Writing book reviews is becoming big business. There are numerous websites and people who do reviews professionally.
As an author, I see lots of advice for authors. One mainstay is finding people to review your book so you can use the reviews, if they are favorable, in your book promotions.
Review Guidelines
Supposedly the author is not to pay for book reviews. This might be considered as a way to buy good reviews, deserved or not.
Amazon wants a reviewer to first purchase the book from them in order to leave a review. Since the company makes money from selling books, not reviews, this is understandable. It also makes it hard for anyone else to leave a review.
Review Considerations
I write book reviews. However, there are genres I am not qualified for writing book reviews as I rarely to never read those genres.
People who read only one genre might be considered good book reviewers for that genre. It also makes it harder for a new author as their book will be compared to all the other books in that genre.
Giving copies of a book to a reviewer can taint the view of a resulting review. As I don’t buy books, but borrow them from the library or pull them off my own shelves, I am limited in which books I can review. My personal stash is old, some going back fifty years and difficult to obtain any more.
Doing Ratings
Goodreads, where I post my reviews, has a five star system for rating a book. It usually suffices.
The biggest drawback in this system for me is that five stars says a book is amazing. Even three stars which should be a so so rating says I liked the book. That leaves me writing book reviews with ratings of mostly four stars.
Another drawback is that it asks for a single rating. A book can be very well written and still be one you did not enjoy, maybe even loathed. My work around is to give a second rating in the comment section.
Review Tyranny
Another big drawback to the rating/review requirement for books is how people are coerced into thinking a book with a lower rating or few reviews isn’t worth their reading time. Any book, no matter how good, has readers who don’t like the book and can lower the rating for the book.
Then there are those who read a book and leave no reviews. The author and the book are at their mercy in today’s marketplace. And the reader let them down.
