Let’s Talk Bookish: Writing & Posting Book Reviews

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme that was originally created and hosted by Rukky @ Eternity Books starting in August 2019, and was then cohosted with Dani @ Literary Lion from May 2020 to March 2022. Book Nook Bits has hosted since April 2022, with Dini at Dini Panda Reads as co-host from February 2025.

It’s always interesting to dive into the ‘background’ stuff of blogs and be able to talk about these sort of things. This is a great topic, and don’t forget to check out the other posts too as I bet there’s lots of varied, valuable answers!

Let’s Talk Bookish March 14th:
Writing & Posting Book Reviews
(Laurie @ Laurie is Reading)

  Prompts: Writing book reviews is a huge part of running a book blog. Do book reviews make up a big part of your blog content? Do you prefer to write long or short reviews? How does reviewing advance copies (ARCs) and working directly with authors and publishers change your approach to writing the reviews? Do you post on platforms other than your blog (i.e. Goodreads, The Storygraph, social media) and do those reviews differ from what you share on your blog?

I don’t think they make up a big part of the content, but they make up a fair bit. And I don’t just write reviews for this particular blog, either, as I also write reviews for DHR. I do try to keep my reviews from running too long, and think a shorter review tends to work better than one that maybe waffles, but every book is different, so every review is, too. I can’t write long review for a novella, and if I’m reviewing a fairly big book, I might just find I have more to say about it.

I don’t think working with ARCs changes my approach – I firmly feel reviews are for readers, not writers, and I’ll review ARCs the same way I would with books I’ve purchased, though with an understanding the format might be different, or a slight more forgiveness towards formatting errors etc. But my view on plot, character etc is that there shouldn’t be fundamental changes to these between ARC and published copy. If I really love a book, I’ll shout about it at every opportunity. If I don’t enjoy it, I’d rather explain why than publish a fake positive review.

However, I think it’s also worth noting that as I do work with authors and some indie pubs as a freelance editor, this does have a bigger impact than working with them as a reviewer. If I’ve edited a book, I won’t review it. I just don’t think it’s valuable, though I may find other ways to talk about it where possible, but always with the information that I edited it.

I don’t post on other platforms – I used to always copy my reviews across to Goodreads, and I really should start doing that again, but truly I only post reviews here and on DHR, and copy them over to NetGalley. If I was going to cross-post, it’d be the same review, rather than me trying to think of different ways to say the same thing!

This was such a fun topic to write about! As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, and I really enjoy reading others’ responses to the topics, so feel free to drop a link to your post below, too.