Winding Your Way Amid Goodreads Groups

It was a few months ago that I posted an article on the basic use of Goodreads by authors. One of the ways to get involved with Goodreads on a reader level is to join and participate in some of the various groups that have been formed on the site. There are loads of them;  There’s more than likely a group of some kind on Goodreads about your favorite author or your favorite genre, and there are groups that people make for many other reasons.

A lot of authors I know are perplexed by Goodreads, I guess because of it being so reader-oriented rather than writer-oriented as a lot of marketing sites might be. But it’s really easy to find things if you take a second and look where you are. If you want to find a book, of course, you can just type away in the search box on the tool bar. If you want to find a particular group, you’d click “Groups” and then use the box on that page to search for what you were looking for. If you’re trying to find a book you know you’ve read on GR, click on “My Books” and you can search through every book you’ve added to your page on the site.

I’m somewhat involved with one Goodreads Group at the moment, which is Readers of Kindle Books. This group is an offshoot of a Facebook group of the same name, where folks just discuss books and e-readers, with a dearth of annoying self-promotions. Simply because I both belong to the group and the group is pretty active, I’m going to use it as my exemplar here.

Once you join a Goodreads group, you’ll see a page much like the one below:

You’ll see on the right side is a section called “Moderators”; if you have a question about a group, those would be the people to ask about it. Otherwise, almost all the links above that section are about the same as you’ll find in a standard Facebook Group. They are very easy to use, as they are really just like any message forum on any website: Lots of discussion threads and, naturally, lots of discussions. On RKB, they also have monthly threads to vote for a book to be read by the group (participation is entirely optional), challenges for folks to read books, either a certain number, by a certain author, a certain genre, or whatnot. I’ve been participating in their 2013 reading challenge myself (they’re trying to have their members read 2,013 books this year).

Creating your own group is just as simple. Click on the “Groups” tab on the GR toolbar top of the page, fill out some basic information, upload a picture and voila! You have a Goodreads Group. I created this one in less than thirteen minutes. It would’ve been quicker, but I had to cobble together a masthead photo with Publisher and Paint.

This new group you make is one you can easily promote (and promote from) to the GR membership, and can also be used as a writer’s haven away from the endless self-promotion of Facebook and Twitter, especially if you just want to have a simple discussion about books. That’s one thing a lot of authors tend to forget: Contact with the people who do the reading on the other end of their books. So sit back, relax, join a group, and discuss Twilight like intelligent people.

And no, I wasn’t able to type that last statement with a straight face.

WARNING: I’ve used RKB as the example because they are great folks. If you like chatting about books, get thee to RKB! But if you run over and join and start trying to spam your books there, two things will happen: First, they will kick you out of the group toot sweet and, secondly and more importantly, they will let me know. Do you really want me on your tuchuses? I don’t think so, Charlotte.