I am sure feeling lost when it comes to starting new conversations is pretty common – be it online or in real life. I hope these bookish questions would be help you kick start new topics. Let me know if these bookstagram questions are helpful.
Here are some bookish “question of the day” (qotd) that you can ask your followers on social media like bookstagram or just write a blog post on. I will keep these bookstagram questions coming if they seem helpful to you. So let me know in the comments.
25. Do you read dystopia? If yes, name one dystopian fantasy that you can relate to our current world.
It is no secret that I love talking about books, writing and everything in between. Of course I talk about it on my blog and all over the social media. And in real life, to whomever would listen, including the book club meetings.
So if you are ever looking out for bookish question of the day (qotd) to talk on your bookstagram or blog, you know whom to ask. * wink wink*
Are you on Instagram/bookstagram? Do you ever get stuck looking for questions of the day (qotd) or captions to post? Would these bookstagram questions be useful? Let us chat.
You have just finished reading a book. Now what? Why not write a book review on your own blog or other sites, so that the author and the other readers might benefit from it? Here is a quick guide on how to write book reviews to help other readers decide whether they should read the book or not.
Also if you are already a book blogger, you might have heard that the book review posts do not get much engagement from other bloggers, and that might be putting you off from writing more book reviews. If it is so, this guide can help you on creating a format so that you wont have to spend too much time on writing book reviews.
How to write book reviews
So here is how you can write book reviews in a way that it will be useful for your readers and yet you can write them fast.
Again, writing them quickly doesn’t mean you can do a half baked job. Having a template ensures that you will not miss out on any important detail from your review post.
Write a short introduction to the book
You might start with all the relevant details like
Author name and link to their website
Their other books
the name of the publisher
the year of publication
ISBN or ASIN of the book
Genre of the book
Target age group
Do not forget to include the book cover and link to the purchase page.
Keep the plot short and spoiler free
Instead of copying the plot summary from the blurb or Goodreads, summarize the plot in your words. And keep it short and to the point.
Most importantly keep it spoiler free, because you are trying to get the reader pick the book (or not, depending on the review) and giving away the plot is not the right way to do it.
Credit: Giphy
Add the relevant disclosure
If you have added any affiliate links like Amazon, B&N in the post, please mention that to avoid the legal issues.
This site contains affiliate links to products. We may receive a commission for purchases made through these links.
Mention if you received the book received the copy from author or publisher for reviewing.
Any books, products, or compensation received in exchange for review or promotion will be clearly stated in individual posts. This does not affect my opinion; opinions expressed are honest and entirely my own.
Also mark as spoiler if your review has anything that might be considered spoiler to the book you are reviewing. We do not want to spoil others
Add your rating and explain your scale
After the disclosure and before starting your detailed review, add your rating for the book. It can either be a number scale (say, 3/5) or a pictorial representation showing the rating, like many other bloggers do.
Either way ensure it is visible distinctly as soon as the readers open the page. Insert a sidebar text box explaining what your rating scale means, say
5/5 – Wow, favorite book
4/5 – great, would recommend!
3/5 – good but can be better
2/5 – It was ok, wouldn’t miss it if I had not read
1/5 – it was so bad that want my time back
Also, rating a book on your blog is not absolutely important. Here is my stand on why I do not rate books on my blog.
Pen down your personal thoughts
Here comes the main part of your review – writing down your thoughts on the book.
Make the review personal and tell your readers about how did the book make you feel. Or be objective and talk only about the positives and negatives of the book. Your choice.
Credit: Giphy
Here are somethings that you can talk about in your review
Character development of the protagonists
Character development of the side characters
Main plot and the sub plots
Did you see the twists coming?
Author’s writing in terms of the style, pace etc
Representation, if any
Triggers, if any
Conclude with a strong summary of whether you recommend the book or not. You can mention the specific set of people who may enjoy the book or should avoid the book.
Other sections that you can include in your review
Pointers on what you liked or disliked in the book
Quotes from the book
Relevant GIFs and images to convey your emotions
You can mention other books that might be similar to the book you are reviewing.
Add links to Goodreads book page, if you are not adding purchase links.
I hope this guide helped you in knowing how to write book reviews. If you are looking for some inspirations, take a look at some of my newer reviews.
Do you like writing book reviews? Or do you feel it is not worth the time spend on writing the book reviews? Do you prefer emotional or analytical book reviews when it comes to deciding whether to read a book or not? Let us talk.
One of the main reason I switched over to WordPress years was the nifty follow button that shows your follower count and more importantly the ease of new posts showing up on your WP feed Reader. So imagine my surprise when I found that the self hosted WordPress sites do not have the follow button natively?
Of course there is a way to get it added, and it is not too difficult. And I did the WordPress follow button on to my sidebar here and my home page here.
1. Ensure your self hosted wordpress site/blog is Jetpacked powered. Basically check if this Jetpack plugin is installed. It usually is, but if it is not just do it.
Where do you want the button
2. Choose where on earth your site you are going to add the button. Just make sure it is a prominent place.
The most obvious choices are
sidebar header
footer
But in some cases, like this post, you can add it to your posts (see the end of the post).
So what do you think about this little ‘how to’ guide? Do you have your WordPress follow button enabled? If you want any other guide for book blogging let me know. Let us talk.
With almost 25% of the countries in the world have imposed a lock down due to the Corona virus pandemic, staying in seems the only way to go. And that might be a bit too convenient for us bookworms, right? If you were one of those introverts, you would have preferred to stay in with a cuppa.
For others staying in might be hard and can quickly become too much. But when there is literally no other safe way to get away from it, why not make the best use of the downtime?
Things to do without leaving the house
So, let us talk about the things to do inside the house during the lock down time aka “don’t leave your house if you value it” time, shall we?
3. Try one of the virtual museum tours if you are into culture and art. Museums of Amsterdam, London,South Koreaand even the Vaticanat your fingertips.
4. Learn a new language or more realistically, learn to say hello in different languages. Duolingo might interest you!
5. Can you name all the countries in the world. Learn with the World Geography games site.
6. Now you got all the time, and there is no excuse to not do those at home workouts. Keep fit!
9. Bring out those board games and play with your family or friends, whoever is around.
Clean up around the house
1. Do a fashion show and try every one of your dress. Discard or donate anything that do not fit or “spark joy”, Marie Kondo style.
2. Clean up your media folder on your phone and PC. Delete those duplicates and let your phone breathe a bit.
3. Are you one of those oldies that still has music stored on your PC or even CDs? Welcome to 2020, clean that up! I bet Media Monkey is still going strong.
4. Match all your Tupperware lids to the containers. In addition, the desi version of this is pick all the polythene covers lying around the house and collect them in a huge one.
5. Make a budget and check your finance. We need to ride out this tough times!
6. Get your taxes done early this year! Even though the governments would probably move the deadlines to pay the taxes.
7. Also ,why not catch up on the 8 hours sleep or how much ever you want to finally?
8. Throw out your old and expired make up stuff and clean the vanity table.
Bookish things to do
1. Start by making a list of the books that you wanna read during the Corona virus shut down.
2. Write reviews on Goodreads for the books that you loved. Authors need you!
3. Clean up your Goodreads virtual shelves. Remove the ones that you no longer wish to read and remove duplicates.
4. And update your wishlist. Soon this will be over and you will be treating yourself with book hauls.
5. Pick up a classic that you have been dreading to start. Read 20 or 100 pages, as you choose, everyday and finish the mighty book. War and peace, anyone?
6. It is a good time to do those Bookstagram shoots that you have been postponing for a while.
7. Do a virtual book club meeting. Maybe with some chai. Or wine!
8. Join readathons and read with others to keep your mind distracted from everything else.
9. Finally, dust your book shelf, and those on your night stand, the coffee table, and pretty much everywhere else.
Tidy up your blog
1. Ensure your posts are all on brand. Do they follow the same color scheme and format?
2. Begin by cleaning up your tags and categories on your blog.
3. Next, add Alt text tag information to all the images in your posts.
4. Add a Pinterest sized image to all your posts, or at least the most visited ones.
5. In addition, once you have done adding one Pinterest image to the important posts, add one more Pinterest sized image to them and maybe hide them inside your post. Thank me when the traffic improves!
As many of us would agree, book review posts draw the least traffic and engagement in a book blog. Despite this notoriety, many of us don’t want to stop posting reviews as many of us including me started our book blogs initially to talk about the books we read and how we feel about them.
What makes a visitor comment on a post or not is not easy to understand. While it is not possible for us to satisfy and engage with every visitor, it is possible to tailor our review posts to suit their needs. And in the process, motivate them to create engagement and increase traffic.
Make the summary more interesting
Do you still copy the blurb/summary of the book from Goodreads or Amazon?
The plot summary is something that is usually placed on the top part of the review. When the readers come across something that they can read elsewhere, they tend to skim over them and lose connection with the post.
Skip the copy paste. Write the summary in your own words and keep it as short as you can. And that reminds me of something else.
Avoid including spoilers
One of the reasons that your visitor is skipping reading reviews on blogs is to avoid spoilers. Repeat visitors usually remember these bad experiences in a blog and may avoid their review posts altogether.
Make sure that you don’t spoil the reading experience for anyone else. And if at all, you can’t avoid a spoiler or two ensure they are hidden unless they are specifically clicked open.
Make your star rating stand out
The first thing most readers look at is a score or star rating when they visit a review post. So make sure your rating stands out from all your other texts. Explain why you rated the book as you did and obviously be fair in your rating.
Anyone with a blog can write a review. What makes yours different from the thousand others? YOU. People visit your blog and your review to know what YOU think about the book. They are not at a blog to get an impersonal, critique review. (But if you think that is what you want to do, please continue to do it with style.)
Try including your life and emotions into the review posts, just like you would in any other discussion or tag post. Be the fangirl that you are (or the snarky ray of sunshine as it might be), people like that kinda genuineness.
Improve the aesthetics
It is no secret that people love seeing beautiful and colorful things. Make your reviews pleasant to look at and maybe pepper in a few relevant GIFs just to hold in their attention.
It is often a criticism that bloggers are so focused on hyping up a book they like that they shy away from talking about the negatives in a book. This is especially true when they review a book they received from an author or publisher.
In my opinion, our duty as a blogger is first to the reader – to tell them what our honest views about the book. If you also share that opinion, please do share both the positives and negatives you may find in a book.
But be gentle and professional about your critique – say what worked for you and what didn’t. Remember you can be critical of the book, not the author.
End with a question or two
Another way to motivate your readers to comment is to pose questions at the end of your review. Ask both book specific questions, for people who have read the book already, and generic questions for others so that there will be something for all the readers to mull upon and answer.
Relate to other books
At the risk of annoying some readers when you get it wrong, comparing and relate the book you review with some other book or movie may help your reader to take a decision about the book.
More importantly, now the other Bridget Jones’ fans might be interested to comment on how true your comparison is..
Read popular books
When all else fails, people search for reviews of book that they read or want to read. Thus reviewing popular and trending books may improve your chances of engagement in book review posts.
You do not have to go out of your favorite genres to do this but reading popular ones in your genre is a good idea. And getting off your comfort zone may work for you as well.
What do you think makes a reader motivated to read and comment on your review? Or what do you as a reader would want in a book review to make it useful to make a decision? How to improve engagement in book review posts? Let us talk.
As many of us did, I started my blog to talk about the books I read aka book reviews. At some point, people in my real life could only take so much of my nerdiness and were glad that I found a place (where they weren’t required to be present) to do that.
That is why, despite what the statistics say and constant murmur about how “nobody reads book reviews”, I can’t give up writing on book reviews on my blog. Yes I agree they bring fewer comments and likes, if at all, but it is something I do for myself – even if it has shifted being a rant review from the initial days to a more structured format now.
It is true that many book bloggers have reduced the frequency of posting book reviews. And a few have even stopped posting them altogether on their blogs and publish them on Goodreads instead. Well, that is never happening on Elgee Writes.
I am good at over-analyzing things and sometimes I do make sense. I have been wondering why book reviews don’t get engagement, despite the fact that just few years ago, that was all the book blogs were doing.
Why book reviews don’t get engagement, actually?
Why aren’t book reviews getting the attention they deserve? Especially considering they are one of the hardest type of posts to write on a book blog. Well, let me over-analyze that for you.
“I want review of *insert hyped book title*!”
The popularity of the book reviews is almost dependent on how popular the books you review are. But as a reader/reviewer, I can not always read books that are popular because
I may not have access to all the popular books due to geography and duh.. money.
I may not be interested in those books, bringing me to the next point.
“I don’t read historical romance!”
Every reader/blogger has a favorite genre of books. And not everyone will love to read all genres. I for one, read very few Science Fiction and fewer Fantasy books.
I am definitely losing on readers who are looking for reviews of Sci-fi/Fantasy books. For want of more readers, I don’t think I can spend time reading what I am not interested. I know that goes against everything blogging stands for, but sorry.
“Reviews are very subjective”
More often than not, book reviews in blogs talk about what WE THINK of the book, as blogs should be doing. We end up talking what WE liked in a book and what WE didn’t. We do not talk about what was good and bad in an objective manner, nor many of us aim to do that too.
Obviously, we like that kinda subjectivity and prefer to keep that way. So unless the reader shares our tastes and preferences in choosing books, they may choose to ignore our reviews and we can do nothing about it.
“Part three? I have not even read the first!!”
Trilogies are all the rage currently. And when you review a book that is part of a series, you have a fairly smaller audience because unless they have read the other books the readers may not be interested in yours at all.
Sometimes readers might hold out on reading your review until they read other parts so that they can avoid its influenced.
“Have I heard of this book?!”
If your reading tastes are anything like mine, your reviews will be books that very few people have heard of. My reading list rarely consists of popular books, though I am trying to change that and begun reading more Young Adults and romances last year.
So it goes without being said, those book reviews have fewer engagements. As a reader of “not so popular-yet” books, I have to take that chance.
“Reviews are not honest enough”
Of late there has been a shift in the review field, that bloggers are shying away or refraining from giving a negative or even a moderately critical review for any book.
Yes I understand why they decide to do that (saving their mind’s peace is one of the main reason) but still as a reader I might want to know what went wrong in the book by reading a review.
So when that doesn’t happen often they might tend to quickly dismiss reviews as mere promotion tool for the author.
“What to comment?!”
Many a times, readers are genuinely stumped, not knowing what to say. Unless your reviews stand out and make them want to talk about them, book reviews usually do not invoke much response. What could they say about your thoughts about a book they have not read yet?
I usually throw them a lifeline asking something generic at the end of my post so that it might help to comment, even without reading that particular book. But beyond that, there is nothing else I can do about it.
Can we make book reviews better?
On an average, I follow about 50+ book blogs on a regular basis and if each even posts one book review per week I read about 150 book reviews approximately each month. I am sure many bloggers do more than I do.
That makes it quite understandable that people skip commenting on book reviews, which let’s face it, are a drag compared to other posts like tags or discussions.
So it is on us as a blogger to make the reviews more engaging and interesting. I will post more on that in the coming weeks.
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Let us talk
Do you still post book reviews on your blog? Why do you think book reviews don’t get engagement at all? If you are a reader, let us know what do you expect from a review to make it more useful? Let us talk.
