Rating Systems When Reviewing Books

For any book blog, reviewing and rating books is an extremely big part of what we do, sure we create a place where we can share out love for books, have discussions on things we like/hate within a book, find and give recommendations, and basically relate anything and everything back to books, but it is the reviews that seem to be the staple of any book blog.

So how do we review? Every reviewer varies, in general, it’s all about stating your likes and dislikes whether you would recommend and analysis characters writing and plot. The easiest way to see if someone enjoyed a book is normally there star or number rating. Sites like NetGalley, Goodreads and Amazon have star rating systems out of five. For NetGalley the recommended rating system is below:

GoodReads and Amazon are pretty similar as well, with both of them using a similar 5-star rating system. Both of these are an easy visual to see just how much everyone likes a book. With these, it’s also easy to filter out any bad books by just looking at higher rated books, but the problem with these is that they still do lack consistency, what I mean by this is that everyone does rate things differently, for some a really highly rated book may only be a 4 star book while others will chuck out 5 star ratings for any they mostly enjoyed. There is nothing wrong with rating books in either of these ways, everyone has different preferences on what they like.

For me I use stars out of five, I do use ‘half’ stars to give a little more wiggle room in really how much I like a book, in fact I actually started off with a rating system out of 10 just because I wanted to have all the options available to really get into how I felt about something. To be honest I did end up feeling that perhaps that was a little too much just because after going through and deciding if a book were say a 7 or 8 star rating out of 10, I would then sit and debate if it should be a 7.5 or 7, and after  a while it just became tedious, how far can you really go with just numbers? This does become a problem when I go to add my review and rating to other sites as I usually just round up if they don’t offer half-star ratings (which is basically all of them haha). I know some people also have their own rating system which they clarify somewhere on their blog, that’s something I’m not quite there with yet, but I’m working on it!

How do you ‘rate’ your books? Numbers star or something completely different? Let me know!