SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion
note: This topic has been closed to new comments.
Members' Chat
>
The StoryGraph
Mod
Yes, y'all def. do choose dark and challenging books... which is why I don't actually contribute much in the monthly discussions. ;)
But anyway, what's the point of StoryGraph? What's the allure?
I have long led a crusade for happier books, but to no avail! Challenging though...I'll cop to that.
I think people are mostly excited about the personalized recommendations, which are excellent. And the mood charts are kind of fun 😊
Challenging is ok if rewarding. ;)Ok, maybe I'll check out StoryGraphs after they've had a chance to work out some kinks. :)
Yes, I'll check out StoryGraph later once it's not beta. Anna, could they import GR shelves?Anna wrote: "SFFBC mainly reads fiction books that are adventurous, dark, and challenging.
They tend to choose medium-paced books that are 300-499 pages long.."
LMAO
I think books under 300 pages need to be a prompt for future monthly reads. I just looked at the books I voted this year, only two of them are below 300 pages, and realized I never even checked number of pages since the story is biggest dealbreaker.
Yet, shorter books are good too.....
I notice that nowadays books tend to have longer pages. Hence my occasional preference for novellas but they're not eligible for group books.
Yes they have GR import but both the SFFBC import and my own look wildly incorrect. It could be a problem in the export, but I haven’t had the motivation to check, since I have so many books on my shelves.
I think most SFF is labeled adventurous, compared to litfic. If we leave out adventurous, thinking it's the SFF mood, then we tend to read books that are labeled as dark, challenging, mysterious and reflective.Those with an account can dig deeper into yearly or even monthly stats. Looking at 2020 reads only, in addition to adventurous, we've read emotional, mysterious, challenging, reflective, and even funny books! :) In May (CatNet and Hollow Kingdom) we read lighthearted, emotional, adventurous and funny! Just like we wanted to!
Screenshots of all time graphs:
edit: I did the import again, it's all fixed now. All read dates must be filled in full (not just the year and month like it was), or it won't work properly.
Ooh this is interesting, now I want to try for the BOTMs of my nonfic group too. Anna, how do you export group bookshelves?
Anna wrote: "Using the SFFBC account."Oh no.....We have a mod only group for our testing stuff but no group account....but I guess I should start? :(
They really should let us export books from group shelves *grumbling
Yeah we have the books on three shelves :D This group, mod group and mod account. And of course in the spreadsheet. Someone, and I definitely don't mean me, ahem, has too much time on their hands!
I tried the site out. Not surprisingly, since the vast majority of what I read is either from our group shelf or sequels to things on it, the things it said about my personal shelf lined up with what it says about the group shelf. :)One thing I wanted to note is that StoryGraph apparently doesn’t have spoiler tags. Maybe that’s coming in the future; I couldn’t find anything talking about their long-term plans. I had imported all my Goodreads data but hadn’t looked at it that closely. Then yesterday I thought I’d go in and manually add a review for the book I had most recently finished and saw a note reminding people not to include spoilers. Then I went and looked at one of my old reviews and saw that all the text within the spoiler tags I used here on GR was displayed openly.
I ended up deleting all my book data there for now, because I have tons of spoilers in my reviews (safely hidden behind tags here on GR) and I didn’t want to risk ruining a book for anybody who runs across them on StoryGraph, nor did I want to take the time to edit all my reviews to remove just the spoilers and/or try to make those comments more generic. I'll probably check back in a few months and see if things have changed, then I can always re-import.
Knowing this in advance, somebody with lots of spoiler-tagged content in their GR reviews could probably just modify their GR spreadsheet before submitting it to StoryGraph and delete all the review data first. Then only the books themselves would get imported.
If you don’t like spoilers, I’d also suggest being careful about reading reviews on StoryGraph since anybody else who imported their book data from Goodreads may have done the same thing I did without noticing.
Yes, they're working on a lot of things, but I didn't see anything about spoiler tags in the latest newsletter today. They're a two person team, and they're working really hard, and I think they're very good with feature requests, so maybe tags will make in onto the list eventually.
Strange, I've finished importing my book data but none of the reviews are imported. And here's my profile (all time):
You mainly read fiction books that are adventurous, dark, and mysterious. (For 2020, my reads are adventurous, informative, and challenging).
You tend to choose medium-paced books that are <300 pages long.
One aspect of their analysis that’s a little baffling to me is how they determine whether a book is fast-, medium-, or slow-paced.
Anthony wrote: "One aspect of their analysis that’s a little baffling to me is how they determine whether a book is fast-, medium-, or slow-paced."I think it's also user-generated since if you add reviews, this is one of the questions asked.
This is what all-time vs. 2020 looks like for SFFBC according to TSG. We were much less dark than usual!
Interesting! Also more emotional, sad, but also funny and hopeful.I have not updated my SG shelf for a long time T_T
I'm not really surprised that we are more emotional in 2020, though.
TSG is now live. It seems to work worse for me than it did in beta, but I don't use it enough to be sure. I updated the links in the first post, anyone can now look at the group account. This month's books have been added, but they don't show up on the profile page. They do show up in stats.
I haven't tested it, but it looks like they've added spoiler tags since my previous post. That had been a deal breaker for me before, so I'll have to take another look someday when I have more time.
I signed up & uploaded my info. Waiting for my graphs to show. Not a fan of the website interface. I'm sure it's done to look clean & easy to view on various platforms but it's kind of clunky to me.
A bit baffled by the descriptions given for the books. I'm looking at the books I've read and how they're deemed "mysterious", fast paced, etc.
It's ambitious to try & use commonly used words to re-define how to look at books. But I think the labels used on Storygraph are misleading and do not necessarily have the meaning intended for the users.
It may be an interesting tool to find new books to read. I would have to figure out how they actually try to categorize the "moods" and "themes" of stories first.
The fact that I have to figure out how the website tries to work before I can make it a potential tool is counter intuitive to me.
It doesn't help that I don't agree to most of the labels. I am contrary! lol
People fill them in when they review, just like genres on GR 😊
I signed up and I'm following the group there.
Just to make it clear, it's just me updating the SFFBC profile for fun, so it's not an official mod thing. If I'm hit by a spaceship next week, Allison, the password is the same as the mod account's here :)
Mod
*Grips the controls harder and poises a foot over the Big Red Button*
Getting hit by a spaceship would be the highlight of my (past, hopefully not coming) year, so it wouldn't be so bad :D
If it was one like the one in that book that I can't say more about because spoilers, that would be pretty awesome, actually.
Are you talking about getting hit *on* by a "spaceship"? :D
-_-I can't believe I fell for your propaganda! But no. But kind of! A half immortal one.
lol, I'm dying*, I can't breathe, yeah I think we're talking about the same one XD* good thing I gave you that password, murderer!
Hi!! I was wondering, I think Storygraph is awesome, and already have an account, but my TBR always ends up falling behind on recent adds. My biggest struggle is how to juggle both GR and StoryGraph, has anyone found their stride in this? I find it cumbersome to update both, but I cannot completely switch over. I find most of my books on GR, and it is just so easy to click "want to read" here and forget about it. ):
Also hello, I'm Amanda for those who aren't religiously checking the intro thread. :)
I also can't keep my own TSG updated, it's too much work. I've been doing a GR import every now and then, just to see if they have some fun recs for me.And hi :)
Lady Amanda wrote: "Hi!! I was wondering, I think Storygraph is awesome, and already have an account, but my TBR always ends up falling behind on recent adds. My biggest struggle is how to juggle both GR and StoryGrap..."Hi again! *taps hood of Anna* what you need to seamlessly update all your book sites at once is one of these beauts. Powered by vegetables and capybara pictures, she's like a Roomba for books.*
*I'm being silly, but I am still pretty sure my beloved co-mod is an AI.
Hmm, perhaps I just occasionally import mine as well. It's great for recommendations for mood reading, but perhaps it's not quite everything I need yet. (Friends, I need book friends, and it is far less social over there!) I do really appreciate that it works to have content warnings, though. A+ on that. :)
Anna, when you do the GR import does it mean you re-upload the already existing books in SG again or you could choose the period?
I don't know if they've changed it, but it used to work so that it would skip anything that you'd already imported, unless you'd changed it, and then it overwrites I think. My imports have always had mistakes, so I usually delete all books and do a full import. But of course you could edit the import csv, and only include a certain date range.edit: I'm pretty sure someone will soon have coded a tool to do this elegantly! :)
Mod
Artificial
Net
Novel
Acumen
Here's what it says right now on TSG:"Where a book is marked on both Goodreads and The StoryGraph, the category the book is set under on The StoryGraph takes priority.
Please note: The Goodreads import is only designed to be done once as an onboarding step. If you do it multiple times, you risk introducing book and review duplicates to your StoryGraph account. We cannot undo any individual Goodreads imports. If you're not happy with the final state of your account after multiple Goodreads imports, you can choose to manually adjust all of your records or delete all of your books and reviews and start again from a blank slate."
Mod
Ancillary
Necropost-enabling
Narrative
Appendix
*I like this on better :)
Melanie wrote: "Necropost-enabling"Absolutely pro necroposting! :)
Mod
With everything going on on goodreads, I guess now is the time to reactivate your profiles.
This topic has been frozen by the moderator. No new comments can be posted.
SFFBC book club on TSG: https://app.thestorygraph.com/book_cl...
SFFBC mod account on TSG: https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile...
Here's what it says about our group shelf:
"SFFBC mainly reads fiction books that are adventurous, dark, and challenging.
They tend to choose medium-paced books that are 300-499 pages long."
Dark and challenging, eh? :D