Authors and publishers, in my opinion, spend way too much time sucking up to literary critics, which is why I decided to become a book reviewer.

Of course, no critic actually deserves the respect he gets (myself included), not for his opinion in any case. And I dare say, publishers wouldn’t give critics the time of day, were it not for the fact that bad reviews can severely hurt sales of a good book, and that good reviews can severely boost sales of a mediocre one. That’s why it’s more important to pander to the tastes and whims of the critics, than to publish books that would actually please ordinary readers.

Authors are not much better, because most authors believe, on some level, that literary critics actually know what they’re talking about. So when a critic doesn’t like the book she wrote, she believes that there’s something wrong with her, because the critic said so. Fortunately, there’s a simple antidote to this line of thinking: the 5 rules of book reviews, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Here what it is: Write a simple, one-paragraph review–good or bad–of one of their books, and post it on a free site. I’ll show you how to write such a review easily and quickly. This kind of review is great for posting on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, GoodReads, Google Books, and other similar sites. You can even turn it into a quick blog post, with a little bit of enhancement. The review does not need to go into detail as to what the book is about, because that information is already on the pages where you’ll be posting your review.

Here’s how to write one: