Becoming a Book Blogger - Structuring a Rating System

Happy Thursday, everyone! Yay! We're over the hump and moving forward with my series on becoming a book blogger. Today's topic is structuring your rating system, and I'm going over your 1-5 "stars" and perhaps a total bomb idea. Stay with me! Grab those pens and notebooks and let's get going!

First, a recap of the past posts and what's coming:

• Choosing a Name and Review Policy
• Branding Yourself With Imagery
• Picking a Platform for Publishing
• Design Considerations
• Structuring Your Rating System (you're there now)
• Building an Audience - Social Media Crazy
• Writing Reviews
• Money, You Say?

Ratings are the number of stars you give a book. They can range from 1-5 on most book selling sites. But we're talking about your blog! You can give a book zero stars if you so choose.

What's important here is to decide what the ratings mean for you. If you give a book a rating of 1, does that mean it was a total stinker; or does that mean it wasn't so bad you wanted to burn it or couldn't get through it, but wasn't good enough that you itch to read it again?

Once again, we'll use my go-to, The Chicken Coop, as an example.

1 Egg means = It wasn't for me
2 Eggs mean = It had a couple of redeeming qualities, but fell flat on all others
3 Eggs mean = There was something about it I didn't like and something I did
4 Eggs mean = I enjoyed it immensely
5 Eggs mean = Author gets a parade and confetti the book was so good
Big, Fat, ROTTEN Egg means = It stinks

Of course, how you rate is up to you, and you'll find the number of stars mean different things on different sites. You'll also probably find yourself on the fence between two ratings sometimes. So, if you used the egg rating system, be sure you mention how many you gave and what that means when copying over your review.

Also, put your rating system somewhere easy to see on your blog (perhaps in the banner across the top?) so folks know right away what they're reading about when they see your eggs.

Plus, you can have cute icons like these for your ratings (note the requisite half an egg):

Be sure you're consistent when using your icons. Your brand matters!

What have you come up with? Share! I'd love to see your works in progress as we go along here.

Well, that's all for today, folks! Until next time, WRITE ON!

Jo