Help > Book Topics
We welcome participation from organizations such as book stores, and we invite all published authors to join the Goodreads Author Program. However, spam and unsolicited advertising of any kind will not be tolerated and could lead to the permanent deletion of your Goodreads account. Please see our author guidelines for more details on appropriate site usage.
Posting of legitimate book reviews from organizations or individuals is the intended use of the site, but no review should have any content with an intent to sell. Goodreads members recognize this as spam, so this tactic is not a good strategy for gaining new customers. In contrast, becoming an active participant in literary discussion on Goodreads will win you friends and new readers.
Find more advice and tips on the Authors & Advertisers Blog.
If a book is missing a cover image or a book page has inaccurate data, please post in the official Goodreads Librarians Group. Our army of volunteer librarians would be happy to help!
Any member with librarian status can edit book data and generally correct any inaccuracies. If you have more than 50 books added and would like to become a librarian, please apply here.
Goodreads Librarians are volunteer members of the site who are dedicated to improving our book data. Librarians can:
- edit book and author information
- combine editions of books to aggregate ratings
- add cover images
Librarians are not Goodreads employees or representatives of the company. They cannot edit any user content (like reviews). If you believe a member's librarian edits contradict our librarian manual, please contact a staff member.
If you would like to become a librarian and have at least 50 books on your profile, you can apply here.
There are a couple reasons why you might have trouble editing your author profile or your books:
1. You haven't joined the Goodreads Author Program. When you sign up for the site, your user profile isn't automatically linked to your author profile. You have to apply to have them linked. As soon as your application is approved by staff, you should be able to edit your profile. Click here for more information about how to apply for the program.
2. You're a Goodreads Author, but you aren't signed into the correct user account. It's possible to have duplicate user accounts, so make sure that you are logged in with the same email you used to claim your author profile. If you're not sure, check to see which email account your Author Program welcome email came to.
3. You're trying to edit a book that isn't attributed to you. If the book doesn't appear on your author profile already, you don't have editing rights (because the system doesn't know it's yours). In this case, you'll need a librarian to correct the author name for you (the system recognizes extra spaces). You can ask one to do so in the Librarians Group.
Here's how to turn off recommendations from Goodreads or "trending" stories in your updates feed:
1. Navigate to the home page, and make sure that you're looking at the "Updates" tab.
2. On the right-hand side of the page (next to the "Currently Reading" box), you'll see a gear icon. Click that to open your updates preferences.
3. A menu should drop down. Uncheck the box next to "Recommendations from Goodreads."
4. Click "Apply Filters" on the bottom.
Tips for book publishers or authors to use Goodreads:
*Author Program. Designed for authors to have a profile on the site and interact with fans, and add photos, videos, events, etc to their profile.
* For authors that aren't interested in the program, publishers can join as a Librarian and then they can fully edit any author profile and add the photo, full bio, Youtube videos, events, etc.
* Advertising. We are now offering custom advertising buys. Buys can be across the entire site or targeted to a particular genre (eg women who like romance/fiction, etc). For a rate card please contact us.
* Author interviews & newsletter promotion. Each month we feature authors in our monthly newsletter. This is an editorial decision, and usually the authors featured have books just released. For consideration, contact us with details about the book.
* Book Giveaways. You can submit any number of copies to be given away to interested members. There is no charge for listing books, however you are responsible for shipping to the winners. For now Goodreads will drive traffic to the giveaway for free.
* Q&A; groups. Authors can host a Q&A; group to answer questions from fans about a new book.
* Ask the Author allows authors to engage with readers from their author dashboard.
* How do books get discovered? A data-driven presentation on how Goodreads members find the books they read. A great tool for authors and publishers.
Find more advice for authors and publishers on the Authors & Advertisers Blog.
For restricted, private, and secret groups, only members can view the discussion boards. For public groups the discussion boards are available to all. For all groups if you are a member you can add books to the group shelves or invite other members. Group administrators can remove members, delete discussion posts, or add other moderators.
There is a comprehensive Librarian Manual that deals with any questions librarians may want to know: check it out.
Much of Goodreads' book data comes from Ingram - including book covers, titles, author names, ISBN's, etc. Goodreads members are able edit any data on the site if they apply to be a Goodreads Librarian. Goodreads Librarians help keep our catalog clean by editing, and fixing various pieces of book and author data, and combining editions. The Goodreads Librarians group is a good place to report book issues.
Goodreads is an online social network where book-lovers gather to review books and compare their taste with friends. Generally you can not actually read the books on our site. However, a few books which are out of copyright or uploaded with permission from the author are available in the ebooks section, or at sites like Project Gutenberg or Feedbooks.
Note: Librarians only
Due to the nature of there being many different editions of a book, each having its own ISBN, we have built a feature where you can combine (or separate) each edition. This provides the advantage of aggregating all the reviews and statistics for this combined 'work'. To combine editions of a book, just click 'combine' on the far right side of the book's page.
To send a friend a book recommendation, navigate to the book's page and click on the "recommend it" link at the top right side of the page. Then just follow the instructions on the next page. You can recommend it to either existing friends or friends who are not yet members of Goodreads.
If you can't find a book on our search engine when searching by author or title, you have three options. The first option is to search by ISBN. You can find ISBN numbers on the inside cover of your book. The second option is to add the book yourself by clicking on manually add book on the right side of the search page. The third option is to post a request in the Goodreads Librarians group, following these guidelines.
Note: Only users with accounts older than 1 day old will be able to manually add books.
We are primarily a book review site. However, several books on the site do have samples available in our Preview feature. The Preview button will show up on any book that has a Kindle edition. Simply click the button to read a sample of the book.
We also have a small selection of readable ebooks. If a book is readable, you'll see a green "read ebook" button below the cover image. Just click on that to start reading!
You can find a list of all the free readable ebooks here.
To post a nominee badge linking to your Goodreads Choice Awards category, you'll need to code it into your website with HTML.
First, you will need a URL for the image, as it has to be sourced online. To get one, we recommend creating a Photobucket account. Then:
1. Right-click on the nominee badge image below and select "save image as".
2. Upload the image to your Photobucket account using the "upload" link at the top.
3. Once the image has been processed, click on it to get to the image's page.
4. Copy the URL in the "Direct link" box on the right.
5. Navigate to your website's HTML editor mode.
6. Paste the following code in your HTML editor, inserting the URL you copied between the quotes after "img src":
<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards">
<img src="">
</a>
7. Replace the URL after "a href" with the URL to your specific Goodreads Choice category.
8. Save.
If you believe a review should be marked as a spoiler or contains spam or other inappropriate content, you can flag it to bring it to our attention. Our team will evaluate it against our review guidelines.
Here's how to flag a review:
1. Hover over the review in question, and you should see a gray "flag" icon appear on the bottom right of the review.
2. Click "flag" and follow the prompts.
Our database is optimized for showing one author per book, so that is all we show on pages with very high traffic like the home page and "my books." Of course, this isn't always accurate, so we try to show multiple authors on as many pages as we can without slowing down the site.
