Want to create a book review website or a book blog where you can write a review of the books you’ve read? Planning to create a book club where readers can rate the books they’ve read recently? In this article, we will see in detail, the features of the book review website and how to create them with WordPress.
Best Book Review Sites
If we are going to create a book review website, we should look at other book review sites and know what features we want on our own site. Let’s see some of the most popular book review websites.
Goodreads
It is a very popular book review website that allows its users to rate and review the books they’ve read. It has a 5-star rating system and it has a good book community. Myself, I’m a member of Goodreads for several years. Bookworms dig this site!
This site is loaded with features but you can choose which of these features you would want in your book review site.
Amazon
Amazon is not just a good place to buy books but a great place to review books as well. Especially Amazon’s Kindle reader has been a very useful tool with book lovers. Whether you buy the book on Amazon or not, if you have an Amazon account you can rate and review the books. The reviews here are quite useful especially if you are ordering them.
Fantasy Book Review
It’s another good website for book reviews. But it is different from Goodreads and Amazon. Here there an Author who reads the book and writes a detailed review with ratings. This rating is displayed on the book listings.
Users can also write a review and give ratings that will be moderated by the website owner. It has Top 100 books for every genre based on the author’s ratings.
Features of a Book Review Site
Let’s see the important features of a book review website
Book Ratings – all the members of the review website, can give their ratings and reviews of the books listed on the site. These reviews could undergo moderation to prevent vandalism.
Genres – books are categorically listed based on their genres and sub-genres such as Fiction, Non-fiction, Epic, Sci-Fi, Romance, etc.,
Top 100 lists – the best-rated books on each genre or best-rated books on the entire site would be listed in Top 100, Top 50, Top 10 kinds of lists. Here the books could be ranked based on User ratings or Author ratings, sometimes could be both.
Full Review Post – if it’s a site where an Author (could be the site owner) write the reviews for the books, he can write a detailed review post with ratings give based on multiple criteria like ratings for the storyline, language, value of money, etc.,
Book Review Community – some book review sites like Goodreads have a good book community (like a book club) where you can make friends and know what they are reading, suggest books for friends and more.
Book Recommendations – book review sites also show book recommendations, based on the users liked genres and their friends newly read books could be used to suggest new books for them to read.
How Book Review Sites Earn Money?
Wondering how book review sites make money? There are several ways by which they earn. You can use any of their monetizing methods for your book review site, if not all of them.
1) Affiliate commissions – many ecommerce book shops like Amazon, AbeBooks, etc.have an affiliate program that you can join. If a user reads your book review and buys them through your referral link you get a commission.
2) Get brand deals – you can become a book influencer and get specialized deals from a famous book Publisher and get brand deals. There could be special discounts for users who buy books through your site.
3) Get paid to write book reviews – book publishers would pay you to read and review their book on your site.
4) Featured lists and Ads – you can earn money for promoting books in your Top 100 lists, book recommendations. Also, a book published would pay for Ads on your site
Earn Money by Writing Book Reviews
Wondering how to write a book review and earn money? You can create a book review website and use all of these monetizing methods on your site and earn good profits.
How to create a book review website
To create a book review website with WordPress follow the steps mentioned below.
First, you need a basic WordPress website, follow the instructions in this article to create a WordPress website. After creating a website you can install the following plugins to convert your website into a book review site.
StarCat Review Plugin
StarCat review plugin is an advanced WordPress review plugin that converts your website into a review site.
It allows the author to write a book review posts and the User to rate and review the books they’ve read. It also allows for creating a comparison table to compare different books.
You can also organize the book reviews categorically based on their genres and sub-genres. It can also show the Top 10, Top 100 list of all the books reviewed on your site.
It helps you to implement all the monetizing methods into your book review site. You can add Features books and Ads into your site. You can also provide referral links to ecommerce sites where they buy the books and you earn a commission.
BuddyPress
BuddyPress is a social community WordPress plugin which allows you to create a book community, where people can make friends in the community and share the views on the books they’ve read.
More Functionality
WordPress is an extremely flexible platform through which you can add almost any functionality you want. There are hundreds of plugins and themes in WordPress which helps you to extend your site’s features.
For example, if you want to sell books on your review site, you can create an online shop with WooCommerce plugins that could handle all the sales and other shop functionalities.
So what are you waiting for? Create your book review site now!
Wondering how to write a book review? Subscribe to our blog. We will cover this in the upcoming days. Also if you have any questions, ask in the comments section.
I appreciate you making this public. I share your viewpoint, and I hope that more others will do so as well.