Today I am continuing the Goodreads discussion I began last week. You can read last week’s post here. In short, Goodreads is a place where readers go to talk about books, learn about new books, organize their reading lists, and more. It’s a place authors should be, both as readers and writers. You can follow and/or friend me on Goodreads here.

How to Find Friends and Followers

Just like with any social medial platform, you gain friends and followers just by being you. Get a Goodreads account, use it as a reader, interact with people you meet there, and if you become friends, send them a friend request. Friends are capped at 5,000, but Goodreads Authors can also have Followers. You will organically get followers as Goodreads readers discover your books and as you post cool stuff on Goodreads that interests other readers (which means NOT posting only about your own books all the time).

You can also periodically (once or twice a year, maybe?), mention in your author newsletter and/or on other social media platforms that you are on Goodreads and invite people to come friend and follow you. Some of your readers might not know about Goodreads, and might really enjoy all the site has to offer. Others might have been on Goodreads for a while now but never thought to add your books to their Read lists. So, it’s worth it to invite people every once in a while.

You can also run giveaways on or off Goodreads. You could run an official Goodreads (paid) Giveaway. Or you could run a giveaway elsewhere (like on your Instagram or through your monthly newsletter) where readers earn an extra entry by adding your book on Goodreads.

Remember, your Goodreads followers and friends will see all of your Goodreads activity in their feeds. If they engage with your posts, then all of their friends and followers will see it. So, have fun. Start positive conversations. Talk about books you’re reading and love. And try to avoid the negative.

One of the easiest ways to interact on Goodreads is to mark books you are currently reading, then post updates as you make progress. I do this on my phone in the Goodreads app. (See the picture below to get an idea of what that looks like.) If you click on the My Books icon at the bottom of the screen, you will be able to see the book you last updated in your Reading section. If you have marked multiple books as Currently Reading, click on the SEE ALL to update those books. The three most recent books on your Currently Reading list that you interacted with will be the three that show up on the top left corner of your Home Page.

Once you’re in your Currently Reading list, click on Update Progress and then you can enter a page number or a percentage. You can also write a short comment. I don’t often post comments on books I’m reading, but I always use this comment area for books I’m writing or revising. It’s a great way to tell your readers what you’re working on and let them peek into your writing process. If you’ve finished reading the book, you can also mark it as finished in this place and, if you choose to, write a book review. (I don’t recommend reviewing books if you want to be a career author. It just gets sticky when you meet these authors at events.)

How to Get More Goodreads Reviews

Authors are always trying to figure out how to get more book reviews. One of the easiest ways is to simply ask. You can ask your influencers and/or street team. You can ask in your newsletter and social media. You can ask in the back matter of your novels.

You can also list your book on NetGalley to get more reviews. NetGalley is vey expensive for indie authors, but you can get listed on NetGalley through several different writing organizations. I’m a member of the Alliance of Independent Authors, and they have in the past had a way for indie authors to pay a reduced rate to have their book listed on Goodreads.

List Your Book at Birth

I talked about this some last week and even up above. I started doing this about two years ago, and I love it. Once you are a Goodreads Author, you can add new books yourself. This means that you can add a book you have just started writing. You don’t even have to give it a title, but you can. The point is, your readers will see you’ve added a new book (and whatever you said about it), and they will add it to their Want to Read list so that they can keep track of it. This allows you to start building book buzz at the earliest stage. It also enables you to start building a list of interested readers. Below is a book page I created for my story Onyx Eyes. As you can see, there isn’t much there now. There’s a description. But readers can add the book and even rate and review it, if they want to. I did post all the chapters of this book on Kindle Vella and on my Patreon, so while I still consider it in a first draft stage, it has been read. Plus, at some point, I’ll ask for beta readers, and some of them might want to add it on Goodreads to be able to count it as read. (As a reader who likes to participate in the annual Goodreads Reading Challenge, it always makes me happy when I can get credit for a book I’ve read.)

Below is a screen shot of some status updates I posted while revising Magic Hunters: The Journey Begins. I didn’t always remember to update my Goodreads Currently Reading progress after every chapter, and since I didn’t know page numbers, I guessed on the percent. But it gave me some interesting things to share with my readers. I always am careful to post spoiler-free information. These posts show up in the feeds of all your followers and friends, and if they like or comment on it, the post will then show up in the feeds of their followers and friends.

So, after I spent a year posting my revising updates of Magic Hunters: The Journey Begins, I decided to indie publish it. This meant I soon did a cover reveal. Once that was done, I added the cover to my Goodreads page. Then I did a Goodreads giveaway, which really helped the book get some good exposure. And then the book eventually released in print and ebook.

The image below is a screenshot I took of my Goodreads page for Magic Hunters: The Journey Begins before my cover reveal. As you can see, before even the cover was revealed, I had several ratings and reviews from my beta readers who I invited to go post their thoughts as a Goodreads review. Now, I only did that because I knew the book wasn’t going to chance all that much before publication. If I felt the book was not ready to be read, I wouldn’t want readers posting reviews on Goodreads since that version of the book isn’t one I want being reviews. But you can see how doing this can give you a nice little head start on reviews prior to your book release day.

Cross-Promote with Author Friends

Cross-Promotion is a valuable part of being an author. Ours is a solitary career, so when we can team up to support each other, it helps. Trust me. Some of the easiest ways to cross-promote is simply to add your author friends’s books to your Goodreads To Read shelf and have them add your books to their shelf. But there are other ways you can support each other. My friend John Otte is gearing up to release a new science fantasy novel, which I read and endorsed. It’s always okay to post a 5-star review for another author. (I’ve never met an author who complained about that.) I still dont’t review books, even if I give them five-stars. I do, however, post an endorsement in the reviewing section. Below is a screenshot from my husband’s Goodreads Feed of the endorsement I posed in the Review secton of John’s book page for Drawn in Ash. He hadn’t released his book cover yet, but that’s still a nice free bit of advertising for John when that went out in the feeds of all my followers and friends. (And if you want to see the cover, it’s there now. Click on the link above or the image below to check it out. And while you’re there, if you like the description of John’s book, please add it to your To Read shelf.)

Goodreads Questions

Did you know you could ask any Goodreads Author a question? And they just might answer it, publicly! Goodreads Questions are another fun part of Goodreads that not many readers know about. I’ve been asked dozens of questions over the years. You will find questions listed on your Goodreads Profile page, right underneath your bio. Click here to scroll down and see some of my answered questions. 

Goodreads Authors also have a Goodreads Questions page, where you can read all the questions they’ve answered. Click here to view my Goodreads Questions page. Depending on your settings, you might also be notified of questions in your email. See the image below to get an idea of what it looks like to be emailed questions from Goodreads readers.

I answer Goodreads questions as best I can, and when I have time. Keep in mind, you don’t have to answer them all. There are Goodreads users who will ask multiple authors the same questions, like the one I circled in red in the image above. You are under no obligation to answer anything, so you need to decide what you can and can’t do with your time. But even generic questions are a great opportunity to interact with readers. Plus, answered questions appear in the feed of your friends and followers, like the one below that S. D. Smith answered.

Kindle Notes & Highlights

Kindle Notes & Highlights is a Goodreads feature that I have only played with a little, so I’m not an expert on it. This feature allows you to highlight your own books as you are reading them on Kindle and leave annotations that your readers can read on Goodreads. Below is a screenshot of the Kindle Notes & Highlights for my book By Darkness Hid. As you can see, I made 11 highlights when I read this book on my Kindle. On Goodreads, I am able to scroll through those highlights, mark certain ones as visible if I choose, then write an annotation for my readers to go along with it. See the bottom of the image below to see how I wrote an annotation to go with that highlight. The others I left blank since I have no idea why I highlighted it. Now that I know of the Kindle Notes & Highlights feature, though, I can be more intentional next time I am proofreading on Kindle.

Goodreads Giveaways

Back before Amazon bought Goodreads and started charging for giveaways, I was constantly doing a Goodreads giveaway. I always wanted one of my book covers showing up in that massive giveaway area so that readers could see my cover and add it to their To Read lists.

What I used to do over and over and over for free now costs $119. There is a more expensive giveaway, but I don’t see any purpose for the increased cost. For a long while I boycotten the Goodreads Giveaway. Now I’ve decided they are still worth it–if you do it prior to your book coming out. Why? Because you will usually get betwee 2,000 and 3,000 entreies. This means 2,000 and 3,000 Goodreads readers will mark your book as To Read. Goodreads always sends an email out to anyone who has a book marked To Read when that book releases. So, if you do your giveaway prior to your book release, that’s 2,000 and 3,000 more people who will be emailed about your book once it’s available for purchase. Pretty cool, right? One thing to note: A Goodreads user can change their preferences not to be emailed about new book releases, so if they have done that, they will not get the email I’m talking about. Most people leave that on, though.

Plus, the friends and followers of all those entrants will see a post in their feed that says “USERNAME has entered a giveaway for BOOK TITLE.” That’s some extra good promotion. You can see how pretty the giveaway post looks from the image of the giveaway I did for by book Thirst. This giveaway is good promo, but I don’t think I would pay $119 to do it for abook that’s been out a long while. I might have to try it sometime to experiement and see if it still pays off when you don’t get that extra new release email part of the package.

You can choose whether to give away ebooks or print books. Amazon will gift your winners ebooks, but if you want to give away hard copies, you will need to mail those to the winners yourself. Goodreads will give you all the information and stats about your giveaway at the end of it.

Book Release Emails

Below is a picture of an email I reveived for a giveaway for a Brandon Sanderson book. He doesn’t pay for these to be sent out. Goodreads does it automatically for anyone who follows an author. I haven’t added this Evil Librarians book to my To Read list. Goodreads just knows I follow Brandon Sanderson, so when Brandon launched a giveaway for this book, Goodreads wanted me to know about it.

And the picture below here is an email I got announcing the new release of a Brandon Sanderson book. As long as your book is listed on Goodreads before it’s release date, a gorgeous email like this one should be sent out to all of your followers–as long as they didn’t turn off that preference. Again, Brandon doesn’t pay for these to be sent out. Goodreads does it automatically for followers of an author. And with this one, you can see that Goodreads makes it easy for my to click Want To Read, which will add it to my shelf. And I can also buy it from Amazon too. So cool.

There is so much more!

There are so many other things you can do on Goodreads, like adding book to Listopia lists, joining discussion groups, and purchasing paid advertising. It can be totally overwhelming, so I recommend you start small. Pick one or two things and try them. See what you think. Once you feel comfortable, you can add something new. Growth on any social media site does not happen overnight, so be patient and have fun!

And if you ever get stuck or have something on Goodreads that is broken and you can’t fix it, ask a Goodreads Librarian for help. These are volunteers who can help fix things with your Goodreads Author page when you cannot. To learn more about Goodreads Librarians click here.

Questions about Goodreads? What do you love about the site? Is there something you dislike or find confusing? Share in the comments.

Jill Williamson is a chocolate loving, daydreaming, creator of kingdoms, and the author of several young adult fantasy novels including the Blood of Kings trilogy. She loves teaching about writing. She blogs at goteenwriters.com and also posts writing videos on her YouTube channel and on Instagram. Jill is a Whovian, a Photoshop addict, and a recovering fashion design assistant. She grew up in Alaska without running water or electricity and now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two kids. Find Jill online at jillwilliamson.com or on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.