To get started as an oral book reviewer, let a local church group or club know that you're available for free. Who could resist such an offer? After a few presentations, you'll begin to develop a reputation, and you can start charging for your services. Almost every organization has a certain number of programs to fill during the year, and most program chairpersons need all the ideas they can get. If you've done a good job, word-of-mouth advertising is likely to get you plenty of work.
Publicity In the beginning, when publicity is your only remuneration, make sure that you get some. Ask the publicity chairperson for the organization to send a press release announcing your review to the local paper. After you've done a few successful reviews, the paper will probably want to do a larger story. Be sure to get several copies of all your press clippings to keep for further advertising. You can use quotes from a news story in a letter to other organizations offering your services. Or you can put several clippings together to make up a flyer or an ad.
When you've accumulated a respectable number of laudatory press clippings, you'll want to send them to book publishers, who provide review copies of their latest books to established reviewers.
It also pays to get acquainted with the owners of local book stores. Let them know you're available to do book reviews. They may also be willing to give you copies of new books.
Don't neglect networking as a means of finding places to give your reviews. Ask your family and friends about giving a book review program for their organizations. Once you get started, you'll find it's relatively easy to publicize yourself. If your programs are entertaining, it won't be long before the publicity will take care of itself, and your career as a book reviewer will be launched. The beauty of book reviewing is you can do it anywhere. If you live in a small town, you'll probably have little competition. Of course, you can start travelling farther afield as your reputation grows.
When you start out as a book reviewer, whether you write your reviews or give programs, you probably won't earn very much. Newspapers, particularly small ones, often pay beginners only by giving them copies of books they review, but they nearly always give a byline, which looks nice on your clips when you look for future work. More experienced newspaper or magazine book reviewers, or those who work for larger publications, earn from $25 to $300 and up per review, and of course, they get the book to keep as well. Since hard-bound books are expensive, this is a nice additional payment, and you can accumulate quite a sizeable library after a while.
As an oral reviewer, you may elect to work for nothing in the beginning, but once you've earned your stripes, you can charge gradually increasing fees as your reputation grows. What you'll be able to charge will depend on the community and the area of the country, the groups you're working for, and your prominence as a speaker. Nonprofit groups generally can't afford to pay as much as for-profit corporations. If you have a Speaker's Bureau in your community, you might ask what others are charging for their programs.
If you travel to another city at the invitation of a group, you would ordinarily expect them to pay your travel expenses as well as your fee, but this should be clarified at the outset. Many rather prestigious groups have no budget for travel reimbursement, so don't assume that because the group is well- Depending on whether you work freelance or are employed by a newspaper or magazine, you may or may not be able to pick and choose the types of books that you review. If you review one book a week for a local weekly newspaper, for example, you might be able to call your review column "What's New on the Mystery Shelf" or something like that. Or if you do freelance reviewing for a larger paper, you might specify that you're only interested in reviewing a certain type of fiction or nonfiction.
You might be an expert on cooking or coin collecting or some other hobby. In that case, you could review books in your specialty. You can assume that if you have talent, you'll be in demand.
You could be hired by a newspaper or magazine to write book reviews, or you could do this work freelance. As an oral book reviewer, your work would be entirely freelance, and you'd really be in business for yourself. That's why we say that book reviewing is the most entrepreneurial form of reading for pay. All the other reading-for-pay jobs we've described require that you do the work for an employer, whether as an employee or as a freelancer. If you do oral book reviews, you develop a program of book reviews, and then you sell your services to clubs and other organizations. You can do it anywhere, and how much or how little you work is up to you.
Are You Qualified?
While oral and written book reviewing have much in common, there are also many areas in which they are different. Neither profession requires any specific type of formal education. Both imply a real love of reading and knowledge of books. For both, you need the ability to express yourself well, and you need confidence in your opinions about literature. You also need to be able to summarize a story well, although there's more to book reviewing than summarizing the plot of a book. Oral presentations require public speaking ability. If you enjoy presiding over meetings, or perhaps acting, oral book reviewing might be just your cup of tea.
