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

Back in May I started writing book reviews as a side hustle via Online Book Club. This is a review of my experience so far.

Now that I am done complaining about the scoring system (well really, about how parts of it are implemented), what else am I noticing about Online Book Club? This is a community of book lovers, and like all communities, but especially ones that are monetized in this way, it really wants you to be involved. 20 of those 46 points I mentioned you could get without writing a single review? Those come from commenting on the forums.

In addition, most of us do not have 14 friends and family members who will create accounts on the site in order to leave comments on every single one of our reviews. And so the way you get views and comments is to be an active member of the community, viewing and commenting on other people’s posts.

Besides the general forums, there is the Volunteer Review forum where they post all of the reviews of books that were not chosen to be the official review (posted in the appropriate genre forum). This makes sense because it allows people to get practice writing the reviews and allows them to build their audience without having to be chosen for an official review. I tend to go through that forum each morning and look for new reviews that have not had a single person comment on them. I then open the review and will try to comment on it.

This means I have read a lot of book reviews lately. I have read some good ones, but also a lot of really bad ones. And because most of these reviewers are new to the site, they all have access to the same limited number of books. That means I have read 5, 10, or even 20 reviews of the same books. In fact, there are some books that I will not even read the review anymore. I will click on the review to give the person a view, but I cannot bring myself to read yet another review of whatever book it is.

I feel a little bad about this, because these new reviews could be excellent. They could point out something new and interesting about these books. But I will never know, because I just cannot read another review of X. (Maybe after taking a week-long break from certain books, I will be able to go back and read those reviews.)

But when they tell you that the average editorial score of reviews on the site is only 58%, that is not because all the editors are hard graders. No, about half the reviews are ok or better. The other half are not ok, and probably a full quarter are just awful. And those are the ones I have a hard time commenting on.

I want to comment on the review because that often leads to the author of that review at least coming over to look at my latest review and possibly commenting (driving up my score). At the same time, the reviews are often so terrible that I do not want to drive up that person’s score, because I do not think it should be very high. Or, I have to stop myself from commenting with a critique of their review.

I have managed, so far, not to write a critique of a bad review. I know from my own scorecards that the site’s editors do a really good job of making content comments as well as rules and copyediting comments. The authors of these poorly written reviews already know it was a poorly written review. They do not need me to chime in. Though sometimes I have a really hard time not saying, “I have no idea what this book was about.”

On really well written reviews, I will comment that it is a great review. On most reviews, the ones just below to just above average, I try to find one thing in the review that I can connect with and honestly respond to. Simply writing “thanks for the review” is not considered acceptable engagement on the site, and I appreciate that. But this does mean I spend a lot of time figuring out new ways to say that I appreciate good character development in a book.

And some reviews are really well written. I have added books I never would have even noticed to my “want to read” list based on reviews I have read on the site. The book I am reading for review right now is one that I read a review for earlier that really engaged me. There is a part of me that thinks maybe I should create a list of the users who are writing the really great reviews and just make sure to look for new reviews from them on a regular basis. Because I do want to reward good writing, even if they are reading books I would not choose to read myself. And it is fun to discover new books to read.

Using the site’s own rating system, I give Online Book Club 3 out of 4 stars. I have some issues, but they are not enough to make me stop reading the books, writing the reviews, or engaging with the community. And money or not, I honestly can recommend joining this site to anyone like me who likes to read and talk about books. And if you can earn some extra pocket change for doing so, why not?