Tagged: goodreads
Discussion: Goodreads Usage
A lot of bloggers and authors use Goodreads, a platform where you can review books and make lists of books you liked, want to read, etc. I mostly use it for cross-posting purposes to get reviews on my blog out there to a wider audience (which can be extremely helpful for self-published authors as well as traditionally published authors). Although I do also keep track of books using my shelves so I know which books I’ve read but have yet to review, what series I haven’t finished and what books I really want to keep an eye out for in bargain shops. Goodreads is not perfect by any means in part because of the author-reviewer drama that sometimes goes on, but it’s pretty much everything I need it to be: generally user-friendly, simple and practical.
What I want to know now is this: How do you use Goodreads? Do you use it as a way to keep track of your books, simply cross-post reviews, connect with authors or a combination of all of them? As an author, is it a good way to reach out to new reviewers or just readers in general? As a reviewer, do you use it quite a bit or not at all? Why?
Discussion: The Changes to Goodreads
For those of you that don’t know, Goodreads announced a change to their terms of service the other weekend. Essentially, they will no longer permit readers to create shelves or reviews about author behaviour. For more information, you can see the entire thread here.
Now, in theory this is a great change because I am fully aware there are reviewers out there that make mountains out of molehills and accuse authors of bad behaviour when they’re actually the innocent party. I get where Goodreads is seemingly coming from. Yet I feel this policy actually hurts reviewers and allows bad authors to thrive.
You see, if a review just completely trashes the author, go ahead and delete it! I’d be first in line to say that Goodreads needs far better moderation. Yet if the reviewer points out in their review in a non-threatening manner something the author has done (i.e. told a reviewer to kill themselves) I don’t see anything wrong with that. It allows the potential reader to see if they really want to give this money to this author and it can warn any potential reviewers that maybe this author isn’t the best to work with.
The thing is: how do you decide what constitutes a trashy review vs. a snarky one? Who decides this? And if Goodreads is doing this to protect authors from us nasty reviewers, how about banning authors like the one that told me to kill myself? If authors are supposed to be protected, shouldn’t Goodreads work just as hard to protect reviewers? The thing is, the abuse goes both ways.
I could do a whole article about this and likely will in the future but now I want to hear you guys weigh in: What do you think of the changes to Goodreads? Do you think they’re for the better or worse? Could Goodreads have done something differently in order to protect both authors and reviewers? Please, I would love to hear your thoughts!