A few words to set your hearts at ease

Those of you who know who you are, that is.

This is a personal note to a few people who seem to have their knickers in a twist after they stalked me to a popular website and saw something they thought was bad behavior on my part.  I want to assure them that I was not doing what they thought I was doing.  I'm sure they will sleep better at night knowing this.

When I came to Goodreads something over a year ago, I began cataloguing my books.  I think it's absolutely wonderful that Goodreads has this fantastic database of books I have and would like to have.

The first phase of my personal cataloguing was to enter the books I already own.  I had a spreadsheet for most of them, or about 1700 titles.  I slowly, in my spare time, began entering those.

Next came the now over 2,000 Kindle titles, many of them new and not even in the Goodreads database.  Some I added myself to Goodreads; some I just waited for.

I also added specific titles to my "wish list" shelf, which is for books I know about and would like to acquire or read someday.  Many of these came as Goodreads recommendations, links from other books I'd listed, or from personal friends.  Some came from Amazon links.

As I worked my way through this agglomeration, I also added owned books that had not originally been on my spreadsheet or books I've acquired since creating the spreadsheet.  I'm still not finished with this listing.  There are two huge bookcases in the living room that haven't been inventoried yet.  I add those books as I think of them or find time.

I've also started listing the books that are out in my studio, which is not part of the house; I haven't even begun to tackle to 20+ boxes still in storage in the workshop. 

Yes, I have a lot of books.

But how was I going to keep track of the enormous bunches of books I wanted to explore?  How could I quickly put them into a separate category of books I wanted to find, books I hoped would appear on Kindle?

A few days ago, I set up a Goodreads shelf for these to-be-explored books, titled "new-new."  I found, however, that it was very tedious to go to the pages for the authors I was interested in checking out and adding those titles to my created shelf.  Nor did I want to add them to my "want to read" shelf via the UGB because in fact I was also adding new titles to that -- books I already had but hadn't entered.  I wanted a way to segregate these easily and quickly.

Here's what I did:

I started by going to the Bodice Ripper Readers Anonymous group, which was the first group I joined when I became a Goodreads member.  (It should go without saying that as a writer of historical romances, I also read a lot of them.)  I knew there was a list of Zebra books with links to the authors.  From that list I clicked on the authors, and added all the titles I didn't already have in my Goodreads library.  Anything I did have showed up on the buttons, so I simply clicked on the one-star, thus adding all those books to my standard Goodreads "read" shelf.

It was a simple matter to sort those books by date added and then batch-edit those books to move them to my "new-new" shelf.  While it's slightly more tedious to remove the one-star ratings, that task can be accomplished while I continue adding the books and authors I'm interested in.  And again, it can be conveniently -- if tediously -- done from that exclusive shelf.

So here's a word to those who have accused me doing something nasty: 

It's just not wise to ascribe nefarious motives to people you really don't know.  It can make you look like an utter fool.  Not to mention, a cyberstalker.