December 13, 2021
Is Goodreads Worth It for Writers? Not for This One at Least
Goodreads has been around for quite some time, and a lot, a lot of writers and readers are there. It feels like it would be a great platform for a writer to promote their books, receive feedback and reviews, and all that. And yet, my experience has been such that I’ll have to say, no, I don’t think Goodreads is worth my time.
Don’t get me wrong, I can’t say I haven’t benefitted from it. I’ve made some good friends and I’ve read some great books thanks to Goodreads. But the overall time I’ve had to invest, plus the way certain things function make me think that Goodreads is worth less than the overall effort and time you put in it.
This is tricky to quantify and explain, which makes the whole process rather insidious. To put it this way, it did take me some time to realize it. It’s also the reason why I bother talking about it; in an effort to help others.
So, let’s take a deeper look at all this. I’ll talk about my experiences with the platform, and why I think Goodreads isn’t worth my time. Your mileage may vary, of course.
Come to think of it, your mileage will very likely vary. But the reasons are still important.
The Goodreads Worth Factor
As with everything in life, judging the Goodreads worth factor is a matter of understanding the ratio of dirt you’ve got to dig through versus the traces of gold. Then, you need to gauge whether that’s worth it.
In its most basic form, Goodreads is a personal cataloguing system. As a reader, Goodreads allows you to have a handy list – including reviews, ratings, etc. – of the books you’ve read. It’s the most functional aspect of Goodreads, and it works reasonably well. However, it’s also one outside the scope of this post.
My goal is to explain why Goodreads is not worth it for writers. As a result, we need to focus on the relevant factors affecting this, and the cataloguing system is not one of them.
Connecting and Promoting
From a writer’s perspective, Goodreads should serve two purposes:
- Finding writers. That is, network with other writers (ideally, of the same genre as your work, and with motivations similar to yours) to exchange ideas and support one another.
- Finding readers. That is, discover an audience; find prospective readers (ideally, buyers) of your work.
Perhaps you’ve already zeroed in on the crucial factor, affecting both purposes: your work.
One of the biggest reasons Goodreads wasn’t worth my time and effort was that I write literary fiction. There are proportionally very few literary fiction authors out there. Conversely, if you write fantasy or romance fiction, you’ll find yourself swimming in them.
Still, this can be a problem too; for social (media) reasons.
Goodreads Is Basically a Glorified Facebook
Take everything you hate about Facebook or Twitter, and apply it here as well. Trolls; like prostitutes; herd mentality; revenge posting. It’s all there, clad in a (cheap) tunic of faux highbrow literary superiority. In simple words: Like all social media, Goodreads is a place where people take themselves too seriously.
To me, that was exhausting. I don’t even take life seriously (it’s too important to take seriously), so I can’t stand it when people build their existence on social media.
Goodreads Worth: Your Mileage Likely Varies
I assume three things about you – and obviously, for some of you, I’m wrong:
- You write genre fiction. I make this assumption simply because the overwhelming majority of writers do; it’s a purely statistical assumption.
- You care about sales. Again, this is an assumption I make because most authors want to sell books.
- You are more tolerant of social media than I am. This is the most speculative of the three. I consider myself highly intolerant of social media, since – with the exception of LinkedIn, where I have a profile – I don’t bother with any of them.
These assumptions (I must emphasize this), lead me to think Goodreads might be worth it for you more than it has for me. Still, it’s important to reflect on the factors we saw, how they work and how much effort they require, and decide whether it’s worth it for you. After all, you’re the only one who can know what’s best for your priorities.
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Goodreads is for readers, and most take umbrage at being approached for anything that might be remotely connected to being used, especially by ‘authors.’
If you’re been there for any length of time, you can see why: newbies routinely drop entitled ‘read my book’ posts without bothering to connect first – and are routinely ignored if the readers happen to be in a good mood, and torn to shreds if readers are in a bad one.
And your writer-friends there will most probably NOT write in the same genre as you do, so the connections are useful only for support.
The process of finding readers who 1) write decent reviews, 2) might be approached, and 3) will read your book and review it, is complicated, takes a long time, and is necessary. Because readers reveal who they are by what they write. And you don’t have access to that much information about individual readers almost any other place.
I have some amazing reviews from Goodreads – and they cost me HOURS and DAYS of my very limited energy. And those readers are now friends.
As with everything, do the work. But be aware if you do it wrong you might even get banned from the site.
Good points, and I think they reveal a certain, shall we say, ideological gray area of Goodreads: Is it designed for readers or writers? Likely the former, but since it was reconceived as a marketing platform (when Amazon bought them, likely) things became muddier.
Readers believe it’s for them; writers who are also readers, and writers who behave themselves, are welcome. It may sound murkier, but Amazon hasn’t done much with it.
I got on Goodreads and hated it. As you say: it’s a glorified Facebook. It changes very little of the logic of social media. Which is the same logic as Wikipedia, it’s worth saying. I invested some time finding and rating the books I’ve read and own. But that’s pointless, I can reread them and find new meanings, reassess them. All this is not measurable, as it accumulates within me and constitutes my being. So the Goodreads platform actually calls on you to deviate from yourself, to delude yourself and format yourself to this logic of the world all figured, all mapped out, all named, all labelled. I hate it, this tame world. It is a world in which there are no seismic tremors, no shock, no intensity at all. Everything is administered, managed, calculated in order to achieve the perfect dose of pleasure to keep the subjects deluded enough not to rebel and not to see the true origin of their suffering (capitalism). At the end of the day, it’s a platform, Goodreads, for repeating 19th century art “criticism”: to publish lists of the “ten best anything”, defining canons, but not thinking about the effects of the works. In other words: it is a platform that predates the invention or the emergence of psychoanalysis. In still other words: it is a platform prior to Samuel Beckett’s question: “what does it matter who is speaking?”.
I can’t put in words how much I agree with this. Especially the “tame world” excerpt, with everything figured out and mapped out. It’s a process meant to lead to quantification of art for (surprise-surprise) marketing purposes. Disgusting indeed.