101 Writing Tips from an Exhausted Reviewer

Payment

Can you imagine if reviewers got paid actual money to review?

I wouldn't even be writing this guide. I would be eating an endless supply of garlic bread in my big mansion with all twelve of my flamingos.

But, sadly, I do not get any cash from reviewing.

No mansions for me. No flamingos, either.

But at least I got garlic bread!

Asking for payment for reviews can feel super awkward, honestly. When I first became a reviewer, and my boss asked me what my payment would be, I kind of just was like...uh, friendship? I want their friendship? Because, well, I was just a teenage girl with no writing credentials whatsoever, who honestly did not excel in high school English (except for the few times I got to submit smutty short stories). How could I possibly get people to pay me, in any way, for writing reviews, when I'm just an amateur?

Years have passed, though. I definitely feel like I'm a pretty experienced reviewer for Wattpad standards, and I have no fear asking people for payment. So, for those of you on my waiting list, I'm still waiting for you to transfer $1,200 into my bank account.

Anyways, that's all I needed to say. Now that my waiting list knows they need to pay me, we can end the chapter here. See y'all later, when I get my flamingos.

Just kidding! Let's walk through payment, and let's vent about it!

Please feel free to share your stories and experiences in the comments! I love hearing all about it!

FROM THE REVIEWER'S PERSPECTIVE:

The first rule you need to know: a review is nothing like a read for read.

The next person who even suggests they are the same thing will be obliterated with my flamethrower (once I become a millionaire with all my flamingos).

Being a reviewer means reading as much of the story as they agree on with the author, and instead of just reading and making fun comments, they have to be critical. If they are a good reviewer, they will be reading carefully, taking notes along the way, and then writing up those notes so that they become a coherent 1,000+ word review.

It takes a lot more time, and a lot more thought, than a read for read.

So, do I think payment is reasonable?

Absolutely.

Because, I'm not sure about other reviewers, but a review can take up to ten whole hours for me to finish if the book is complete. Those ten hours could go into my academic assessment, or my own projects, or I could even use that time to hunt down every piece of dandruff in the world and burn them. But instead, it is me trying to support other writers.

Mind you, I do it because I love it. Seeing other authors grow makes me extremely content, and I'm in no way guilt-tripping anyone for requesting a review.

But I do acknowledge that, if I can't spend those ten hours on my own projects, it should be totally okay for this author to spend at least ten or fifteen minutes looking at my work. That way, I sort of am still supporting my own projects by asking this author to check it out, but I'm not forcefully asking for a review in exchange or anything.

So, yes, I think payment is reasonable. Obviously, when I say payment, I do not mean cash -- so many people ask me this, and I'm like... while I would love to buy another sixteen scarves for my scarf-but-also-suffocation-tool collection, keep your credit cards to yourselves.

Payment means asking your requesters to either follow you and/or check out some of your works (to a reasonable extent). It is important that you consider what you are doing for the requester before you actually ask for payment. For example, are you reading their whole book? Or just a single chapter? Because you just can't ask someone to comment seven hundred times on all ninety chapters of your book if you're only going to read one of their paragraphs and tell them their characters aren't hot enough.