Organizing Your Shelves on Goodreads {Discussion}

Okay, let me just come out and admit this…I’m a Goodreads whore. This is not a bad thing — I’m actually quite happy with my status and hope to slut up as many other people as I can 😉

What I mean is that I’m basically on Goodreads 24/7. It might as well be my homepage (do people still have those?). I started using it back at the beginning of 2012 and, since then, haven’t stopped. I have over 2,000 books in my shelves, and that number is growing every day! I don’t do a lot of socializing on there, and I don’t have very many friends (be my friend!), but that’s mostly because I see it as, more than anything, an organizational tool.

I have 85 shelves on Goodreads, 6 of those being exclusive shelves. This may seem like overkill to some of you, but it really helps keep me on track organization-wise. A huge chunk of those shelves (23 of them) is dedicated solely to classifying the historical fiction genre. Since I post those awesome historical fiction spotlights every once in a while on the blog, having different shelves on Goodreads for different time periods of historical fiction helps me be able to easily put those posts together.

But my favorite part of the shelves is the exclusive shelves. Every Goodreads account comes with three non-deletable exclusive shelves — To Read, Currently Reading, and Read. But you can add other exclusive shelves if you want, too. I’ve added three more — Consider Later, TBR Already Own, and Not Interested.

This helps me the most when I’m searching for new books to read/buy. I own a lot of books. So many books, in fact, that I sometimes forget if I own a certain one or not (that is so embarrassing…I hope this happens to other people, too!). But, because of my shelves, when I’m looking at the Goodreads page for a book, I can easily see if it’s on my TBR shelf, or if it’s on my wishlist, or if I’ve already decided that I’m not interested in it. At only a glance, I can get a lot of information about a book just by looking at that handy-dandy bar under the book’s picture on its Goodreads page.

I love using my non-exclusive shelves, too. I have sort of a system. Once I purchase a book, it immediately goes into the “TBR Already Own” shelf, then I choose my non-exclusive shelves — usually, either “Kindle To Read” or “Paperback/Hardback Owned.” Then, I have a few other shelves I might want to put it in, like “Young Adult To Read” or “ARC.”

But I have a rule…I don’t put a book in its particular genre shelf (or shelves) until after I’ve read it. Just because I have so many books on Goodreads in general, it’d be ridiculous to have them all sorted into genre shelves. It also helps like things with Top Ten Tuesday. If the theme that week is “Top Ten Favorite Dystopians” or whatever…I can easily go into the genre shelf and pick, without having to sift around all of the books that I haven’t even read yet. It’s just easier for me that way!

But sometimes I do want to look at the books in a certain genre that I specifically haven’t read yet, so I’ve added a few “[Genre] To Read” shelves, like the young adult one that I mentioned above.

This system just works for me! I think that the whole Goodreads shelves thing might seem overwhelming or just like too much work to some people…but I’m a Type A person who loves to organize, so it’s pretty much a Godsend for me!

How do you sort your Goodreads shelves? Have you added any of your own exclusive shelves? Do you use Goodreads as much as I do? Is there any special sort of system that has worked for you?

More on This Topic!

• Nose Graze — How Do You Organize Your Goodreads Shelves (Specifically TBR)?
• So Obsessed With — Get Organized on Goodreads
• The Book Addict’s Guide — How to Make Goodreads Work for YOU