In Part 1 of this series we started with a tutorial on how to enter a customer review on Amazon. That’s the easy part; now it is time for the hard part, actually writing that review. One of the reasons the first part is easy is it has simple steps that are straight-forward to define with no alternatives or choices to be made. There is only one right way. Writing the review is hard because none of those things are true of that task. There is no one right way. There are no clearly defined steps. And just like the contents of the review, which is largely personal, how you go about writing it probably will be too.
There is a good chance this post will be as full of opinion as a review, but I’ll at least try to explain my reasoning. While I’ll primarily be focused on writing a review of a book to post on Amazon, most of the ideas I’ll throw out would, with a little tweaking, be applicable to writing a review of anything to post anywhere. (I spent several years reviewing music for a magazine and a few websites before I started my book review blog and found more similarities than differences between the two.)
A good place to start is establishing what the purpose of a review is. It’s simple and maybe shouldn’t even need to be stated. Yet, this purpose is easy to forget. Many people who haven’t bothered to consider this write reviews with no value, get upset with reviews that are written, or create conflict in the process some other way. It’s so important I’m going to emphasize it. Continue reading “Reviewing 101 – Part 2”
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Book reviews are essential to writers. While we do our best to communicate the essence of our stories through our book descriptions, the reviews from readers tend to go deeper, revealing some of the more detailed layers of our stories to other potential readers. Just think back — do you read reviews of books you’re thinking of buying? And have you ever been swayed to buy/not buy after reading a review? Reviews are immensely important.