How do you keep track of your books, completed reads, and reading goals?
I’m a total stats nerd and I love staying organized with my reading! It’s a bit of overkill but I use three things to track, log, and stay on top of everything related to the books that I’ve read and want to read!
ONE: goodreads
I’ve been using Goodreads since 2010 and while there are alternatives out there, Goodreads is still the one for me. I’ve tried StoryGraph, which really is great for some of its stats and helping you choose your next read based on your mood (how awesome for us mood readers, right?), but I just don’t love the layout and visual set-up of it, so Goodreads is still my home! I’ve also been using Goodreads for literally over 12 years and I can’t break that kind of history 😅 My bookshelves are plentiful and I use them to organize my books in tons of different ways like by genre, publication date, where I got them from, and more!
my goodreads shelves and recent reads
I also use Goodreads to keep track of my reading progress including start dates and ending dates for reading a book and all of my star ratings. I wish Goodreads allowed half stars but it seems like that’ll never happen (I actually talked to someone from the company way back in the day and they said it only added confusion 🤷🏻♀️) but I can still write in any half stars in my review notes. It’s also been a way to keep track of reviews and feelings while I wasn’t blogging and people can still see how I felt about a book (like my sister, since we’ve both been into thrillers lately). I can also still stay on top of some new releases when I see other people add books to their shelves or mark them as currently reading!
TWO: spreadsheets
Like I said before, I’m a big fan of stats! I like to post my reading stats every month/every end of year to social media or on my blog, and it’s just fun to see all of the different ways my reading habits change each month. I created a spreadsheet (which is available for purchase! Shameless plug here…) that I use to fill in all of my reads, DNFs, and acquired books to keep track of everything related to my reading each month.
my reading lot & data tracking spreadsheet
The spreadsheets take a little bit of manual work to enter in the data but I LOVE it because it automatically totals up my stats for me so I don’t have to do the work. This spreadsheet will tell me my most popular genre, format, age range, and borrowed/owned each month PLUS it automatically totals my number of pages read, number of audiobook hours/minutes, and gives me a star average so I don’t have to do all the math. It even has some pie charts!
THREE: my Reading Tracker
I’ve never been a journal/planner person so when I’ve purchased reading planners in the past, a lot of the pages went to waste or I just plain didn’t keep up with it. Enter the Novelly Yours Reading Tracker! (And yes, full disclosure, I did create this myself but I truly love it!) While I didn’t love using a planner or journaling reviews and bookish notes, I still enjoyed writing down the books that I’ve read and having them in a fun book, bundled all together in a physical form. (We are book-lovers after all… Sometimes that book in your hand is necessary!) The Reading Tracker has spaces to record your reads each month, a place to write in new releases and a TBR, record acquired books, show off your stats, and even color in your own bar graphs based on some popular stats! 
The Reading Tracker has also been fun to feature in physical form on social media for recaps on Instagram and fun posts on TikTok! There’s just something about filling it in by hand that’s a lot of fun too.
