My Book Review Writing Process

Writing book reviews is hard!

I have stressed about review length, consistency, why I like or dislike a book, whether I should like or dislike a book, and on and on. Then I have to come up with coherent thoughts about what I read!

I’ve found a lot of great advice from other book bloggers, but, like every book reviewer, I have come up with a process that works for me. Here are a couple quick things I’ve learned that have helped me write reviews:

1. I do not have to review every book.
2. I do not have to make the length of every review the same.
3. Commenting on what is in the book is always better than writing about what I think should be in a book.
4. I don’t have to polish and post my review right away, but if I don’t get my thoughts out shortly after reading, I will forget most of the book’s details and not be able to write my review without a reread.

I wanted to share my entire review writing process from reading the book to hitting the publish button.

Peyton’s Review Writing Process

1. Reading the Book

Typically, when I’m reading through a book, I take little notes. Sometimes I don’t take any! This is because, I find that when I read a book with the intention of reviewing it, I have a hard time enjoying it. I get inside my own head and start nitpicking every choice of phrase. I could be reading an amazing book, but I’ve found the slightest flaws to make into an issue. The only way I can get around this, is just letting myself experience reading a book without taking any notes. Then I can just focus on enjoying the story.

If I’m reading on my kindle, I do use the highlight function to quickly mark parts that I want to comment on later. If I’m reading a physical copy or audiobook, I will take some notes in my Notes app, but only if something stands out that I want to write down and I’m already at a break in the book. I hate taking my attention away from a scene to take notes.

2. After Finishing

Once I finish a book, I ALWAYS do something completely unrelated after. I go for a walk, go to sleep and enjoy the next day, go out with friends. I don’t immediately write my review or start a new book. I like to give myself time to passively process the story before I sit down to write my review. This also gives me another thing to comment on: how much did the story stick with me after it was done? Did I feel like I just emerged from another world, or did I move on quickly?

3. Drafting My Review

Only after I’ve had time to be distracted and really think about how I felt about a books and its ending do I write my review. First I compile any notes I took and review any of my kindle highlights to remind myself of any details I want to comment on. Then, I open a new Word document¹ (dark mode, of course), set my font to Comic Sans, and start vomiting out thoughts.

Why Comic Sans? You might ask. Because one time I read a random Tumblr post that said Comic Sans helped with creative writing, and Tumblr is always right so I always draft my reviews in Comic Sans. Something about the font just lets me know, “you can write freely and make mistakes. It’s okay. You can edit later but get the thoughts out”. It seems to work for me, so I see no reason to change my method or my font!

4. Editing!

Once I’ve gotten all my thoughts on to the page, I go back and start editing, formatting things into paragraphs, and polishing the review. A lot of times I end up deleting things because they’re a little too spoiler-y. Once I feel like my review is good to go, I copy it into my actual post draft and begin formatting it with images, links, and all the other things you usually see on my review posts. I often catch small mistakes during this part, because changing the space and the font I’m reading the review in makes it look new.

Some of the little mistakes I catch are typos not found by spell check, book titles not in italics, and repetitive wording or sentences that get WAYYY too long. I tend to write long sentences, so just be glad I edit some of them to be shorter before I publish! If it were up to be, every post would be one long blob of words with no paragraphs and no periods. I would only add the occasional exclamation point for emphasis. Just kidding, I do like grammar. I just also seem to have long, wordy thoughts.

5. Finishing Touches

After my next round of formatting and revisions is complet, my review is almost ready to publish! I always preview my post (several times), and again I will find even more things to correct! I also like to check my links to make sure they are working (though I am sometimes lazy about this).

Now my review is ready to publish!

6. Post-Publication Revisions

Once my review is published, I just have to go back and correct that one typo I always miss but my mom always finds when she reads my post (thanks mom).

Now my review is finally complete and ready for the world!

Closing thoughts

I’ve noticed that I tend to be a person that needs a lot of time and space to fully process stories. I spend all my time reading not really taking notes, and then take a break before writing my review. I feel like I need to really sit down with a story and all it’s parts before I can sum up how I feel. Then, my actual writing process is more chaotic. I just write down whatever thought I have in no particular order, and have to patchwork my thoughts into a review after.

I think my process looks like this because I don’t really have thoughts about books. I have feelings. And feelings are a lot harder to put on paper because first you have to understand your feelings as thoughts and then put them down on paper. If you could look into my brain after reading The Bone Ships, for example, it would look like this:

!!!!!!!!!!!EEEAAAAOOJJFFJJSIJHAAAAAAAHHHHHHHAAAIIIIIIIDNSNKSNVSNSDUHSUDVAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!AIIIIHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe I should just start writing all my reviews like that. I think people would understand.

What’s your review writing process?

1. The first reason I like to initially write my reviews in Word is because the writing flow is easier than in a post draft on my site and I can use the Comic Sans font and dark mode. In Word, I can focus entirely on writing and save formatting for later. The Second reason is I like to keep a copy of my review separate from my website. Hypothetically, if something catastrophic happened to my website, I would still have a copy of (almost) everything I have written on my laptop (even if they are drafts). I have plenty of backups of my website, so I should never run into a situation where I lose everything. But also, WHAT IF!!! The third reason is if I ever run into a situation where someone questioned whether I am the author of my posts, I have all of the drafts and revisions saved. Not that I would likely care if someone decided to think I didn’t write my posts. Go find a different blog to read if you are going to question me! ↩︎