Blogs and Book Reviews – Brothers Under the Skin

There are 6 Must Have Steps to writing a book review, writes Francesca of the Sway Group:

1. Introduce the subject, scope, and type of book.
2. Briefly summarize the content.
3. Include graphics (be aware of copyrights).
4. Provide your reactions to the book.
5. Provide links.
6. Be honest about your review, passing along a recommendation to your audience.

In a way, I’ve often reflected, what we do when we write business blog content offering information and opinion is comparable to a book review. “Sometimes you will need to include background to enable readers to place the book into a specific context,” says Francesca under #1 step of reviewing the book. “For example,” she says, “you might want to describe the general problem the book addresses and how it provides solutions.”

Online visitors are “test-reading” your company or practice through reading your blog posts. They want to see whether you understand their problems and can quickly and effectively help solve those.

Provide your reactions to the book, Francesca advises. “Your” is the operative word here in terms of blog content writing, I’d say. A review is more than a mere summary. Whether you’re blogging for a business, for a professional practice, or for a nonprofit organization, you’ve got to have an opinion, a slant, on the information you’re serving up for readers. In other words, blog posts, to be effective, can’t be just compilations; you can’t just “aggregate” other people’s stuff and make that be your entire blog presence.

Provide links, Francesca cautions reviewers. In your own work, I teach blog content writers, you can “curate” – gather and present – information from many sources that you believe will be relevant and helpful to your readers. How do you give credit to the sources of your information? The blogging equivalent of citations in academic writing  is links.  So even if you’re putting your own unique twist on the topic, give your readers links to websites from which you got some of your original information or news.

All 6 of the Sway Group’s steps to writing a book review are perfectly appropriate in business blog content writing.  Blogs and book reviews must be brothers under the skin!