Although I’ve been using Goodreads to record and review books since 2014, it wasn’t until my relatively recent participation in the bookish community that I started learning a lot of pretty cool things built into the site. If you’re a regular reader of book blogs, you’ve probably at least tried out the [self-proclaimed] “world’s largest community of book lovers”, and for purposes of brevity I won’t go into too much depth in this post — hopefully it’s still accessible!
(Also, please do feel free to skim for the features that most interest you; this post got a lot longer than I expected it to be.)
I’m not by any means an expert (though I am a Goodreads librarian!), but if you have further questions, I can try to help; I’ve also always found the Goodreads support staff especially helpful and friendly, and in my experience they return emails promptly and follow up until the problem is truly solved. (I may also eventually do a guide targeted to beginners!)
One final note: apparently Sam @ Fictionally Sam and I share a brain or thought process or something, because she actually also has a Goodreads guide going up very soon! I’ll make sure to link it here once it’s posted It is up and I have linked it, so make sure you check it out 😉
Extra Book Details
If you’ve used Goodreads for reviews and/or tracking the books you’ve read, you’re likely already familiar with the “review” and “date(s) read” boxes (and they’re pretty self-explanatory). But if you click the faint gray text underneath that says “More details…” you’ll also get these options:
Although “I would recommend to” is a freeform box (meaning it’s meant for categories, e.g. “readers who loved [other book],” rather than specific people), “Who recommended it to me” does let you tag other Goodreads users, and will even autofill users you’ve friended/followed! (More on that below.) There’s also a character-limited section for notes that only you can see; Briana @ Pages Unbound wrote a post about using private notes and “currently reading” status updates to facilitate your review-writing process! Finally, you have the option to catalogue specific information about your copy of the book, if you check the box to indicate that you own it.
None of the above are mandatory, of course, but they’re all nice to have!
Recommenders
If you’ve ever asked a bookish influencer (blogger, Bookstagrammer, BookTuber, etc.) about their favorite kind of comment to get, many will say that we especially love hearing that someone added/ordered a book based on their recommendation. Partly due to this, and partly because half the time I can’t remember where the titles on my TBR originate, earlier this year I started a recs-from-bloggers shelf to keep track and link up the review/recommendation post.
Essentially, this lets you tag a specific person who recommended the book to you. Just one, though, as far as I’ve found — if multiple people have posted about the same book, I’ll tag the most enthusiastic or the first one I read, but list all the posts in the review itself. And, in case you’re wondering, they’ll get a notification that you tagged them in your review.
This feature has led to much excitement among my blogger friends, so it has a special place in my heart 💕 (And it actually inspired this post!)
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Interacting With Others
On the topic of other Goodreads users — since the site is, after all, marketed as a social platform — there are a variety of ways you can engage with other users! (That said, I didn’t start engaging in the bookish community until fairly recently, so I know how daunting it can be.)
Goodreads Groups
Active Goodreads users have probably seen this feature before; it’s an easy way to find and communicate with users who share a specific bookish interest: reading challenges (such as PopSugar, Beat the Backlist, & Devour Your TBR), Netgalley users, Edelweiss users, buddy/book club reads, etc., etc.
If you can imagine it, there’s probably a group for it. They range from big and busy to quiet and close-knit; there’s probably also a group that you’ll fit right into if you go looking! (Though it can be a little difficult to find a good match when you’re just starting out — as always, it helps to know your own criteria and preferences before you begin.)
One-on-One
Maybe you’re looking to connect with specific people, whether they’re IRL friends or fellow bloggers, or you met in a group and hit it off. From their profile page, you can follow their updates, send a friend request (some users will have a “security” question, usually open-ended; Goodreads currently doesn’t have a setting to make them mandatory to answer, but your request is generally likely to be ignored if you ignore the question), message them (if they’ve set up permission for non-friends to do so), and even compare books on your shelves.
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Compare Books (By Shelf!)
Before I accept friend requests, I like to check whether we have any books in common. By default Goodreads will display matches for “All” shelves, meaning that it will display titles you’ve both shelved regardless of which shelf/shelves they’re actually on (e.g., a book that is on your “wishlist” shelf and their “Currently Reading” shelf will be displayed in the list). Personally, I prefer to set the filter for books that we have both shelved as “read,“ as outlined in the red box below:
You can also compare shelves that aren’t common (i.e., have different names) between your accounts — for example, your TBR and their read shelf, or each of your available-to-buddy-read shelves, or anything else your heart desires. The possibilities are limited only by the shelves each of you actually has.
(There is also a book compatibility test, as indicated in the top right corner, but I really don’t understand the formulas/algorithms and have found that comparing titles and reading some of their reviews gives a better idea of how similar your reading tastes are.)
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Setting Up Shelves
Goodreads shelves are a great tool for organizing all the books you’re adding. You start out with three basic shelves — Want to Read, Currently Reading, and Read — but you can add lots more, and even customize them!
(In case you’re wondering…
- My featured shelf is my Favorites shelf.
- Shelf sorting is enabled only for my TBR and Favorites shelves so that I can manually change their order.
- I set ARCs, buddy/book club reads, next-in-series, etc. as sticky shelves to more easily select them when adding books.
- My exclusive shelves are Read, Currently Reading, TBR, DNF, DNF to Revisit, Maybe Read, Say No To This, and Year in Review.)
Creating & Editing Shelves
Lauren @ Northern Plunder has written a really helpful post on how to add shelves, edit shelves, pick the shelves you want recommendations for, and make shelves exclusive/featured/sticky, as well as everyday-language explanations of each type. If you’ve ever wondered how to make a shelf for the books you didn’t finish, or a wishlist for gift ideas, or if you want some ideas for shelves to include, go check it out!
Shelf Display/Sort Settings
You can also change the default sort and display settings for each shelf, depending on what you’d like to see! Personally I keep the cover, title, and author, but I have different priorities for each shelf.
Every book on my Favorites shelf has a 5-star rating, for example, so I unchecked that column — leaving more space to see my review! I also sort by position, or order, meaning the top 10 on this list are my actual top 10 favorite books. (Beyond 20-25 or so, though, the order becomes somewhat arbitrary.) On other shelves, I might sort by Date Added or Date Read; for reading challenge shelves, I also have it display Notes — where I record which prompt each book fulfills.
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Year in Review
Whether or not you’ve had time to write your own reviews, here’s a chance to review your entire [Year] reading and post it under this title so that others can see what your reading year was like. Together, all the reviews of [Year] on Goodreads should make an interesting and varied catalogue of books to inspire other readers in [Next Year].
For those who want to create an overview of their year of reading — whether that means writing it up at the end of the year/start of the next or updating as the year goes on — the Goodreads Year in Review series offers a place to do just that.
Anything goes, really. I based my format off other “reviews” that I saw, including some statistics from Goodreads’ “Your Year in Books” report, a summary of my reading challenge goals and how I did, the 5-star reads of the year, and a blurb about how my reading went overall. The best part of this feature is that you can do whatever you want, whether that’s ignoring its existence or copy+pasting/linking all your reviews from that year.
Thank you for sticking around to the end! Did you learn something new? Have any tips/reference posts to add? Or you can share your own Goodreads preferences with me; I’m always curious about how everyone else uses the site!
Nine Tale Vixen 
You live and you learn! Thank you for your lovely post. I have been wondering about how to add ‘Recommended by’ tag to my review.
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glad to be able to help!
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This is an awesome post. I never knew about the extra information you can add while reviewing. I will definitely be doing this from now on 🙂
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yup, there’s some really cool stuff built into Goodreads! glad you found the post helpful.
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Ah! I didn’t knew about the « recommend by » options and the compare shelf! Pretty interresting, thank you! I need to try that now, eheh
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yup, they’re pretty fun to play around with 😉
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I AM DYING THAT MY KINK TWEET INSPIRED THIS POST! Thank you so much and my notifications on twitter today make a lot more sense now ahahaah.
I literally just learned about the year in review book like last month. Not sure I want to use it but it is so cool! Great post love.
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lol #sorrynotsorry for blowing up your twitter notifs 😘 it was a beautiful tweet and the world deserved to see it, tbh.
I also discovered the year in review, so I had to go back and fill out the older ones in retrospect – but I had a lot of fun with it!
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*discovered it recently, haha
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YAS TO ALL THIS LEARNING! Literally the Recommending feature is a life saver for my reviews and wrap ups as I can finally pay homage to the actual person who rec’d the book to me instead of saying “a friend of mine yelled at me to read this” A time indeed has been had.
Also a huge fan of the Year in Review feature, cause I’m a slut for data. a mood.
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yes it’s so much fun! i’m going to be spamming everyone’s GR notifs when I get around to tagging all the books I’ve shelved but not yet sorted through 😈
and yes to data. give me ALL the data, please and thank you.
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All good tips! I’d also like to mention there’s a “remove duplicates” tool – things sometimes get borked and you end up with two editions of the same book, this helps find them and fix the issue.
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omg yes I use “remove duplicates” all the time, I don’t know how it slipped my mind! 😅
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I didn’t know that we could tag people and they’d get notifications :00 maybe i should start doing that 🙂
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it’s a pretty cool feature! people generally love to know that you picked up a book from their recommendation 😉
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This is a really helpful post, because I didn’t know about the extra details section haha. I always forget about the Goodreads groups LOL.
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I’m glad it was informative 😊
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Awesome post! Thank you for sharing it. I am still trying to learn how to add GIF in my reviews so maybe I will learn from your upcoming Goodreads guide post.
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adding GIFs is actually pretty straightforward HTML! you just use where [GIF_URL] is the web link to your gif, height and width are optional and customizable 😊 (and if you want to make sure it works before you share the review, you can click “Preview” which is under the Save button!)
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Alright, I will try it out and see if it works. Thank you😊
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Ohh I love the idea of the recs from bloggers shelf! I definitely need to do that.
And buddy reading shelf.
And yes, it is quite intimidating to start socialising on GR 😅🙈
I always feel like I’m intruding on a conversation between friends and everybody is just too polite to tell me
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I can definitely relate to that! but for the most part I’ve found that people are happy to talk about the books they loved/hated 😉
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I haven’t actually read ink and bone…..should probs fix that….oooopsies I didn’t know about the extra details though, or being able to tag someone so that’s useful to know. Honestly I used Goodreads a lot more when I first got it, I was more involved with the community on there than I am now. shrugs Love this post Izzy, so informative 🙂
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LOL I probably also have some books marked as read by accident 😅 glad you found this post helpful, Clo! 💕
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Wow, here I thought I knew everything about GoodReads. Obviously I don’t know it all! My favorite feature is the Duplicate feature because I hate over duplicate books in my shelves.
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yes “remove duplicates” is a super helpful feature! I don’t know how I forgot to mention it … maybe if I do a part two 😉
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Amazing informative post isabelle❤. Tbh I didn’t know most of them , so i saved it and begin to use them soon
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glad you found it helpful! 💕
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This was really fun to read! I’ve been on goodreads since 2011 or so, but there are still so many features I don’t know how to use or just don’t bother with. For instance, I’ve never used the private notes section, but I can see how helpful that would be, especially if you’re trying to track reading challenges. Thanks for sharing!
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thanks for reading! there’s definitely a lot of features to be explored, so my goal was to list a few so people could find and try out the ones that are helpful for them 💕
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Great post! These tips are so helpful. I think there are so many features on Goodreads that we don’t make use of and your post exposes quite a lot of them.
Thanks for the tips 🙂
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haha yup, there are definitely lots more than I forgot about or haven’t even discovered yet! always something new to learn 😊
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This is very helpful – thank you! I have a blog I use most of all, but started listing all of my books on goodreads just this year. So I am always grateful to hear from people who have used it regularly to help get the most out of it.
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glad you found it useful!
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great post!! and extra thanks for the pingback
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you’re very welcome for the pingback 😉
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whispers Maybe you’re both one and the same. Oh, look, it me (and other wonderful human beans). I love using the comparing books test, especially when people send me requests rather than the security question (I know full well it can be scary when the question “Why do you want to be my friend?” is the question and I feel it should be more than, “You seem cool and I like some of your reviews.”). I’m not sure about the algorithm involved since it seems to be really weird? I don’t know if it takes from the books we’ve both shelved and then compares or what since all the results are interesting to analyze.
(On a side note, what’s really funny is I wrote a post about Goodreads Shelves but it’s sitting in pending – wow, we’re all on the same wavelength here.)
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it you indeed! 💕 and yup, I kind of freeze when I get to “why do you want to be my friend” even though it’s definitely a fair question – comparing books is just easier, lol. and as for the algorithm, I agree, it’s really weird: data is cool but also I wanna understand the data for it to be useful 😜
Goodreads shelves are such a rich post topic 😂 if you ever get around to posting it, I look forward to reading it!
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Isabelle, I’ve just added my first ‘Recommended by’ ! Thank you!!!
I’ve seen some people add screenshots of pictures from the books they’re reviewing but I have no idea how to do it. Can you help?
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hm, are you stuck on how to take the images, or how to upload them? or both?
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How to upload/embed them in html, I guess
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If the image has an url, I know how to do it. But what if it’s a screenshot?
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the easiest way is probably to save it as an image file, then upload it to get a URL! I’ve heard people use photobucket, and there’s probably others you can google for. hope this helps, and feel free to check back in if it doesn’t and we can try to figure it out! 🍀
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Thank you, Isabelle!
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Was directed here by Kal, and ahh!! Thanks for so many helpful tips! I had goodreads open while I read your post (and Kal’s too), testing everything, it was so much fun! I had no idea you could compare shelves with peeps, I’m floored!
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the world (Goodreads) is your playground, Haley 😉 glad it was helpful!
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also oops, I think you meant Sam 😜
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Bahaha! This is what I get for commenting on more than one post at once!
Sorry Sam!
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Wow, you basically know all there is to know about Goodreads! I’ve been trying to use Goodreads more than I do this year. I don’t really use it conventionally but it works for me 😀 And now I know where to go if I want to do anything!
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haha I really don’t, Sam’s guide has even more things that I didn’t even know about! 😉 I think it really is about making it work for you, but glad to hear you found the post helpful! 💕
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This was a super cool post! I can’t believe I was so unaware about so many of these features! Goodreads really is a cool place! I use Goodreads regularly, but now I want to use these tips and tricks to completely up my game!
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haha glad you found it helpful! Goodreads really is awesome to keep track of bookish stuff 😉
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