How and where do I add the genre(s) of my book?

[Athena]

I can't find where to list my book's genre. I clicked on "show metadata," but the page only says "No metadata answers yet"… but there aren't any questions. Help!

[Paula]

Genres on GR are crowd sourced from the shelves that users use to catalog their books.

You need to create shelves and then add your book to those shelves. So if your book is Sci Fi, create a shelve called Sci Fi and put your book on it

[Athena]

Paula wrote: "Genres on GR are crowd sourced from the shelves that users use to catalog their books.

You need to create shelves and then add your book to those shelves. So if your book is Sci Fi, create a shelv..."

Oh, I see. Okay, thank you Paula!

[Debbie's Spurts (D.A.)]

Shelves here are kinda like tags or keywords on other sites. Once two people (you can be one) shelve your book on a shelf with a name feeding into goodreads genres -- your book is in that genre.

It might help you to go to some bestselling books in your genre and glance to the right to see what genres/shelves they are in to guide you in what shelf names to create.

(Cache on goodreads can take 10 minutes to 72 hours to catch up normally and right now I believe they are testing some search feature and other rollouts that may or may not delay it displaying quickly in genre.)

[Athena]

D.A.—just a reader wrote: "Shelves here are kinda like tags or keywords on other sites. Once two people (you can be one) shelve your book on a shelf with a name feeding into goodreads genres -- your book is in that genre. ..."

Okay, thank you. But since my book hasn't been released yet I don't imagine anyone else will be shelving it as a specific genre. And I'm doing a giveaway right now for this book... So if nobody else shelves it, does that mean it won't show up in the Giveaway section under the 'romance' (etc) tag?

[rivka]

Genres on giveaways work differently than elsewhere on the site, and you should be able to assign one as part of setting up the giveaway.