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I’m going to upset a few people with this article.
Why? Because I'm turning the idea of a traditional book review on its head.
I’m going to argue that online book reviews should be different to traditional, printed reviews.
Before I go on, a caveat:
This advice should NOT be interpreted as a discouragement against writing long reviews; rather, it should be viewed as a comment on the layout, structure and visual appeal of longer reviews.
So let’s go back to basics and ask an obvious question:
What is the Purpose of a Book Review?
This might seem like a dumb question, but it’s not. What exactly is a book review?
Let’s get straight to the point: book reviews tell others what the book is called, who wrote it, what it’s about from the reviewer’s point of view, and most importantly, lets you know whether the reviewer liked the book or not.
It’s really that simple. Even book reviews in academic journals can be summarised using this definition.
The Elements of a Book Review
Although I’ve written an entire article on this on my blog, now is a good time to look at what elements of a book review are.
A book review always contains:
- The book’s title
- The book’s author
- What the book was about without giving too much of the plot away
- The genre the book was in
- The reviewer’s opinion was about the book (i.e. whether they liked it or not)
Book reviews often contain (but not necessarily):
- The book’s publisher
- Number of pages
- The book’s ISBN
- The price of the book
- A rating based on the reviewer’s rating system
This is all very straightforward. In fact, I’m sure I’m not telling you anything didn’t already know. To recap: the main elements of a book review are: the book’s title and author, a statement about its plot and the reviewer’s opinion about the book.
Online Book Reviews Vs Traditional Book Reviews
Now this is where things start to get strange.
I’m going to say that for online book reviews be killer book reviews, they need to stand out. In other words, they need to be different to traditional, printed book reviews.
Why is this? It’s the medium: the internet, the computer screen, and the nature of what we’ve come to expect from online content.
Although we are still reading content online, it’s a very different kind of reading to holding a journal, a magazine or a newspaper, and enjoying the touchy-feely (kinaesthetic) pleasures of a printed review.
At a physical level, we use different senses and different centres in our brains when we hold and read printed material, compared to when we read online material.
As another example, think of how useless a detailed chart with 20 rows and 10 columns is in a Powerpoint presentation, compared with a simple pie chart -or even a photograph.
Whilst this might seem simplistic, my point is this: if we’re trying to write a great online book review, then we not only need to understand what a book review is, and what its key elements are, we also need to write book reviews in a way that suits the medium -the internet.
What Can We Learn From This?
Given that we’re not using the same senses and parts of our brains when we’re surfing the net compared to when we’re reading a printed book, we need to make some adjustments Here, we can learn a lot from copywriters and online marketers. Rather than filling the screen up with lots of dense type, copywriters spend days (sometimes longer) figuring out how to say more with less.
They use blank spaces and short paragraphs of four lines or less.
They also recommend using bold to call attention to important points.
Copywriters recommend using eye-catching post titles to grab a reader’s attention like: How to Write a Killer Book Review and recommend that you place most of the content in the space above the ‘fold.’.
The ‘fold’ is the all of the web page you can see when you first arrive on a website without scrolling down the page.
And it almost goes without saying: use a picture of the book’s cover in the post above the fold and make it large enough to see clearly. Thumbnails are not adequate for great online book reviews.
A Summary:
In this article, I’ve examined what a book review is, arguing that it’s purpose is to
