My website lists book, often ranking them 1-10 with a short exposition and mini review. However I'm having trouble getting the right color pallet and layout to make it look nice and visually appealing. Maybe I need to change the text, position the title differently, have smaller pictures, use a color pallet, maybe make everything smaller. I'm really unsure and open to suggestions. Here is a picture of my custom theme. http://imgur.com/a/YWJMv
Honestly, so long as what you have is in a legible font and dynamic (non-pixel) font sizes, what's there is fine -- it's BETTER than fine as the focus is on the content, not non some goofy artsy-fartsy bullshit that just sucks down bandwidth for nothing of value. If it's "visually appealing" enough for it to be noticed, it's distracting enough to get in the way of what's actually important on the page -- YOUR CONTENT. That said I'd consider perhaps slightly larger pictures of the front cover, moving the title down next to the cover image instead of over it... How does your layout concept handle when the screen is too small to have the text next to the image? What's your max-width? How do the fonts and layout handle user preferences? Do you have a retina/HDX plan in place? How's the graceful degradation plan for when CSS blocked/inapplicable? Pictures don't really tell us the whole story of what's going on there since a picture is NOT a web design -- no matter how many PSD jockeys have deluded themselves into thinking so...
I always find it easier to concentrate on a review (any text in general) when the image is on the right-hand side:
Yeah, images on the right usually feels more natural. I'd write off on that. On the implementation side I'd aslo suggest making the heading and the image links to the buy-now as a redundancy. A LOT of people expect the header to also be a link, and it puts MEANINGFUL text into the buy link since "buy now" doesn't say WHAT's being bought. When possible, you should have at least one link saying what the link is for as plaintext, and not just a single lone "buy now" -- also helps with people on screen readers and braille readers -- and as the joke goes: Search Engines don't have eyeballs!