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6 Goodreads Tips & Hidden Features
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Hi everyone. I'm Rincey and I'm one of the contributing editors over at Book Riot.
I am a big fan of Goodreads. I've been a member since 2006 I want to say, maybe
2007. I was pretty early the Goodreads bandwagon mostly just because I have a
friend who is a librarian, or when Goodreads was launched she was in school
for library sciences. So she knew about the website pretty early on. She got me
to sign up mostly because I wanted to be able to stalk what she was reading. And I
basically loved it ever since. I like using it a lot as a way to catalog my
reading and a way to just see how my reading has changed over the years.
There are a lot of features available on Goodreads that I don't think people
realize, partially just because there's so many features on Goodreads that it's kind
of difficult to know about all of them. And some of them I came across mostly
from like just clicking on things and seeing what happens. Like being like oh
there's a link I've never noticed before, what would happen if i clicked on it.
So today I'm here to talk to you guys about some of the little features or tricks
for using Goodreads to help maximize your experience and to help you become
sort of like a Goodreads power user. The first one I'm going to mention is that
there is a hack to let you mark rereads. One of the biggest gripes I always hear
about is the fact that if you reread a book, there's no way to really mark it so
that it counts for your Goodreads challenge. Like if you mark it as read
and keep the original read date, then it won't count for your current Goodreads
challenge. But if you change the read date on it, it'll count for your current
challenge but it'll mess up your previous challenges. So I'm actually just
going to link to the blog post down below that explains this perfectly where I
learned about it because it is a step-by-step process and there is a way
to very easily like mess it up. So I'm going to just link to the blog post but
it basically just comes down to you marking a different edition of the book
as read. If you don't know this, on the Goodreads page when you are looking at
specific book there is sort of like a line of images.
It lists like a whole bunch of different other additions like including
international editions and things like that. And so if you are super like
specific about how your Goodreads is categorized, you can go through and make
sure that the addition that you own is the addition that you are marking as
read. I sometimes like to do that just because I'm a crazy person and I like
my covers to match and I like the page numbers to match. The second little hack
is to create a DNF shelf or Do Not Finish shelf. One of the other big gripes
that I hear about is the fact that if you are reading a book and then you
decide to DNF it at some point and you want to mark it as DNF but you don't
want it to be marked as read, people are like how do you deal with that situation.
And the way to deal with that situation is to make a DNF shelf a permanent shelf.
People generally realize that you can add shelves and people use
shelves as a way to categorize the different books. But you can also make
one of them a permanent shelf so the way Goodreads works as the default permanent
shelves that you have is Want to Read, Currently Reading, and Read. Those are the
three. But you can add as many as you want. The way you do that is when you are
on the My Books page there is a little edit button where all the shelves are
listed and then you can just check mark a new shelf to be a permanent shelf and
then when you are, you know, on the little down bar thingy to choose your
status, you can choose the DNF. So that way a book isn't marked as read but you can
still have that as a categorization if you would like. The third thing that you
can do is if you want to be a true power user of Goodreads you can become a
Goodreads library. Now I'm not really sure how they pick who becomes a
librarian. I've never actually applied. I know that the minimum requirement is
that you have to have at least like 50 books on your profile. I'm not sure if
that means like 50 read books or just 50 books listed somehow on your profile. But
you basically a lot of form. I will leave a link down below to the URL so that way if
you're interested you can fill that out. And if you become a Goodreads librarian
you can help the website become a better website by doing things like
editing editions and cover images and page numbers and descriptions. If
you are someone who reads a lot of like indie press books or you read a lot of
like early ARCs or you read a lot of like self-published authors, you can help
make the website even better than it already is
with its categorization and with its different descriptions and stuff like
that and help fix any mistakes or errors that might be falling through the cracks.
Another thing that you can do at the website that might be helpful if you are
looking for suggestions of what to read is you can actually see what books are
trending with your friends. There is a little link that size like see what
books are popular amongst your friends and it'll list the books that your friends
have been marking for the last like month or so. So that way you can see sort of
like is there this really popular book out or if you're someone who doesn't
really care about the books that are super popular or doesn't care about sort of
like the best sellers but just kind of cares about what your friends are
reading, if you want sort of like an easy way to see like what your friends are
really into it any specific moment, this is the page for you. I just think it's
kind of fun to see like sometimes there are just these weird trends. Like
sometimes these backlist books just sort of hit this bubble in my friends and it
seems like everyone is reading them and it's just kind of fun to see sort of
what books are trending and what or not and what sort of getting a backlist bump
and things like that. The fifth tip that I have for you guys is to check out the
stats available for your Goodreads. This is especially helpful if you've been
using Goodreads for a real long time like I have. But there are stats for every
year that you have been reading. If you are marking books read with a specific
date, then Goodreads categorizes all of them and there is actually a really fun
sort of graph or chart that they put together where it lists every year, you can see
the number of books that you read that year, you can also switch it so you can
see the number of pages that you've read every year, which I think is actually
really interesting to see like how my page numbers do or do not correlate to
the number of books that I read. And then if you click on it it sort of
categorizes all of your book ratings, which is always fun for me to see. It's a
nice little like visualization of your reading life which is something I always
appreciate. And the final little hidden tidbit that I have for you guys
that you might know about, but might not is that you can actually export all of
your data into a spreadsheet that you can download. I really like this feature
because it gives you literally everything you could ever want to know
about the books that you read. This is also why I'm super like picky about
making sure that the right editions of all the books that I mark is read on
Goodreads are the actual editions that I read. I always export my data and
then put it into this big spreadsheet. And if you're someone who likes to see
trends in your reading or anything like that, this is a great way to do it.
This was also really helpful for me a couple of years ago I decided that I wanted to
read more authors of color and the way I got to that point was I decided to
export all my reading from 2006 to I think it was like 2012 or 13 at the time when I
was doing this and I went through every single author on that spreadsheet and I
marked whether or not they were white or whether or not they were a person of color.
And it was that point where I realized that I was reading like less
than 10% people of color and I decided to change all that. But you could
use it to look at the stats on anything you've ever wanted to look at the stats on.
You can look at your male-to-female author ratio, you can look at your hardback
to paperback to ebooks audio book ratio, you can look at the average number
of pages that you're reading every year or every month or the number books that
you're reading every year or every month. And you know it's just a big
spreadsheet full of data that you can do whatever the heck you are with it. I am
just such a nerd that I love that they have this available just easily download
it and play around with the information however you would like.
So yeah those are just a couple of quick tips to become a Goodreads power user.
If you have any tips of your own that you would like to share, definitely leave them
down in the comments below.
I know for a fact that there are a bunch of features that I don't even pay
attention to just because there's so much happening on this website. But if
you have any sort of like special hidden features that you found out about that
you really, really enjoy, definitely leave it down in the comments below and share
it with myself and all the other viewers of this video.
So yeah that's all I have for now and thanks for watching.
