G is for Goodreads

What is Goodreads?

Well, I’ll let them tell you, first:

Who We Are

Goodreads is the world’s largest site for readers and book recommendations. Our mission is to help readers discover books they love and get more out of reading. Goodreads launched in January 2007.

A Few Things You Can Do On Goodreads

• See what books your friends are reading.

• Track the books you're reading, have read, and want to read.

• Check out your personalized book recommendations. Our recommendation engine analyzes 20 billion data points to give suggestions tailored to your literary tastes.

• Find out if a book is a good fit for you from our community’s reviews.

So, from their POV, this is why it was set up and who it is for.

It has a large community of readers, and it really is designed for readers, not authors, as well as awards, giveaways, and an excellent system for tracking your reading, and your previous reviews.

It, of course, has pros and cons for authors, and I’ll briefly chat about my experience with it.

So, first and foremost, I’ve approached using the site much like you have to approach any subjective review platform, and that’s to remember that nothing that is written on there is PERSONAL!

And that there are many people, like in every walk of life, that are EXTREME with their views. They come across and strong and aggressive, even if it’s not their intention, for emphasis or to make their point clear. It is not a place for a lot of nuance at times.

You WILL get rough reviews - check out some of my worst if you like - and you will get some that make no sense and others that will rate you low with no review - again their prerogative, it’s a site for them, not us.

I try to reply to every single person who leaves a (good) review saying thank you. Not only is it nice to reach out and connect with a reader, I genuinely want to say thanks to anyone who has read any of my books and this allows me to do so.

I tend not to say thanks if it’s a review slaughtering me, especially when they say they will never read another one of my books, or similar, for obvious reasons. They don’t want that connection and it’s just inviting more negative dialogue - it’s already tough to read a bad review of your work, so you don’t want to amplify that or give it any more thought than it deserves.

But the really pro for me is that it can absolutely help with getting eyes on your book - obviously converting them to a reader and then a fan is on your book’s cover, blurb and story quality - and the more people leave a review, the more likely it is to get noticed by others.

As you know, it’s a long time since I did any marketing at all for any of my books, but The Nameless got a good bit of marketing in 2023 and that has helped keep it being read, even to this day, and I think the number of ratings and reviews on GR plays a small part in that.

But I have all my books listed on Goodreads, and claimed (will mention below how to do this, and you really should). Here’s an example:

You can view this page, and check out my other pages by clicking on my name on this page, here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/179956153-the-nameless

To claim your book, you will need to ask a GR librarian to add you as the author.

First, you will need an author account - this is different to a reader account, so be careful when setting one up. Then you will need to navigate to this page:

https://www.goodreads.com/topic/group_folder/120471

There are 3 pinned posts at the top that you should read to talk you through getting your book added to your author account.

They are normally really quick and really helpful in this process, and I’ve not had many issues - the only one really was that my latest book was due to be traditionally published in 2019 before I pulled the plug, but the listing from then remains, and they were inflexible about removing that, so if you look at Storm Rising’s listing, you’ll see it says a publication date of 2019 even though it was only released in January of this year.

I’ve come to just accept this, and there’s little point in battling it tbh - not sure the release date is such a significant detail anyway!

Anyway, I hope this little introduction to GR, and my experiences, have helped you understand the platform a little better.

Many authors never use it or look at it. That is a personal choice.

For me, the pros outweigh the cons and I have pretty tough skin when it comes to negative reviews and criticism of my work - probably my pessimistic Scottish personality - as Renton would say: ‘it’s shite being Scottish - we’re all wankers!’

And when you think about yourself like that, what worse thing could a stranger on the Internet say about you and your work! 😂

So don’t fear Goodreads too much - don’t take yourself or your work too seriously and you’ll be just fine on the platform and reap all the benefits.

Until next time…

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Quack, Quack!