Goodreads Review Widgets

by Elizabeth S. Craig, @elizabethscraig

It has taken me a long time to warm up to Goodreads.  As a writer, I’m still very wary of some aspects of the environment over there. But I’ve grown to use it as a tool, both as a reader and a writer.

I recently posted about my experience using Goodreads giveaways.   I’ve also started using a few Goodreads widgets…carefully.  Today and next Monday I’ll be covering a couple of widgets that I’m using there and Friday Chrys Fey will be talking about three other important things to do with Goodreads.

The way I’ve set up my website is for each book to have its own page, which helps with title SEO and visibility.   I’m starting to add the Goodreads review widget on my book pages for a little visual interest and perhaps some social proof.  I won’t add them to all of my book pages because I don’t want to slow my site down when it starts loading.  I’m thinking the last few releases would be good enough. 

But!  We need to tinker with the settings on the widget a bit.  Below are the default settings:

Goodreads is a tough environment for writers.  Reviews on the site (even for good reviews) are frequently a lot lower than what you’d see on Amazon.  I think this is because readers mark books as a reminder to themselves how they liked a book/series compared to other books/series. It makes sense, but can be rough on authors who are used to higher ratings.

The review widget on Goodreads defaults to a minimum 1-star rating.  Obviously, we don’t want to have 1-star reviews on our website.

Don’t get me wrong–as writers, we need those lower reviews in order to prove that real readers (not  just Mom, Dad and Sis) have read our books.  But those lower reviews don’t make for great sales copy.

I’d advise that you change the minimum rating to 3 or 4 for advertising purposes.  Here are my changes:

You can see that I changed the ISBN (necessary for them to pull up the book), changed the number of reviews to show to 3 (because I didn’t want the widget to take up the entire page), changed the minimum star rating, and altered the header text. From there, you hit submit and then copy/paste the code into a webpage (using the ‘text’, not the ‘visual’ compose setting).  Then you end up with something that looks like this:

Next Monday I’ll cover the Goodreads widget for Facebook (Friday look forward to a post from Chrys Fey covering three things you’re probably not doing on Goodreads, but should).

Have you spent time on Goodreads?  As a reader, a writer, or both?  Do you use widgets?

Photo on VisualHunt

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