Spell it out for me...

4:42 pm 28 September 2013

A few simple things that you should do when starting your booklikes page. 

 

***OR... Help! I've fallen off the GR merry-go-round and want to know how best to supplement my book addiction with a booklikes blog.

 

****OR - I'm super lazy and wish someone would have just given me all the cheats!

 

1. You need to get all of your precious books saved. To save all books & reviews, you can export a .CSV file. (You'll need it for your booklikes startup)

Go to your "My Books" page by clicking on "My Bookshelves" from your profile. On the left hand side beneath all of your shelf titles will be a list of other links. Click on "import/export". On the new page, upper right, is the link to export to a .CSV file. 
This will take all of your books/shelves/and reviews and organize them in to a file. SAVE THAT.

(For pictures and more in depth tutorial visit this awesome blog: Scott Reads It )

 

2. Jump over to booklikes and sign up. During that process you will be asked if you want to import your books from goodreads. You'll have a "choose file" button. Click it and select your saved .csv file and then click Import. -- you do not have to stay on that page after the file moves over. You can close everything down, turn it off, etc etc, your importing process is going on at the magical booklikes factory in someone else's mystical world and will not stop if you shut down your computer. Just in case you're like me and didn't know. (What? I never said I was smart!)

 

3. Get really excited and start doing a bunch of pretting up the joint - because your import will take FOREVER. No really. It took from around noon on 23Sep until sometime last night, 26Sep, for all 905 of my books to fully import and my reviews and shelves and everything to mesh. (It was weird because the numbers were wrong and things didn't add up. Just wait. Let it finish. In its own time. Trust.)

 

So... just let that do it's thing in the background.

You need to customize and pretty your little bloggity blog.

 

4. Scratch your head and try to figure out exactly what's next. Maybe look up that old friend who knew how to write code back in the days of myspace and livejournal. (Heh! I made a funny.)

 

5. Visit the booklikes Explore page and G. O. NUTS finding people to follow. 

 

6. Ok - I'm not gonna lie. I didn't get how easy this was. I just couldn't figure out how my goodreads stuff would continue to be on my booklikes blog. The new stuff - not the .csv file stuff. I got that. But then, the light came on and I realized I'm only old - not completely useless yet.

 

The way it works (without reading thru the booklikes FAQs because I'm lazy!) is that once everything is moved over from goodreads - you now do your book reviews on booklikes instead of GR and it will automatically add your review over there. (I thought I'd always update the GR page and it would auto update here, but duh... it's the other way around. Because, you know, I was mad at GR so obviously want to post somewhere else.)

 

So - you go to the top of your booklikes dashboard page and in the little search box you type in the book you want. When it pops up you can then click to add it to a shelf. Also, cllick the star rating system... and you can do halfsies!!! Just don't fully fill in the star. It's awesome. If you click "edit shelves" it will give you your other shelves to put the book on. Then SAVE it. You can do reviews, spoilers, all the good stuff. 

 

I've tested it with my last two books and they "poof" showed up on GR after I updated my BL page. 

 

7. Steal some GR widgets before you bail. From your profile settings on the GR page find the tab for widgets and take the ones you like to add to your booklikes theme. I have the favorite quotes and favorite books widgets on my page. 

 

I'm not full on bailing. I'm using booklikes as a supplement. A home base for all of my reviews from this day forward. A place to post my true thoughts about a book without worrying about an author leaving me a snotty message when I say the book is badly edited. *don't even get me started!* I don't want to talk to self-pub'd authors about why their book sucks. I just want to rant. You should have figured it out before throwing it online. Sounds bad? Oh well. I'm ranty. I read A LOT. Last year I read over 300 books. THINGS BUG ME AFTER A WHILE!!! I HAZ PET PEEVES!!!!

 

8. Now what? Read! Share! Post funny reviews! Post mean reviews! Post nice reviews! Post completely bland and boring reviews. DO WHATCHU LIKE!!! 

 

It's your blog and you can cry if you want to!