Why You Should Start A Goodreads Account If You Love To Read

Goodreads is a social media and book tracking platform for readers and authors. Since I started my account several years ago, I have absolutely fallen in love with it for so many reasons.

(This post is in no way sponsored by or affiliated with Goodreads. All opinions are my own.)

1. It Encourages You To Read

Each year Goodreads has a reading challenge that allows you to choose how many books you want to read that year and allows you to track the books you’ve read each year.

And you can adjust your challenge throughout the year if you want to read more or less books. This year, I started out with a goal of ten books, but I was easily able to up my goal to 40 after finishing original goal.

2. Goodreads Allows You To Connect With Other Booklovers

As I mentioned before, Goodreads is also something of a social media platform where users can talk about books with other readers and connect with their favorite authors.

This a really cool feature because it allows you to become “friends” with other readers and authors. In fact, I am friends with several of my favorite authors on Goodreads!

When you become friends with someone, you are able to see what they’ve been reading, and get updates through the platform.

3. Book Recommendations Based On How You Rate Books You’ve Read

After you read a book, log it in on Goodreads and rate the book, and based on those ratings they recommend more books for you to read.

So if you rate a book anywhere from three to five out of five stars, you will get recommendations similar to that book.

Plus, it takes into account what your favorite genres are as well.

4. Listopia

One of the best parts about Goodreads is the lists. On both the website and the app, there are thousands of book list curated by users. There lists for just about every genre you can think of. Plus, there are a ton of other lists that round up the best or worst books of a certain year, read alikes, and more.

5. The Review Platform

Not only can you rate books on Goodreads, but you can also write reviews. This is optional, but reviewing books on Goodreads is a great way to get started as a book reviewer.

One of the great things about reviewing books on Goodreads is you can hide portions or even all of your review if it contains spoilers. Then other users can decide if they want to read the spoilers.

6. Goodreads Choice Awards

Each year Goodreads hosts awards where readers get to vote on their favorite books in each genre for that year. It’s kind of fun getting to vote for the books you’ve enjoyed.

7. Groups

There are also a number of groups that you can join. There are groups based on favorite genres, celebrity reading lists, and more.

I’m even apart of a few for book bloggers where we can share our work with each other.

Some groups are more active than others, so keep that in mind when it comes to notifications. (You can choose how you receive notifications when you join a group.)

8. The Giveaways

My favorite part of Goodreads is the giveaways. They have hundreds of giveaways for both popular and lesser known books in Kindle and physical formats. These giveaways are completely free to enter.

I’ve won three giveaways in the past few years.

Final Thoughts

Do you use Goodreads to track your reading? Is there another book tracking platform that you like better? Let me know in the comments.

If you would like to become friends on Goodreads click here to send me a request.