Style Guide

Some Rules of Thumb.

• Write What You Can, When You Can. You don’t have to post daily just for the sake of posting. It takes a while to read a book, after all, and there’s no way anyone could post a daily book review blog. And, of course, you may already have your own blog or site that takes up the bulk of your time, to say nothing of other employment. All that is fine — write what you can, when you can.

• But A Once-Weekly Posting Schedule Would Be Great — if you can manage it. Kind of hard to build up a readership and following otherwise.

• Review & Write About What You Know — and heck, if you’re the only one who is reading new translations of Sufi poetry, we’ll thank you for it. You’re also welcome to read outside your comfort zone, if you can bring your unique voice, education, and experience to it, but…

• Don’t Review Something Just Because You’ve Read It — please only review books you’ve enjoyed, and would like to recommend to other readers. Guilty pleasures are still pleasures, though: even if a book is awful, if you love it despite it’s flaws and can explain why then I’d say that makes the book an excellent candidate for a review.
  
  
  

Style Guide.

I won’t make anyone conform to a single writing style or official ‘book’, though if you have the AP Guide or the Chicago Manual of Style sitting on a bookshelf, it’s fine to use it. Reviews should be free of accidental typos (intentional mispellings for effect can certain be used), written in complete sentences, and using some approximation of correct grammar — but otherwise should be conversational in tone, not academic.

(For example, I criminally overuse emdashes and parenthetical asides, and pile clauses into sentences like I forget what full stops are for; I am also perhaps a bit too fond of the semicolon. You should not emulate my writing style, as it is not and should not be taken as a default style for the blog.)

If you’d like some guidance, there is the Yahoo! Style Guide, available both online for free and also sold as a thick oversized paperback [isbn 9780312569846] for $22 (or less, on sale). The online version is searchable, which makes it quite handy. I wouldn’t call the Yahoo! Style Guide the ‘official’ book for reviewers on this site, but if you default to an answer found there you won’t be wrong.

Preferred Formatting.

• The title of your review should be the title of the book you’re reviewing.

• At a minimum, always include the Title, Author, and ISBN (the minimum needed to find the book in a bookstore or online) and if all the information doesn’t appear anywhere else, it should be the very last line right before your plug.

• So long as you include author, title, and ISBN, you can cite the book however you like – My preferred method of citation is as follows: Title by Author : Publisher, City of Publication; Vintage & Edition, isbn 9780000000000 — and an actual example: The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community by Ray Oldenburg : Da Capo Press (Perseus), Cambridge, MA; 2nd edition 1999, isbn 9781569246818

• Whenever possible, use the 13-digit ISBN, as that is the newer, accepted standard; the older 10-digit numbers are still valid, and most if not all bookstores & websites still support them — and they’re fine, but will eventually be fully supplanted by ISBN-13. Best to switch now (or to start fresh and not have to switch at all)

• A book title should appear in bold when first referenced, and in italics afterward. In the body of your review, a book title can be abreviated to just one or two words, so long as your choice of abbreviation is clear and reflect the most promenent words in the title.

• An author should be referred to by their last name, without title, unless they are a doctor (Dr.) and the book cover and/or title page lists the MD or PhD. Even so, after establishing the author’s credentials once, you can fall back on the common practice of last name only. For example, best practice is to use “Shakespeare” when reviewing the plays, and not “William” or “Will” or “Mr. Shakespeare”. Similarly, having established once that someone like Sir Winston Churchill was knighted, one need not constantly use the honorific.

• The book title & publishing information should lead the article. Except if you don’t want to. An introductory paragraph is fine too, but get out of the way as quick as you can to actually identify the book that is the nominal subject of the review. If your introduction is longer than the review, your focus is wandering.

• Include a pic of the cover somewhere in the article. It doesn’t have to be first; in fact, it can work quite well as an insert in the middle of the article, or right above the links-to-buy at the very end of a review.

• Please, please, please use tags. There is a “keyword” box on the same page where you compose (or cut-and-paste) articles for the website, and I strongly encourage you to use as many and whichever tags for the review that you feel are appropriate. Best practice is to repeat the category (review, commentary, etc.) as a tag, and also a fiction/non-fiction tag, as well as the book’s genre, sub-category, main topic, ‘buzzwords’, key words in the title, or other identifiers. This is what tags are for, and it is quite nice that our CMS has this functionality. I also advocate using the author’s last name as an additional tag, as it provides a handy link to all reviews of that author’s work.

• As your editor [Editor-in-Chief and Publisher for the site] I might occasionally go in and fix small things, or move an image, or add tags, or change some bits of formatting. Editing is work, though, and I’m lazy — so you can expect a light touch. If you would like more aggressive editing, let me know and we can make arrangements. I’ll likely try to pair you up with another reviewer, rather than do it myself, but I’m here to help.
  
  
  

The Plug.

At the end of each review, after your conclusion and the rest, you get to include a plug. Just like an actress on late-night talk shows or authors showing up on The Daily Show or commentators providing ‘color’ on cable news broadcasts: for your noble work you get 5 seconds at the end to make money, advertise, or get the word out.

At a minimum, the plug should include a link to your personal/professional blog, if you have one. A quick, one sentence capsule of your author bio is the obvious way (indeed, one preferred way) to include that link.

I also highly recommend you use at least one established affiliate program and include a link for readers to buy the book. You’ll need to sign up as an affiliate in your own right, as this link should be attached to your account so you get paid if people click the link. I don’t pay for reviews, and there is no budget for the foreseeable future that would enable me to pay for reviews, so this is how you see a little remuneration for your efforts.

If you need help or a starting point, I’ve provided some links on the Reviewer Resources page; at a minimum, Amazon’s program is not only fast and easy to sign up for, they are also one of the most popular online retailers. You can be set up (and posting affiliate links) in under 48 hours.

Of course, you could use your plug for anything you like: to drive traffic to your site, to directly solicit tips via a PayPal button, to raise money for charity (my favourite charity is the CBLDF currently; I’m sure you have your own favs) or just to say ‘thanks’ to our readers.

If your review was previously posted on another website, the plug should also include a direct link to the original review (if the site still exists). If anything in this style guide could be called a requirement, it’s this: You must include a link to the original posting if you choose to re-post a previously published review. The preferred way to ‘recycle’ a review is to only excerpt a paragraph or two, and link to the full article on the original site — and then include the links where people can buy the book. (Even a recycled review merits a plug)

And The Rest.

For any issue not specifically covered in the ‘style guidelines’ (such as they are) I encourage you to use your own best judgement: If I liked your writing enough to set you up with a BookNom account, then you likely have already figured much of this out on your own and don’t need me to mess with it.

However, I’m always available via email (and often am on Twitter @ProfessorBlind) so just ask.