I (more or less) have a GoodReads account

[julesjones]

I set up a GoodReads account last month, mostly because it is apparently now a vital part of author marketing (and yes, I do mean "marketing of author", not just "marketing of author's books"). I then tried to import my LibraryThing catalogue, only to find that the server kept hanging. Since I was not going to manually re-enter 2,262 (and counting) records, I sent off a plea to the helpdesk.

Helpdesk asked me to send along my file. Apparently the problem was that the import server was not expecting 2,264 records (as it had become by then), and it had choked on my import file. Helpdesk got a large chunk in by breaking the file up into several smaller files, although I can tell by the count that a lot are still missing. At least now I know that it was the size of the file, and should be able to fix it.

My file - so big the server couldn't take it...

Comments

[seawasp]

I think I have a Goodreads account, but I have no idea what the point is or how it's supposed to be a "vital part" of marketing. I thought it was just some review site, not something the author would have any input on.

[julesjones]

So that your readers can find you and interact with you. And so that you can take part in discussion groups, and friend lots of potential readers, and do various other things that if taken to excess very rapidly cross the line into shameless spamming. There are ever so many ways to attempt to game the social networking features to get *your* book to the top of the pile, and thus hopefully bought by more people.

It also offers many, many opportunities for authors to attempt to persuade readers not to post anything less than 5 star reviews. There are a number of author groups and fora where this is considered to be a feature, not a bug.

In less sardonic mode, there are also some interesting social features that with my reader hat on I think could be quite useful if I did not already have a LiveJournal and a LibraryThing account. And it does seem to give you the opportunity to edit information about your books, which is useful if Amazon have cocked it up in some manner. (Such as the way they failed to put the back cover blurb on the dead tree edition of The Syndicate for months, which meant that there was no indication of what the book actually was other than the metadata tags.)

[julesjones]

Oh, and if you link your account to your author profile, you also get to control what is put in the "about you" on your author profile -- which might be a good idea in some situations. Somebody had already filled in a lot of info on mine, including adding the RSS feed from my LJ. If you have multiple blogs, controlling which one gets fed to your GoodReads author profile might be handy.

[deborahjross.livejournal.com]

We've got somewhere over 4,000 books in our LibraryThing. (My husband's dowry included 70 cartons of books.) I didn't know you could import the catalog, but I can see I will have to appeal to the Help Desk to do it.

[julesjones]

They told me that what you need to do is break up the LibraryThing export file into several smaller files, which they'd done for me. The LT export file is a standard file format, so it's probably easy but tedious to do this yourself.

I'm surprised they haven't run into this more often, since they're actively trying to recruit author members (in the hope of selling them advertising facilities), and my library isn't exactly large by author standards.

They're set up to import from the .xls export file format used by LibraryThing (for some reason, although in general they recommend using CVS, for LT they recommend xls).

Brief Faq entry here: http://www.goodreads.com/help#import_books

[glitterboy1.livejournal.com]

I imported my catalogue a couple of months ago, and had similar problems. :-(

It eventually managed to import it, minus some indeterminate number of records that it didn't like (possibly Folio Society and other things without ISBNs?). I haven't bothered to try to work out what it didn't like, and am treating it as a social thing, rather than as my actual catalogue.

[julesjones]

It hasn't uploaded all of mine, but it has given me a list of ISBNs it didn't manage to import. I'll give it overnight to finish crunching, and then poke at it a bit tomorrow. And my actual catalogue remains on LibraryThing, because I want to know the exact edition and for preference print run of my copy...

[birdsedge.livejournal.com]

I just did a friend add. I'm on goodreads under my real name.