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Get Paid to Review Books: 5 Book Review Jobs Sites That Pay Reviewers

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Writing book reviews is one of the best ways to get paid to read books online.

As a book reviewer, you’re tasked with reading and reviewing books, which in return can earn you a paycheck.

This blog post will show you five of the top-paying book review sites where you can submit your pitches and get hired for book review jobs.

To review books effectively, having a good education is important. EduBirdie can help you improve your skills and knowledge, making you better at reviewing books.

Book review jobs sites that pay reviewers

So, if you want to get paid to review books online , here is a list of five websites that you can explore to find book review jobs:

1) The US Review of Books

The US Review of Books has fair terms for reviewers, and the pay is usually between $25 and $75. To be accepted you’ll need to submit your resume, samples, and references. You’ll also be asked to do a sample review.

The site doesn’t have tough guidelines, the reviews can be half summary, half commentary. Most of the reviews requested will be around 300 words and you can expect to earn $25 for each. For longer reviews that are around $600 the pay can be as high as $75

The first review you will do will be treated as an application and you are compensated nonetheless, whether you’re hired eventually or not.

The pay might not seem much especially when you factor in the hours it will take you to read a book. However, if you are a faster reader, you can easily lock in $250-$750 doing 10 reviews a month.

Another added benefit of writing reviews for The US Review of Books is that you will be listed in its directory of reviewers that you can use as social proof and also get a backlink to your site.

The site pays via PayPal. US Review of Books encourages readers and authors alike to visit their website.

2) Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Reviews isn’t transparent with their rates but some people claim that it’s usually $50 per review.

The media company has been in existence since 1933, so it is a legitimate company. That said, the reviews from Glassdoor seem to suggest that the editors will ask you to change your review if it’s negative, thus interfering with your work ethics as a book reviewer.

The reviews are around 350 words long with 2 weeks turnaround time. If you still want to apply, simply head over to this page and contact an editor.

3) OnlineBookClub

Though a popular book review website, many people do not recommend OnlineBookClub because of its tough and demanding guidelines with extremely low pay.

While they claim to pay up to $60 per review, most reviewers earn their lowest rates, which is actually $5 per review.

Reviews are easily rejected and can affect your review score. When you join, your score will be below 35, meaning that you will be bagging home $0 per review as they only begin to pay beyond the 35-point mark.

There are no clear guidelines on improving your score apart from the fact that you will have to engage in a forum and give shoutouts on social media. The editors aren’t as responsive either.

4) Booklist Publications

Booklist Publications is a book review website whose pay is not as appealing. Booklist pays $15 per review and only upon publication. This means that even if your review is accepted, you might have to wait a while

For published reviews, you will get one line credit and you can also be listed as a reviewer on their directory page.

To get started, you will need to fill in an application form answering basic questions and if you are fit the team will get back to you.

5) Women’s Review of Books

Women’s Review of Books is a publication of Wellesley Centers for Women, a part of Wellesley College, and reportedly pays $100 per review.

The publication specifically reviews books about women or written by women.

They expect their reviewers to have journalistic, academic, or strong book review backgrounds.

So if you believe that you can develop thought-provoking reviews you can start pitching your idea to them.

They pay on a review basis. To get started, send in a review pitch proposal about the book you want to review, its publication date, and your angle to the editors. You can find contact details on this page.

You will be paid upon review publication and you also get 12 months of subscription to their monthly issues.

You can also find more writing guidelines in this document . Make sure you adhere to them when writing the reviews.

Ready to begin your book reviewer job?

Book reviewing is a lucrative yet demanding career.

However, if it’s something you love doing and have a passion for writing, then book reviewing can be another source of income for you.

If this isn’t the case, I would advise you to look for other ways to earn money online such as freelance services, info products, or affiliate marketing.

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Helping you work at home and make money online

Get Paid to Read Books: 8 At-Home Jobs for Book Lovers

By Angie Nelson

Last Updated August 4, 2023 . Disclosure: We may receive compensation if you sign up for or purchase products linked below. Details on offers may change, and you should confirm them with the company prior to taking action.

If reading is your great love in life, why not turn it into a side hustle and get paid to read books?

One of the best things about the book publishing business is that thanks to the internet, it adapts well to copy editors, designers, and even editors looking for a home job, as well as voice talent for narrating audiobooks.

And if you’re simply a book lover who gets excited about free copies of new young adult lit or interesting nonfiction, you can turn your passion for reading into pocket change by writing a book review.

So settle in, my excellent bookworms! I’ve got some great ideas that’ll let you read books and make money in a remote job .

Make extra money with book review opportunities

If you aren’t necessarily looking to pay all your bills by reading books, you may be able to find work as a paid book reviewer or at least get a free book in exchange for an online review. Here are some sites where you can provide paid book reviews or get a new book.

• Online Book Club requires your first review to be unpaid, but you’ll still get a free book to review! After your initial review, most projects offer $5 to $60. As you can see, book reviewing really isn’t a gig that compensates well for the time involved. You really need to love to read — and quickly — and consider any compensation a bonus while having fun .
• Kirkus hires freelance reviewers and expects a 350-word review within a 2-week time frame.
• Booklist accepts freelance book reviews – assigned reviews only. Freelance opportunities are limited but pay $12.50 for a blog post and $15 for a full book review.
• The US Review does pay reviews, though their website does not say how much. Reviews must include a short book summary, be turned around within 2-3 weeks, and follow a style guide.
• Bethany House specializes in Christian books and is specifically looking for reviewers who have an existing online platform like a YouTube channel, a book blog, etc. There is no mention of compensation, but you may be able to use your affiliate marketing link within your review on your own website or channel.
• Writerful will allow you to submit an honest review of any book of your choosing. You just won’t get paid as a new reviewer, so expect to put in some time on the site. Paid book reviewer opportunities are offered if you become a trusted, experienced reviewer. These paid opportunities compensate $10 to $50 per review.
• Moody Publishers is another publishing house specializing in Christian titles. They do not pay for your reviews, but you will receive free books.

If you need to earn a living from your side hustle , you’ll probably have to do more than review books. Here are some additional opportunities that pay more and will still have you reading.

Also see: How to make money as an Amazon reviewer

Become a narrator

Audiobook narration is an industry that has been picking up steam in the work-at-home world in recent years. With so many books now being consumed through Audible and similar services, even self-publishers are publishing their works on various platforms.

To become an audiobook narrator , you’ll need a great voice, the ability to perform in different voices (training as a voice actor helps), and editing skills (most narrators do their own post-production file editing). You can mark up the manuscript or printed book with tips to help you avoid problems when narrating.

Audiobook work also requires the right equipment, such as a microphone, a pop screen filter, good-quality headphones, a tablet or e-reader, and recording and editing software. Learn more about becoming an audiobook narrator here .

Copy editing and proofreading jobs

Large and small publishers — not to mention websites, magazines, and corporations — often outsource online proofreading jobs as well as copy editing jobs. If you’d like to copy edit for a traditional publishing house, it will most likely require you to have a professional copy editing certificate, which you can get by completing a copy editing course. Universities often offer these courses, and many can be completed online.

If you aren’t able to get a certificate right now, don’t worry! You can still land a professional proofreader job or copy editing position from someone else, such as a website or corporation. To apply for a copy editing or proofreading job, simply demonstrate your superior grammar and spelling skills! If you are looking at some resources, two that were helpful to me were this free workshop with the basics of getting in the proofreading business and The Copyeditor’s Handbook: A Guide for Book Publishing and Corporate Communications by Amy Einsohn. (Be sure you pick up the latest edition.)

With a little bit of luck, you can score an editing work-from-home job . These opportunities are not that common, but you’ll periodically find websites or online publications looking for assistant editors and even managing editors. A small traditional publisher may also work with remote editors. Bookjobs.com is one great place to keep an eye out for book editor openings; you can also keep a tab on Indeed, and make it a habit to regularly check the Careers page on your favorite websites.

Or you could develop your own freelance editing business , selling your services to authors seeking a professional evaluation and polish of their manuscripts. This will take some time and legwork on your part. You’ll need to build your business from the ground up: decide your rates, design your website, and gather customer testimonials. Then you’ll need to land clients!

You may want to look for editing jobs via other services while you work on your own base of operations as a freelancer. You can find a remote editing job on various low-paying job boards (such as UpWork) or via better-paying Virtual Assistant companies (like Time Etc). This work-while-you-build strategy serves two purposes: First, it brings some money in, and second, it lets you collect testimonials about your performance. Be careful when employing this tactic, however. Make sure you don’t poach customers from another service or violate the terms of your agreement with any virtual assistant platform.

If you are fluent in a second language, you may find online opportunities for translation jobs . These gigs are plentiful on sites like UpWork in addition to translation services and marketplaces such as:

Today Translations

Translators Base

Layout and design

There are a lot of emerging opportunities to work with writers who are self-publishing these books. While these folks may have a great story to share, they may not be as passionate about formatting their book or graphic design needed to create a compelling book cover.

You can learn how to do book layout and editorial or graphic design for free at sites such as The Book Designer . And many great desktop publisher computer programs, such as Adobe InDesign, Quark XPress and Microsoft Publisher, can help you with the actual book layout.

Then just hang out your shingle as a designer or formatter! You can create a website to advertise your book layout and design services, network with authors and publishers on social media, and look for designer gigs in all the usual places.

Some smaller publishing houses even hire freelance book designers, giving you the opportunity to establish a lucrative business relationship. Or you can actively seek out self-publishing authors getting their books ready for print-on-demand and ebook stores like Kindle. (The latter will likely be your primary clientele.)

Become a book publisher

This is the ultimate “get paid to read books” job.

Let’s say you’ve been building all the skills I outlined above. You’ve maximized your opportunities in the book business. You can recognize good writing. You’re a good copy editor and overall editor. You know how to make a book look beautiful on the page and on the screen. So why not start publishing books yourself? Go into business to create your own publishing company!

If you’re a writer, you could start by self-publishing your own work. Once you’re established as someone who can turn out a beautifully designed and cleanly edited product, you can start looking for other authors to publish. You’ll need some start-up capital to land your first author, but you’ll have all the skills and a golden opportunity to create a book that you believe in. And be sure both you and the author make some money, of course!

Marketing and public relations

One of the key tools in your arsenal is knowing how to market yourself, your skills, and your products. Not only is this crucial to making your own freelance editing or publishing business work, but you can also turn book marketing and public relations into its own business! With so many self-published authors new to the field every month and traditionally published authors who are struggling to come up with their own PR strategy, there are tons of opportunities to step in and help them out. You can become their freelance book marketing and publicity pro, who lines up blog tours, plan author interviews, and really gets the word out about their books with viral marketing .

Where can I find these jobs for book lovers?

• Kirkus hires book reviewers as well as several of the positions mentioned above.
• Freelance Writer’s Den offers a job board specifically for writers and editors.
• Publishers Weekly offers several freelance publishing positions, such as book reviewer and editor.

Are you a book lover who’s excited about these opportunities? I’m excited for you! There is so much remote work for you to turn your love of reading into a livelihood, and now you know how to look for it. Whether you’re reviewing books for extra cash or narrating the next best-selling audio book, I’d love to hear from you about any and all jobs you land and businesses you begin from here!

About Angie Nelson

Angie Nelson began working from home in 2007 when she figured out how to take her future into her own hands and escape the corporate cubicle farm. Angie’s goal is sharing her passion for home business, personal finance, telecommuting, and entrepreneurship, and her work has been featured on Recruiter, FlexJobs and Business News Daily..

Angie Nelson began working from home in 2007 when she figured out how to take her future into her own hands and escape the corporate cubicle farm. Angie’s goal is sharing her passion for home business, personal finance, telecommuting, and entrepreneurship, and her work has been featured on Recruiter, FlexJobs and Business News Daily.

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Let’s Say Someone Did Drop the Bomb. Then What?

In “Nuclear War” and “Countdown,” Annie Jacobsen and Sarah Scoles talk to the people whose job it is to prepare for atomic conflict.

Evidence of the first test of a full-scale thermonuclear device rises over the Marshall Islands on the morning of Nov. 1, 1952. Credit... Los Alamos National Laboratory, via Associated Press

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By Barry Gewen

Barry Gewen is a former editor at the Book Review and the author of “The Inevitability of Tragedy: Henry Kissinger and His World.” He is working on a book about nuclear proliferation.

• March 24, 2024

NUCLEAR WAR: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen

COUNTDOWN: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons, by Sarah Scoles

When it comes to nuclear catastrophe, there is a large and ever-expanding body of books and films .

Movies have an obvious visual advantage (what is more photogenic than a mushroom cloud?), but books like Annie Jacobsen’s gripping “Nuclear War: A Scenario” are essential if you want to understand the complex and disturbing details that go into a civilization-destroying decision to drop the Bomb on an enemy.

Jacobsen, the author of “The Pentagon’s Brain,” has done her homework. She has spent more than a decade interviewing dozens of experts while mastering the voluminous literature on the subject, some of it declassified only in recent years. “Nuclear war is insane,” she writes. “Every person I interviewed for this book knows this.” Yet the sword of Damocles hanging over our heads remains unsheathed.

Numbers tell the terrifying story by themselves. A one-megaton bomb dropped on the Pentagon would kill about a million people in the first two minutes, and the subsequent war would be a march toward Armageddon. She estimates that, by its end, at least two billion individuals would lose their lives.

Jacobsen calls this genocide, but then goes further, describing a mass extinction event from the postwar impact of nuclear winter and the degradation of the ozone layer. “As long as nuclear war exists as a possibility,” she says, “the survival of the human species hangs in the balance.”

Jacobsen lays out an imaginary narrative that begins with North Korea launching a missile against the United States. The “why” — Kim Jong-un is paranoid? resentful? a “mad king”? — is less important than the “how” of procedure, because nine governments possess nuclear weapons, and for many of them the decision to kill millions of people in an instant rests with one man, whether Kim, Vladimir Putin or the president of the United States. (During the Watergate crisis, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, worried that a drunken and brooding Richard Nixon might decide to launch a nuclear strike, reportedly told the Pentagon’s leaders to check with him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before following a directive from the White House.)

In Jacobsen’s telling, Washington fires interceptors to take down the missile but these fail because, as she explains, tests of America’s interceptor system have produced dismal results. “With 44 interceptor missiles in its entire inventory, the U.S. interceptor program is mostly for show.”

Now the doomsday clock begins ticking. Jacobsen proceeds minute by minute, even second by second. After the detection of the North Korean missile, the president has just six minutes to decide whether to fire America’s own missiles in a counterattack, turning much of North Korea into dust and inviting involvement by the Russians and Chinese.

One of Jacobsen’s major themes is that apocalyptic choices have to be made in a frighteningly short amount of time. In her scenario, it takes 72 minutes for the world as we know it to come to an end. (During the 1960s, the political satirist Tom Lehrer sang about World War III lasting an hour and a half — not much has changed since then.)

Jacobsen has a second theme designed to keep her readers awake at night. Traditionally, in the “fog of war,” high-level strategies are inevitably disrupted, meticulously designed plans go awry, numerous mistakes and miscalculations are made — and nuclear conflict is the foggiest of wars. There has never been a nuclear exchange, so no one really knows what would happen, and all the carefully calibrated, algorithmically determined projections of the Pentagon and its think tanks may not be worth the computer paper they are printed on.

How can one foresee the impact of widespread panic, the breakdown of public services, the collapse of the military’s command and control networks, the anarchic violence and every-man-for-himself ethos bound to follow? In Jacobsen’s plot, North Korea also launches other missiles, including a high-altitude explosive that knocks out America’s power grid in what a former senior C.I.A. official calls “electric Armageddon.”

Jacobsen says more than once that “nuclear war has no rules,” but that’s not quite true. There is one prediction we can safely make: Apart from the countless deaths, the result of a nuclear war would be total chaos for those who survived. Nikita Khrushchev, of all people, said that in the aftermath, the living would envy the dead .

Can anything be done to save us from ourselves? Jacobsen points an accusing finger at the doctrine of deterrence, which has been America’s governing policy for decades. Since the nation’s enemies know that any nuclear attack would be met with an overwhelming response, they are deterred from starting a war they know ahead of time they cannot control.

But Jacobsen notes that deterrence, which has a spotless record so far, works only until it doesn’t. Should a nuclear conflict break out, either by accident, a misunderstanding or the decision of a crazed leader, Jacobsen’s end-of-the-world scenario becomes much more plausible. There is no Plan B if deterrence fails.

So far, so good (or bad), but it is at this point that the questions begin. What is her Plan B? If she favors abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, she owes it to her readers to say so, and then explain how it could be done. How do we get from here to there?

Deterrence theory was devised following Hiroshima and Nagasaki by farseeing thinkers like Bernard Brodie , who grasped that the development of nuclear weapons had irrevocably changed the entire nature of warfare, and that the threat of aggression by a rival power had to be met defensively, and peacefully, by deterrence. There was no alternative.

Entire schools of thought have grown up around the proposition that the Cold War never turned hot because of the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons. And there is a legitimate argument to be made that the only reason we are not at war right now with Russia over its invasion of Ukraine is the existence of nuclear weapons. (See also: Taiwan.)

Among the people who appreciate the importance of deterrence are the individuals who populate “Countdown,” by Sarah Scoles, a journalist and contributing editor at Scientific American. The subjects of this rather discursive book include former hippies and competitive speedskaters, but most seem to be born physicists who at an early age aspired to be astronauts or wanted to explore what makes the universe tick.

Now they “toil in obscurity” at facilities like the Los Alamos National Laboratory. They are charged with the responsibility of securing and modernizing America’s deterrence system, and their jobs include testing the components of nuclear weapons, checking that missiles function the way they are supposed to and tracking plutonium to ensure that none of it is diverted. Some spend their time trying to pick up clues of any advances other countries are making in nuclear technology.

This is incredibly important work, costing hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps trillions, and the people who got into it seem to have done so because they wanted to do something meaningful with the scientific expertise they had acquired at school. “I honestly feel that I’m serving my country working here at the lab,” one says. In the 19th century, Baudelaire observed that the heroes of modern life were individuals who wore frock coats. Today, we might say they wear lab jackets.

Not everyone would agree. Scoles portrays scientists who often feel misunderstood and under siege by those convinced that the fastest way to end the nuclear threat is simply to abolish the weapons themselves. Tell your friends that your job is modernizing America’s missile system and count how many of them you lose. Protesters regularly demonstrate outside the labs. “Evil” is a word routinely hurled at the researchers. They are even drilled in how to argue with those who accuse them of being warmongers.

Significantly, the labs are having trouble recruiting talented young replacements because of the anti-nuke and antiwar beliefs that are common on American campuses. Who wants to work on projects that could kill millions of people when you can have the personal satisfaction of marching outside a nuclear lab as your contribution to “world peace”? Meanwhile, the population of scientists experienced in nuclear affairs is graying and shrinking, producing a “worker gap.” Scoles reports that as much as 40 percent of the current work force at the National Nuclear Security Administration will be eligible for retirement over the next few years.

Yet she also demonstrates that many, if not most, of the scientists doing nuclear work have attitudes not all that different from those of the marching students. They too believe in abolishing nuclear weapons. They just don’t think it will happen simply by holding up a sign and wishing for it. Convinced that the United States has no choice but to keep its deterrence system safe, secure and operational, they live inside a paradox difficult for outsiders to understand.

They are embodiments of an antique maxim of international relations: If you want to prevent war, you have to prepare for war. “These things can’t just be put away,” one scientist tells Scoles. In his youth, he favored abolition. Now he asks, “How do you then manage policy that makes sure that they never get used in anger again?” Another, her exasperation showing, was blunter. “You know what? Nuclear weapons exist.” One might add that they are not about to go away anytime soon.

NUCLEAR WAR : A Scenario | By Annie Jacobsen | Dutton | 373 pp. | $27

COUNTDOWN : The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons | By Sarah Scoles | Bold Type | 264 pp. | $30

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