it.
I think talking to an author is a good way to tackle it as well as writing a review telling people about the issues. Hopefully the author is open to learning and understanding that the contents of their book were an issue. This works best for books that haven’t been published yet where you can aim to have it looked into. That’s why there are proof/ARCs before the final printing. If you get to read an early copy, there’s a chance any problematic themes can be altered thanks to your review however, this isn’t always the end result.
Sadly, books that are already published are a lot harder to deal with. If you find a problematic book that’s been published for a while, the most you can do is write a review outlining the problems and warn others about it. That way readers can avoid the harmful content and choose not to read it.
That’s as much as I can say with dealing with reviews less than 3 stars. In some cases, authors don’t need to read a review where you didn’t like their book. But where there’s harmful content with a book due for release, you can contact an author and explain the problematic content.
Never attack an author, or tag them on a review where you talk about how much you didn’t like their book without any reason besides personal preference. They don’t need to know that and it wouldn’t help an author. Just remember than even if you disliked a book, your followers might have loved it.
We’ve reached the end of the post. It got quite long and rambl-y so, if you made it to the end, thank you. Hopefully this post was insightful and gave you some ideas on where to start.
But to summarise all the points; all you need to do is add the relevant information about the book you’re reviewing, also figure out how you want to set out your actual review and thinking about who will be reading it, and lastly consider how you write your reviews for each book and ways to approach reviews with different ratings, especially ones you didn’t enjoy as much.
That’s all from me. My asks and messages are open if you have any questions about this post or any of the points I mentioned. Thank you so much for reading - any likes, reblogs and comments are very appreciated.
Hope you all have a lovely day. Until next time, bye!
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