Blogging as a Career: Book Review Blogs

There are several free blog providers - this one (blogger.com) and Wordpress.com to name just two, where you can create a blog and also monetize it (by becoming an affiliate for Amazon.com, for example, Ebay, Google Adsense and so on).

So, what type of blog can you found that can serve as one among many income streams?

Consider starting a book review blog.

A book review blog serves many purposes.Once it becomes well-established, people and book publishers will send you their books for review (they may do this on their own, or you can email their customer relations folks and ask to be put on a review list). If you have a well-established blog - meaning you have posted in it at least *twice* a week for at least three months, even large publishers may be quite happy to send you books in a certain genre.

If you create a book review blog, you must:

1. Decide on the types of books you will review. Will you do only fiction, only non-fiction, and what genres in each?

2. Give the blog an appropriate name that will be memorable.

3. Read books in your chosen genres and review them thoroughly - 500-word reviews are a minimum, really, to please book publishers.

4. Design your blog site well. Whether it's blogger.com or wordpress or whatever, you should have the capability of creating more pages - one as a contact page, one as a page that describes what your blog is about, etc.) It's on these pages that you'll give your address - a PO Box address would be best, as you want to maintain your privacy) and state that you'll review books in certain genres - and you'll do it for free! (Potential clients will post jobs on Amazon and be willing to pay for reviews - and you can bid on those if you want, but really, it isn't ethical - your readers trust you to write objectively about books.)

4a. You must decide - will you post reviews only of books you like, or will you post negative reviews should you read a book and dislike it?  If you bid on a job at Elance, will you specify that you'll give un-biased review? (A potential client may or may not appreciate this - but those who are confident in their book will.)

5. Make the commitment to review. Again, it's only if you post regularly in your blog, at least twice a week - and have done so for at least three months to six months - that authors and publishers will trust your review blog as an "authority blog" and send you review copies.

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From now on , a regular feature in this Freelance Writing Magazine blog will be my book review series, Reviews by Ranpo. (I'll explain the name in my inaugural book review post). In these reviews, I'll attempt to teach folks how to write good reviews.