Darklight On.... DarkSiders on Goodreads

Goodreads - Some people love it. Some people hate it. One thing for sure it's a way for readers to find books they want to read. 

Using Goodreads widgets

Here on the DarkSide DownUnder we use Goodreads widgets on our website and blog to show off the covers of our members. (Widgets can only have up to 200 books so another widget would be needed if there were more than 200 books for a particular shelf/label).

It gives us the flexibility by adding book covers only in one place. 

Look at the top or right side of the blog to see books by year. At the top is our latest and upcoming releases, on the right, are books by other years. 

On our website, the home page has also our latest and upcoming releases.

The great thing is when hover a title (on the website, not here as the above is a screenshot), the title and author of the book pops up in text. If you click the cover you go to the DSDU 'review' for that book. Basically it lists the shelves the book is listed under.

For example, let's pick a book and click to the cover - The Mind Eaters by Lilliana Rose. Here's the link showing the below:

To go to the book details, one just has to click the title of the book and it will show you the book's entry. You can then add the book to your shelves.

 Other ways you can find books via our website is via the the book covers from our navigation menu. They are by year.  

Also individual DarkSider pages (may also) have book covers for that DarkSider.

For example on the Christina Phillips page, her covers are shown via a Goodreads widget. Again if you click a book cover, you get to the DSDU 'review'. 

The second widget is a direct link to our Christina Phillips shelf on Goodreads.

Finding us directly on Goodreads

Our profile on Goodreads has some of our shelves listed. 

If you click 'more', you are taken to the My Books for the DSDU. 

We've created a 'dsdu books' shelf under the main shelves (where you usually pick read, reading, want to read) as this profile is about showing the books of our DarkSiders and not about what has been read by an individual person. 

The image above shows the latest covers that have been added to our shelves. You can see that each book is added to dsdu shelf, as well as the year of release, the author, an occasionally another shelf such as 'anthologies' or 'co-author'. You can click these individual shelves to view the books. 

For example if you look at the first book, '1001 Dark Nights Short Story Anthology 2020', you can see the shelves is for '2020', 'anthologies', and 'Khloe Wren'.

Further down, the book 'The Final Dawn' has the shelves of '2021' and 'Jess Anastasi' (Goodreads tends put the shelves all in lower case).

On the left hand side column, you can find our bookshelves for the individual years and our individual DarkSiders. 

Individual DarkSider shelf

If we scroll down, we can find M.J. Scott and click it to go to her shelf. The shelf is listed by the date added. The third book, Warlords, Witches & Wolves had been a limited anthology that happened to have a few of our DarkSiders in it, so they are listed in the 'shelves' also. 

Goodreads profiles

Not all DarkSiders have Goodreads accounts. To find which of our Darksiders are on Goodreads, you can go to our Web hangouts page (located under DarkSiders by Genre in the menu). 

There is a column for Goodreads with all those who have an active profile on the platform.

Clicking Adina West, takes us to her profile.

From here, you can read more information about Adina including finding some of her books listed. (You need to click 'more books' to see them all). The profile page allows another Goodreads user to request to be friends, or just to follow the author. 

Because I was signed in as the DarkSide DownUnder, the shelves indicate that they are 'dsdu books'.

If I look at this page as me, the list would indicate if I had put any on my shelves. In the below example, I had read those shown.

By using the above methods, readers can find DarkSiders and their releases on Goodreads, and by using the widgets it gives us the added benefit of not having to upload the individual covers on our website. 

It's a win-win.

~Eleni

You can find me on Goodreads where I mark a lot of books 'Want to Read'. Occasionally I even get to mark them off as 'Read'. :)