Website Niche. The first decision you must make when starting your book review site is to choose the direction/genre of the books you will be reviewing. You can write reviews of all the books in a row, but it’s not a viable option because there’s already LoveReading, Goodreads, Reedsy Discovery, LibraryThing, Amazon reviews, and many other sites with reviews of all the books in a row. And if you choose that direction, you’ll have to compete with them, which requires a serious budget to launch a big marketing campaign.
It’s much better (and more economical) to choose one category to offer readers a deeper dive into the genre and a personalized site design. That way you can stand out from the competition and gain leadership in one niche. After that, you can think about gradually expanding into other niches as well. That’s what Amazon, Facebook, and Google did, by the way.
What niche to choose? Choose a genre based on the fact that you should enjoy reading a lot of these books, and it is advisable that you have a large enough base of readers (fans of the chosen genre) and as few competitors as possible.
Type of book reviews. Next, you need to decide what your reviews will look like. These will be short notes or longreads, texts will be written by professional critics or amateurs, it will be reviews as a text or as audio podcasts. The latter option, by the way, is now gaining popularity, because people have the opportunity to listen to audiobooks anywhere and anytime. Thus, according to Deloitte, 70% of Americans who own Bluetooth speakers listen to audiobooks or podcasts weekly. Among smartphone users and car drivers, the number of audiobook listeners is also on the rise.
Who writes reviews. Next you need to decide who will write book reviews on your site. It can be only professional critics, only ordinary users or a mixed version. All options have a chance of success (judging from the rest of the industry), but each has its own nuances. For example, creating a site with reviews from professional critics is quite easy, but expensive, because their texts are not cheap. Whereas user reviews cost nothing, but you will need to somehow attract them to your site and get them to write.