A Review of My Side Hustle (Part 1 of 3)

I have been doing my side hustle for a little over a month now, and naturally, I have some thoughts.

Let me start by saying, I am overall happy with the process. I have gotten to read some really interesting books that I would not have noticed otherwise. There has also been one book that I could not finish. It just bugged me too much. But that is not the fault of Online Book Review. (And while it seems from the reviews that many people agreed with my issues, many others did not and enjoyed the book tremendously.)

Now that I have said something positive (and honestly, my overall experience IS positive), as my writing teacher taught us we should always do in critique, on to the things I like a little bit less.

The site has rules for how reviews should be written, and a scoring system for reviews to make sure that the people getting access to the most important (ie highest paying) reviews are people who are active on the site, write well, and have a good following. I do not disagree with the rules or the scoring system. I understand the need for it, and for the most part, it makes sense. I do have some issues with how the scoring system in used when there are issues that are not the reviewers fault, and also how they represent a reviewer’s ability to get to the top of the score chart in order to get access to those higher paying reviews.

One of the things you can get your score docked for is saying you are going to review a book (and therefore getting a free copy of it), and then not finishing the book or writing the review. This part makes sense. The problem is in the implementation of it. I am not currently being docked points, but I do have a warning about having too high a percentage of uncompleted reviews. Part of this is because I do not have many reviews period. And, as I mentioned above, there is one book that I just could not finish. But my history says there are two books I took and did not finish. The problem is, with one of those books, I never received the free copy. I said I would review it. I went to get the free copy, and all the free copies were gone. I submitted a problem report, and the site cancelled my review. But it shows up in my history as an incomplete review.

One of the other rules they have is that you have a limited time after you choose to review a book to download the free copy and then report that you have successfully gotten it (or not gotten it, as the case above). If you do not update your status in the required time frame (which is an hour or two), you start getting reminder emails. You get dinged for every one of those reminder emails you get. Again, I do not have an issue with this in principal, or even in the case where people simply do not go in to update the status. I have an issue with the fact that the reviewer is held responsible for meeting this timeframe even when the reason they have not met the timeframe is not their fault. Earlier this week, I chose a new book to review. I clicked on the link to get the book and update my status. It took me to an error page. This means I could not even access the form I was supposed to use to report an error with receiving the book. And the error report form it took me to to report this error simply circled me back to the page that said “click her to update status” and took me to the error. I reported the issue through a couple different mechanisms, to make sure it got seen. But it took almost 24 hours for the issue to be resolved and for me to be able to update my status. In that time, I got over 10 email reminders to update my status, and my score was docked for every single one of them.

This is also done as an average per the number of reviews you have done, so for someone who has been on the site a while and done a lot of reviews, even this issue would not have a major impact. But as someone with only four reviews posted, it has a big impact on my score. But the fact that I did not update my status was not my fault, and I did report the issue. However, the issue itself prevented me from reporting it via their preferred mechanism. The five points I am currently being docked for this actually has a pretty big impact on my overall score. I do have a request in for them to review that and remove those negative points, but I feel like I should not have had to make that request. As soon as they saw the error report I submitted, someone should have gone in and removed these demerits from my account.