By Donald Mitchell
Most people don’t realize that books are a poor way to get an important message across. That’s because most people don’t finish many books . . . and often don’t remember much about what they read.
There is an important alternative: Write book reviews to help guide those who do read books to better books and to appreciate the more important points in those books. Let me share my experience to show what’s possible.
I write books about improving the world. That’s a problem: Books about improving the world are rarely big sellers. Self-improvement books are more popular, especially if appearance or relationships are involved. All nonfiction categories are relatively small when compared to novels, especially romance books.
I soon realized that I could use writing book reviews to share important lessons with potential readers who would never see one of my books. How could I serve these readers well?
Let me share what I learned so you can understand how you can use being an online book reviewer to spread your ideas to more readers.
If I limited my reviewing to serious nonfiction books, most people who could benefit from reading those books would never find out about those books or me as a reviewer. Why? They wouldn’t know where to start to find good books or good reviewers for serious nonfiction.
I needed to broaden my audience if I was to help people find the best nonfiction books that could improve their lives.
Could I learn to be an excellent reviewer of children’s literature, cookbooks, romance novels, and mysteries? I found the thought daunting but the potential reward for the 400 Year Project was enormous.
If I could eventually attract hundreds of millions of people to read my book reviews, I could help shape the world’s ideas about how to make progress by affecting which books were read and applied. The copying process that allows useful improvements to go into broad use could be greatly accelerated.
I took it slowly, beginning with one genre at a time. Fiction is particularly difficult to review well because readers want a sense of the story but without spoilers that will lessen their reading pleasure. You can be quite explicit about the first few pages (especially if the publisher has given something away on a jacket blurb), but you need to be broadly descriptive without saying anything specific for much of what follows.
As I wrote about the latter parts of novels, I was reminded of the code words that teachers used to describe our children during conferences. Someone who was “lively” was a cause of classroom disruptions. A child who “doesn’t participate” was asleep much of the day. I gradually learned to create my own code words that would tip off readers who were familiar with my reviews.
As a result of these constraints, many of the top reviewers who look at contemporary fiction didn’t appear to bother reading past the first 100 pages. You can always tell when that happens because they mischaracterize the book in hilarious ways that only those who finish the book will ever realize.
Unfortunately, a lot of people read books that dissatisfy them as a result of these dishonest practices. Hopefully, those reviewers will eventually earn the reputations they deserve.
As my helpful votes grew for a new genre, I would begin to learn another genre. In each case, I would insert little lessons for life into reviews that fit into the book’s context. For example, if a character in a mystery had trouble solving the murder, I might comment that if the characters had been more open-minded about who should be suspected, the story line would have been simplified. In that way, I would remind review readers to beware of the misconception stall without necessarily calling it that.
Nonfiction was, of course, a simpler challenge. In most cases, reviewers don’t bother to give you a complete sense of what’s in the book and the style of presentation. If you take the time to make those two explanations before offering your opinions about who should read the book and why, you have done a major service to people who cannot browse through the book before purchasing it.
That’s a major problem these days: More and more books are published and a smaller and smaller percentage of them are stocked in book stores. A majority of any year’s best new books won’t be in your local book store.
Online booksellers have helped by making it easier for publishers to put in excerpts you can preview, but those excerpts aren’t nearly as useful as a brief summary in a helpful review.
With enough people being guided to the books that are most helpful to the 400 Year Project, I expect that ideas for and implementation of the project will be greatly advanced. As time passes, the audience for my reviews will probably grow to tens of millions. When I am joined by other book reviewers who favor the 400 Year Project (as is occurring now), the potential influence on bringing support to the project grows exponentially.
Are you ready to start reviewing?
Donald Mitchell leads the 400 Year Project and is an author of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Read about creating breakthroughs through and receive tips by e-mail through registering for free at
http://www.fastforward400.com
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