3 Reasons Book Reviews are Critical for Writers
By: Rachel Tindall
Tags: Books, Writing Life, Writers On Writing, Books And Authors, Book Review

3 Reasons Book Reviews are Critical for Writers

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I’ve been reading so much lately, and then I had an interesting conversation on social media.

What do you know about book reviews? Do you use them to decide whether to buy a book or skip it?

I was shocked at how many people on Twitter really do utilize the reviews to determine whether or not to read and book — especially writers. I guess the reason it surprised me was that, as a reader, I don’t use reviews at all. And if I do happen to see one, it doesn’t change whether or not I will actually read the book.

Although I don’t use them to help me decide what to read, I need them for my own writing! And I do so enjoy giving a good review on an excellent book.

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What is a Book Review?

As you might expect, a book review is a piece of writing about a specific book that generally gives overarching details about the book. As a genre, book reviews also tend to give overall opinion on the contents and quality of writing.

Many of us probably remember doing a book report in elementary school to learn summarizing skills and prove that we had, in fact, read the book.

But in the writing world, there can be a lot more to book reviews than a simple summary. In major publications that are known for reviews, such as the American Book Review, Kirkus Reviews, and The New York Review of Books, there is also typically analysis of the plot and evaluation of the writer themselves. They can be pretty formal pieces of writing!

There are, of course, plenty of places to review books that are more informal, like Amazon and Goodreads. On these sites, readers can leave their own review of any book they might have read. These kinds of informal reviews are a bit different than what you might find in Kirkus because people who review books for bigger publications are often exclusively writers who’ve sent in samples and their work is quality checked before it hits the web.

That’s not to say that Amazon & Goodreads reviews are less valid. In fact, in terms of what readers actually look at regularly, Goodreads is probably one of the most common sources of reviews because it’s so accessible and so many people use it. It’s a pretty great resource to have if you love to love to read!

Many strong book reviews pull out important or moving quotes from the book as a sample of what you can expect when you read it for yourself.

Why talk about the differences? Not all reviews are equally helpful. If you’re looking at a longer, more established review, it’s likely to have more information than a few sentences on Amazon. Not only that, but many strong book reviews pull out important or moving quotes from the book as a sample of what you can expect when you read it for yourself.

There’s also the matter of bad reviews to consider.

Using Amazon as an example, readers can rate the book between 1–5 stars, give the review a title, and then type out their thoughts on the book. While some people thoughtfully type out an honest response (good or bad), there are many instances of a 1 star review where someone doesn’t like the main character, or something of that nature that really doesn’t reflect on the book itself.

Of course some of these 1 star ratings also mention poor writing quality, but that’s almost an afterthought of disliking the content. To be fair, I’ve read many books I didn’t “like,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re “bad” or badly written.

Despite what I might do or feel, though, people do use reviews… a lot. And they take the time to leave them, which is great for writers!

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3 Major Book Review Benefits

As a writer, there are some great benefits of having people write reviews and actually taking the time to read them. 3 major immediate perks are:

Feedback Generate Interest & Start Conversation Social Proof

Feedback

I talk a lot about writing feedback, but it’s such an important part of writing! When we write, we need feedback to improve and make our writing even stronger. This includes both the good and bad responses.

Although it can sting when someone gives you feedback that seems more critical than constructive (like a bad book review), it’s important for us to realize that we’re not perfect and we can always improve.

Having book reviews about our writing gives us different kinds of feedback that we may not get from our friends and editor(s) who are closer to the writing process than the average reader. Book reviews can make us smile with praise and swear at criticism, but ultimately it’s good to know that people are actually reading the words we worked so hard on, right?

Generate Interest & Start Conversation

Although all 3 benefits are important, this is one that often seems to get overlooked. When people are taking the time to review your book online somewhere, that means they care enough to spend time taking that action. Whether or not all of the reviews are good, when you have more book reviews it tends to more easily grow interest in your book and get people talking about it.

You want people to be intrigued, and you want them to be talking because if they’re talking that means they’re more likely to buy and read!

On the occasion I do read a book review, it’s especially intriguing to me if there’s a split of good and bad reviews because that means people are torn. It also means, though, that all of them read it (at least enough to have a conversation about it). Informal book reviews on Amazon and Goodreads are great for this.

Social Proof

This might be a newer (and kind of odd) concept, but social proof is the idea that people in your audience have interacted with your material in some way and trust you enough to validate your ideas to others.

For example, someone reads your book and takes the time to give it a review. Someone else then reads the review and decides to read your book based on what they saw in the review. They, too, leave a review.

The more social proof you can gather, the better your trust factor will be with your audience.

Essentially, when you have a ton of good reviews, people are more likely to read your book and be talking about it in conversations. This is a fantastic benefit for writers! You want people to be reading and talking about your book!

Book reviews are an interesting topic because it doesn’t seem to be a mainstream discussion, even though tons of people like reading and relying on them. Whether you use them as a reader or not, they will be helpful to you as a writer because it offers the chance to get feedback, gain interest in your work, start conversations, and ultimately offer social proof that will give more people the go ahead to buy your book and read it faster than if no one is talking about it.