How I Organize My Goodreads Shelves 

Learning that i could make an exclusive dnf shelf was life changing because i was so glad i could mark dnf rather than just pretending it never happened or slightly lying and put read. I still am terrible at dnfing books but i think that mostly because I've been enjoying what im reading. I have a ridiculous amount of shelves but i think i enjoy cataloging them. Having a owned and owned tbr shelf is really useful

This has inspired me to do a bit of tidying up of my Goodreads shelves as well! You're right, just dumping everything on that "want to read" shelf is really overwhelming! I love the idea of that shelf just being top priority reads and have you have your "Top 40" within that!

What a cool system! I only have my read, want to read, and currently reading shelves. This seems like a really great system though! I should take a look at how to implement it for myself. ☺️

I love the way you organized, especially the want to read and consideration. Definitely going to borrow this idea.

I didn't realise you could create exclusive shelves! This a game-changer, thanks for the tips! :)

This was really helpful!!! I’m getting back into Good Reads and this gave me some ideas on how to set my shelves back up. I really like the idea of adding the year along with the topic on the bottom shelves. Thanks for sharing!

My Want to Read was really overwhelming (over 3000 books) so I started paring it down a couple of years ago. I am still whittling it down but I am to 300ish books now and I move books I am still interested in to my OWN-tbr shelf if I own them, my Kindle-tbr shelf if I have the ebook, TBR-Consideration if I am somewhat interested but not 100% sold on it and then TBR shelves by genre (tbr horror-thriller-mystery, tbr-ya-contemporary, tbr nonfiction, tbr classics, etc). I am thinking once I get my Want to Read to 0 I may go back to my separate TBRs and further separate them. I also have a wishlist TBR for books I want to buy or get from the library, as well as my own shelf. I also have a favorites & childhood favorites shelf. To make it easier to see how many books I have read per year, I also have a shelf for each year I started (2014 and beyond). So everything I am reading this year goes under 2019 reading list. That way I can see the numbers at a glance and see how the years compare. I also have a group reads and buddy reads shelf to keep up with those books. I like the idea you have of ordering them by number and series to finish. Thanks for sharing yours!

I use "Want To Read" as the books on my physical TBR shelves at home. Then I have an exclusive "DNF" shelf, so my DNF books can't also be read. I just got rid of my Unhaul shelf today bc it got too complicated to have books that I bought and didn't read with books that I read or possibly DNF'ed and then unhauled. Then I have an exclusive "want-this-book" shelf with all my most anticipated releases and most interesting backlist books with only 19 books there. And I have a "Maybe" shelf for new releases and backlist books that sound kinda interesting or I need someone else to review them as consideration, with 67 books there. And then I have a nonexclusive "favorites" shelf and "non-fiction" shelf, for non-fiction I have read and fit into that genre.

YAY FOR A VIDEO ABOUT ORGANIZING YOUR GOODREADS SHELVES! As we’ve talked about many times before, it’s always therapeutic and a total habit to keep my Goodreads shelves organized. Loved hearing about how you decided to clean up your shelves! You already know how mine are 😉

Really inspirational! Thanks for the video. I especially like the way you organized your "want-to-read", "consideration" and "tbr-unreleased" shelves. Every now and then I will come up with a new shelf I want to create to organize everything but it eventually ends up in chaos again! I really think your system might work for me so I'm going to incorporate a couple of your shelves and hope I can get my procrastination-lover-self to keep everything tidy! haha

So guess what I will be doing this evening! I have the standart set up, but I really love some of the shelfs that you have.

I made four exclusive shelves for my Goodreads: to be read no yet owned, borrow before buying (for online library books), dnf, and incomplete (for books I started but put down for later). The rest is organized by genre, publication year (from 2017 forward), and any other special content like poc authors and mental health books.

I use to be so bad about goodreads but I took everything off and started over and I love it.

Do you keep track somewhere of books you own, but haven’t read yet?

Love waking up on my birthday to a new video from you! This honestly was so helpful thank you so much!!!

I 100% love the idea of the ‘consideration’ shelf. I always look at my want to read shelf and it overwhelms me when I see its at like 140+ books, but having that consideration shelf will help me break down the books I definitely want to read and other ones that I’ll considering reading one day :) thanks for the idea!

Thanks for sharing! I immediately took your idea of an unreleased exclusive shelf. :) I'm considering some of your others. I have all of my owned tbr (over 500 books) on goodreads, so my "to read" shelf is HUGE. I've been considering different ways of reducing that, and I like your method. A change would be a big commitment, so I need to think about it more, but I do like your method.

Ok, now I'm super discouraged at the utter lack of order to my Goodreads shelves. I'm definitely stealing your ideas for my own organization. Great overview of how and why you arrange your books.

Loved this! I like the idea of having genre/topic specific shelves, and then just moving things over when you're getting ready to read them. Keeps things a little more organized I bet. I keep my shelves pretty basic (Want to Read, Currently Reading, Read). One thing I do keep track of is all the things I haven't yet read or own that are available at my local libraries. I love that Goodreads has a function that shows you what library a book is at. I call that my "Charge it to my Library Card" shelf :)

Have you done a video on how to annotate or take notes for books? I feel like your methods always work so well for me!

I love the way you organize your shelves, I'm definitely stealing some ideas. Now you make me want to listen to an audiobook, drink my cup of coffee, and finally organize my goodreads shelves.

I deeply relate to wanting to minimize your anxiety about your tbr shelf. I have a similar system of delineating various tbrs. I use the Goodreads Want to Read shelf as my owned and unread tbr and keep a Google Doc with my considerations. In January 2020 I'll look through my considerations a decide which one's I'm getting and which ones I'm not. I've had a Goodreads account for 6 years and I only figured out I could make exclusive shelves 5 months ago. I'm not very intense in terms of shelving but I do like keeping my DNFs on an exclusive shelf because it feels weird for me to put them with my read books. I love how specific your different shelves are. I probably wouldn't be able to keep track of that many but I've slowly started separating my books into different genres. I haven't fully decided how I want my shelves to be but this video gave me some good ideas.

In case you didnt know.. the release date for Queen of Nothing is now 2019 instead of 2020. It‘s currenty on your 2020 shelf. Thanks for sharing your organzation methods. I really feel like cleaning up my goodreads now ♥️

I love the way you organize your tbr/want to read books. I'm definitely going to be using some of your methods!

This was a major revelation, I thought Goodreads was a website only for books you've already read. Definitely going to start up my own account now 📚😍 I can finally convert my bookmarked wishlist into something more visual! 😄

YES I always have a Goodreads tab open too! oooh Graceling is great, so excited for you to get to that one! and the Lumatere Chronicles too! really liked seeing your organization. I'm the same where seeing progress and trackers change is so satisfying! I also love using shelves for specific challenges I want to do throughout the year. Like I have one for all the books I want to read for the 2019 Retelling Bingo Challenge so if I'm looking for something to read but don't have a clear idea of what I want to pick up, I can look through my tbr/challenge shelves and see if there's anything there I'm in the mood for. It's really helping me keep on track with some of those!

I’ve been thinking about organizing my goodreads shelf and this definitely helped. I have a lot on my TBR so I think having a want to read being smaller and then others is great. I think I’m going to do a TBR own shelf so I read the books I own first and then therefore see if I want to keep it as I have very limited shelf space.

I don't organize on Goodreads but have a journal that I use to do what you do. I may start doing it on Goodreads.

Thank you so much for sharing your method of organizing! Definitely going to implement some of this for myself. My "Want To Read" shelf has a lot of books on it and it does kind of feel overwhelming 😬

this makes me want to organize my shelves on good reads right now it a little bit of a mess with little order

I love how you have yours organized! I love organizing my GR 😆 I’m currently working on getting my want to read down to 100 too - it’s gotten way bloated over the years! Still got a ways to go but I’ve been making progress on it

This was very interesting to see all of your methods! On my Goodreads, I keep track of all the books I want to read through genre. For example, my contemporary shelf has around 70 books because that’s all I’ve been reading lately 😂 Loved this video :)

You're pretty much my organization soulmate :) As far as my book ratings though I stopped using Goodreads and just keep track of them in a word doc. I have a lot of reasons for discontinuing to use it but now with the word doc I just have a section for what I want to read each year specifically, then a section of just "to read (at some point)" then a list of what I've read each year in the order I read them and my rating out of 5. If it's something like an art book that I can't really rate then I just put whether or not I enjoyed it in place of a rating.

Love the way you organize things! I'm going to have to redo my GoodReads. My shelves are a little chaotic right now. 223 unread messages?!? Dang girl, check your messages. haha! That's so funny.

this is so helpful ♥

First of all, that shirt, I'm LIVING for it. ♡ I'm in the process of creating more organized shelves on GR, specifically for series books, manga and graphic novels. But the android app is limited so I have to make time on my computer for deep organization lol

I love how you organize your Goodreads .

Wow you're so organised haha! I got so exicted when I saw keeper of the lost cities on your want to read - I've currently just finished the 4th book in that series and i'm loving it. The characters are so loveable and the plot is really complex for middle grade, also the family and friendships are 100%. Also I'd highly reccomend mistborn era 2 - it's definetly a different tone (much lighter) from the first 3 but they are still really good and a lot more fun and also Wax (the mc) is basically Batman haha. Plus some characters do make cameos from era 1 ;)

I did try to use Goodreads but at the time at the beginning of 2019 but I don't it's for me. I do however want to use Goodreads in 2020, so I can keep track of my reading goals 👍👍👍

I think I'm going to add in your "consideration" shelf idea. It will help limit the number on my want to read shelf. I strive to keep my want to read shelf under 300 books but I've been having lingering around that max number for a handful of months now. I hate deleting books that I think I'm still interested in because I really, really feel accomplished when I read a book that has been added to the shelf years ago (I started using Goodreads in 2012 and even still have a few left added from that year unread). Sure, maybe it doesn't look that great that I claimed to want to read it 7 years ago and STILL haven't read it, but I am a terribly moody reader. Also, when I do remove a book that I think I lost interest in, I end up checking it out from the library randomly or the author comes out with a new book that I like so I want to go back to read their old... etc. Then I'm just sad I didn't get to save that original added date.

Hi silly question, I know how to create a shelf under my tbr section, but how are you able to create another exclusive shelf?

I dont read a lot of non-novel books...so can you explain to me what the difference is between a graphic novel and a manga?? And where do comic books fit into that realm lol

hi, I noticed recently that your goodreads shelves are a little different now. I was wondering how you edited your default exclusive shelves. more specifically, I want to ask how you made the ‘Read, Currently Reading, Want to Read’ shelves all lowercase. I have been trying to figure out how to do it for the longest time but no luck. I would really appreciate if you could help me out.

I have a shelves dedicated to books I want to buy and the books I own

When you add a book from your read shelf to another one say " Top Favorites" then does it remove it from the Original shelf (read) in that case wont it affect the reading challenge update count

Really useful video, thank you!!!

Amazing video! I've been trying to find the perfect way to organise my shelves for so long. I think I've finally found it! Thank you!❤️ For the non-exclusive shelves, after the year ends, will you be deleting those? Or will you go on doing the same for 2020 and keep all of them?🤔

So many messages omg 😂

I have a Tracker App and I DNFd The Chronicels of the Celts its not even close to Celtic Mythology. So I Reccomend Celtic Myths and Legends the Illustrated one.

I think my shelves need cleaning so ofdf I go.