While not technically a social media platform, Goodreads is very important to us authors.

Goodreads is a social cataloging website that allows individuals to freely search its database of books, annotations, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. The website’s offices are located in San Francisco. The company is owned by the online retailer Amazon.

Goodreads, Wikipedia

About 80 million people use Goodreads which has over 2.3 billion books listed. According to their stats, the site sees 50 million unique visitors a month which accounts for 430 monthly page views.

Goodreads is an ideal place to connect with your readers as well as find out about other authors that you love.

Goodreads is far from the only site in its class. Several other social bookshelf sites exist that are not owned or controlled by Amazon. For alternatives to GoodReads see our marketing article about book sites.

Example Goodreads campaigns for authors

By far the most common technique I have seen is the one where the author announces a new book and tells readers to mark it as “want to read” on Goodreads to take part in a prize draw. This, of course, makes the book appear more highly anticipated while causing Amazon to work harder to sell a copy to those members

This section has not been finished. I am probably still researching this topic. If you want to contribute to this page, please post your ideas in the forum on Author Buzz group for this sub-site.