Tell Me Something Tuesday: Goodreads Shelves

Posted December 8, 2020 by Berls in Tell Me Something Tuesday / 13 Comments

Tell Me Something Tuesday

Tell Me Something Tuesday was hosted by Rainy Day Ramblings, but she has (temporarily?) stopped blogging. So a group of us that had been doing posts (Linda from Book Girl of Mur-y-Castell, Karen from For What It’s Worth, Roberta from Offbeat YA, Jen from That’s What I’m Talking About  and me) decided to get together, come up with some more topics and keep the meme going.Michelle made us a logo and we’re off and running. For more details, check out this post where I reintroduced the meme.

I can be sporadic, but when I do join in I will always share next week’s topic at the end of the post. So, today is about…

How do you organize your Goodreads Shelves?

I JUST spent months reorganizing my shelves. It’s been a big project and I’m not sure if I’m finished yet.

First I deleted every unread book. Yeah. They were that messed up.

Then I deleted just about every shelf.

Then I created new ones… after a ton of thought. My new shelves are:

Exclusive shelves:

These are your basics, with one added – paused. Books I think I want to come back to. I debated having a DNF shelf. But I’m going to leave those in the Read category with a 1 star rating.

All (1009)

Shelves for keeping track of what I own:

I decided one of my struggles has been keeping track of what I own. So if I am given a book for review or if I purchase it, it will immediately go on one of these shelves and stay there. If I’m trying to decide what to read, I can use multiple shelves to decide (thus filtering out the already read books).

*2next-in-series ‎(0) I debated about this shelf and decided it will only have the very next book in a series I want to read. When I finish a book, I will move the next book to this shelf.
*to-publish-on-blog ‎(133) this shelf isn’t what I own, but reviews (written on Goodreads) that need to be published on the blog still. I cleaned this out and only kept the books that I actually had written a review for. Yep, 133 unpublished! Geez!
1nearly-free ‎(0) This is a COYER designation. No more than $2 for eBooks and no more than $5 for Audiobooks. (my audible credits are about $12 each so only books bought with a 2 for 1 credit would count)

Shelves for keeping track of challenges:

I sort of tried my hand at this previously so there’s a couple shelves there already. But mainly this is in preparation for next year’s tracking.

Shelves for sorting the genres I read:

I debated making this books I have read vs books I want to read. I’ve decided it will be both and I can use multiple shelves if I’m looking for what I want to read. These are all the genres I use for COYER so I decided it would be an easy sorting mechanism.

As you can see, I’m still working on the next couple steps – sorting the books in my read shelf and then adding all my owned books. It’s a project, but I’m excited to be getting it done!

What about you? Do you have a good system for organizing your Goodreads Shelves?

Next week’s topic: What are your favorite posts to write?

It's Tell Me Something Tuesday and Berls wants to know how you organize your Goodreads Shelves: Share on X

About Berls

Michelle adopted me as part of her blog when I decided to close down my blog, Fantasy is More Fun. The blog was dying, but my love of reading and the blogosphere was still strong as ever - so I found my new home here at Because Reading!

I'm not just a book lover, but a one time author (that hopes to be more in the future), wife, mom to the cutest, happiest, best 5 year old and step-mom to the craziest, sweetest 24 year old on the planet. My family mean everything to me and they appear frequently in the Sunday Post with Berls. So grab a glass of wine and chat books, blogging, and family with me!

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13 responses to “Tell Me Something Tuesday: Goodreads Shelves

  1. My GR shelves are okay-ish? Ha ha. They make sense to me, but probably not other people. The most important thing I did was add a “looks-interesting” shelf after Goodreads started to make us add giveaway books to our “to-reads.” The looks-interesting shelf is actually my to-read shelf. 😄

    Maybe someday I’ll get up the gumption to do a proper job like you did. Good work. 👏👏👏✨

  2. I like that you’re focusing your shelves on how you want to track your books. I started doing this a while back and it really keeps me organized. I have shelves for each challenge I’m currently doing, I have shelves by genre, and I have shelves by read, unread yet have, dnf or later, and wish list. I keep a spreadsheet separately of purchased books so I can track my spending and I use that for COYER purposes when I need to figure out if it counts.
    It’s a big project to get the shelves the way you want them, but so worth it.

  3. I have been going back and forth on reorganizing my shelves! Whenever I decide that I’m going to get started, I log in, stare in horror, and back out! I have a general plan of what I want to do, but there’s just so many books. I did, however, go in and add shelves for Reviewed, Not Reviewed, and Nonfiction, but I want to add genres and if I own them. Possibly other sorting criteria as well. It’s just such a huge task, but it’s nice to see that it can be done! Although, no way am I brave enough to delete all of my unread books!

  4. Just last night I ‘emptied out’ some old shelves from previous challenges etc
    I have one sticky shelf, – an ‘about to read shelf ‘ to which I add the next half a dozen or so books I have to read on my review schedule, and remove once they are read and published on my blog. I have shelves for a couple of challenges and events, one to mark ARCs, one for Netgalley, one for Edelweiss, and one for print books from publishers. I have thought of creating genre shelves but i have over 7000+ books altogether and that just seems like too much work 🙂

    Shelleyrae @ Book’d Out recently posted: 2020 Nonfiction Reader Challenge: Monthly Spotlight #10