Suppose you’ve just finished a wonderful how-to-write book and you want to tell other writers everywhere what a fine work it is. You could offer a review to your local newspaper, but most papers around the country only print a handful of reviews each month and the editors may consider your subject too esoteric for general readers. You could also tell your writer friends about the book, but no one else may seem very interested. What other outlets can you turn to?
Fortunately, there are several Internet review sites where you are encouraged to review books and other items, no expertise necessary.
For example, go to Amazon.com and look at a book, CD, DVD, or video. In most cases you’ll see several reviews of that particular product written by fellow shoppers. There’s not much of a screening process, but most Amazon reviews are what they seem to be: the honest reactions of consumers who want to share their experiences.
How do you get your review onto Amazon? Look up the particular book, DVD, video, or CD that you want to review, then scroll down to the bottom of that page. You’ll see a sign saying something like, "I have read this book, and I want to review it." Click that link to reach the review area where you can enter up to 1,000 words in a text box. But before you start writing be sure to review Amazon’s General Review Writing Guidelines.
The review writing process is very similar at Barnes and Noble’s online bookstore (BarnesandNoble.com). Beneath each product’s description is a link titled, "Write your own review". Under step # 3, click the "Rules" link to see B&N’s review guidelines. Hint: If you violate a site’s guidelines, they will probably delete your review. It’s worth the extra 2-3 minutes to read the guidelines.
Compared to the first two sites, AllReaders.com, a book-only site, is a major time sink. Prospective reviewers must complete a seven-page form which evaluates characters, settings, plots, themes, and the structure of books. This information is then stored in a database. The advantage of AllReaders.com for the consumer is that visitors can search for books by all of the many data categories rather than merely by author or genre. For example, if you crave a book in which the main character is a circus performer who lives in South America, you can search the AllReaders.com database for exactly that combination.
Readerville.com (http://www.readerville.com/) is much less formal in its book reviews than the other sites. It’s more like an online book discussion group, but there’s no reason visitors can’t write a proper review and post it.
If you’d rather write about current movies instead of waiting for them to make it to DVD/video sales, you can register on the Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com/) and become one of their many movie reviewers.
Unfortunately, online review sites bring up a basic question that sooner or later must be faced by all writers. Should you ever write for free? This subject can evoke extreme opinions from writers. The pro viewpoint runs something like this. As the number of print markets continues to shrink, not every writer will be able to easily sell their work. Just knowing that someone else is reading your words, for whatever reason, can keep you going. Plus, there’s always the hope that work given away may attract attention and lead to paid work. On the con side the view is that time spent on freebies is time that you are not working on the paying stuff and it’s easy to produce so much free material that you have little or no time to do your real writing. Furthermore, free writing reinforces the idea that such work isn’t very valuable and hurts the entire profession.
It’s a very personal decision and one with more shades of gray than a battleship. Those that do free writing often stick to areas where they have a strong personal interest, such as religion, politics, or hobbies. I’ve written a couple of free reviews on Amazon, but only for books that I thought were very good and that didn’t already have other reviews. I’ve also written reviews for a professional game magazine for which I was only paid $5.00 plus the review copy of the game. Selling a review is often not much more profitable than giving it away.
So what does the online review writer get instead of money? An audience. Depending on the popularity of the reviewed item, a review on Amazon can easily be read by several thousand people and possibly by millions. No print magazine or newspaper has a circulation anywhere near the potential size of the Internet audience.
Is it worth it? That’s up to you.