HOW TO WRITE A BOOK REVIEW IN 5 SIMPLE STEPS – FICTION | 2021

I remember starting this blog back in 2019 and wanting to share my love for reading with people. My goal was to bring book reviews, book recommendations, and other bookish content to my audience and connect with them through our shared passion for books. I started reading more and more each month and with each book I finished, I started writing book reviews for them detailing my thoughts and impressions of the books I read. This was a great way to write down my ideas and feelings and helped me in keeping a structured record for all the books I read. Right now I am looking at a total of 150+ book reviews. It is exciting to see the number of books I read and all the great books I got to explore during this journey.

Having said that, I wanted to share with you my method of writing reviews. I follow the 5 step strategy to write down my thoughts. Over the years I have tried a few things when it comes to writing reviews and this is the one I gravitate to the most. So I thought I would share it with you guys and help any of the new bloggers or book reviewers who are starting this journey. Let’s get into the 5 step process of writing killer reviews for fiction.

1. INTRODUCTION

You can start your book review by doing a quick intro to the book. I usually do this by including a picture of the book followed by linking it to the Goodreads page or the book’s webpage so that the readers can check the book out for themselves. Once that is set you should give a few basic details to get the readers familiar with it. You can add the book’s name, author’s name, genre, star rating (we will talk about this in the final step), and the date of publishing, etc. This will be helpful to know as the reader can form a basic impression of the book from the data that is provided.

This is all you need to do in the first step. You can follow any format you like for this section. If you would like to see how I do it in a review – (CLICK HERE)

2. SYNOPSIS

The second step as the name suggests is to write a synopsis or a summary preferably spoiler-free. Make sure to keep it simple and concise by giving the readers a brief idea about the story. This is key to hook your readers into the review and develop an interest in the book at the same time.

3. PROS

This section is my favorite of all the steps. I love that this section allows you to highlight the pros and all the positives you found within the book. When discussing the pros, you can go into as much detail as you want or as little as you like. The platform is yours to gush over the things that captivated you. You can go into detail on different aspects of the book like – character, plot, pacing, writing style, themes, emotional connection, etc.

In this step, I like to go into the details of each of the different aspects of the book, individually, and talk about everything that stood out to me.

You can also include quotes & giphy images to convey your thoughts better. I find this to be very helpful and it makes the content stand out and be more interactive.

4. CONS

This step is all about what you didn’t like about the story and the cons you found in it. You could talk about the negatives if there are any and how you would have preferred them in the story to improve it. The important thing to remember is to critique fairly and positively rather than bashing the book/author. The key is to focus on constructive criticism.

5. SUMMARY

Summarize your thoughts and talk about the important points you want the readers to remember – with a greater focus on the best parts of the book, who it’s meant for, etc. You can include a similar book or even compare other books to give your readers a better idea about it. This is the step where you can recommend it and round up your review with the star rating you give the book. This can be either based on a 5 stars or a 10 stars rating scale. The rating scale can vary from person to person and you can customize it to your tastes.

All the steps to writing a killer review are done. With these steps, you can write a book review (fiction) very easily and effortlessly. I hope you benefit from this post and let me know if your steps are different from these and what they are, in the comment section down below.