How to get paid for writing book reviews may initially sound like at best a bit of a challenge and at worst, a daunting process of attempting to get reviews published in such as publishing magazines or national newspapers. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth and it is perfectly possible to get paid for writing book reviews in the same way in which we can get paid for writing any other form of article.
It may well of course be the case that the writer chooses to go down the road of attempting to get their book reviews published in the more conventional mediums of magazines or newspapers. This will involve buying or borrowing a copy of such as the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook and looking through the listed publications for potential markets. They may then be required to write a letter outlining their work and request that they may submit same for consideration.
The upside of this route to getting book reviews published is that this market is likely to be the one which pays the best rate, at least in the short term. The downside is that book reviewers in such publications are very often staff writers, or commissioned or guest writers, and the likelihood of the novice successfully breaking through is extremely slim.
The best way therefore to get paid for writing book reviews is to do so on a site such as Helium, the one upon which you are reading this article. Helium has a structured payment system whereby it rewards its best and most prolific writers in terms of upfront payments for their articles and even offers a bonus payment to those writers who successfully suggest a title for a new series of articles and subsequently write the first article in the group. In the case of book reviews, there is an excellent chance that the writer will be in a position to be the first to suggest this title and perhaps therefore claim both payments.
Writing book reviews on sites such as Helium, however, does not just include one-off payments for writing the review itself. Helium and many other sites like it offer the writer ongoing royalties "ad infinitum" on their articles, depending largely upon the number of page views they accrue. This means that it is very much in the writer's own interest to promote those articles which they write around the Web, wherever they can, in order to drive through traffic to them. This can, particularly in the longer term,. represent a considerable amount of residual income.
It is therefore entirely possible to write book reviews and get paid for it without having to follow the route of attempting to break through in to what was once the only, but is now merely the conventional, market for same.