The Gals Over at Goodreads

Two years ago, I started a Goodreads group for romance listeners as an extension of the Speaking of Audiobooks column over at All About Romance. The twice-a-month column didn’t provide a satisfactory meeting place day in and day out for our listeners. Initially named the Speaking of Audiobooks Goodreads group, many of the column’s regular commenters immediately joined the group identifying either their audiobooks on their print bookshelf or dedicating their entire Goodreads shelf to audiobooks. Brenda joined me as co-moderator early in 2011, improving the group’s setup as she organized and put her technical and detail talents to work.

Although our Goodreads group still supports the Speaking of Audiobooks column and its events, we changed the name earlier this year to Romance Audiobooks to better reflect the purpose of our group and assist others in finding a group dedicated to, well, romance and audio. Our growth was slow and steady for the first 22 months reaching 280 members and then something happened – intense growth. In just the past ten weeks, our group has grown by 156 members making the membership today 436. We can’t pin down the reason for the sudden growth. Maybe it’s the new masthead Christine designed for the group? Maybe current members are making referrals to others more frequently? Maybe it’s our new name Romance Audiobooks? Maybe (we hope) many of those new members are finding their way to our Romance Audiobooks Goodreads group through AudioGals?!

Why would one choose to join a Goodreads group? Mainly it is to find others with like tastes, receive referrals, and talk about books – in our case audiobooks. You don’t need to create a bookshelf to join Goodreads but creating even the smallest of bookshelves helps others identify with you as they see your favorites and even those you haven’t liked all that well. It’s a place to quickly tell others what you are listening to and hearing the same in return. Here’s where you will find talk about the latest Audible sale or the more exciting recent releases. There are even threads now and then on a particular author or narrator. And if you make a friend or twenty who write in-depth reviews, you can find those as well. It’s still rare to find more than a few full reviews on a specific audiobook as Goodreads in general favors print heavily. However, making friends through Romance Audiobooks allows you to see their 1-5 star audiobook rating even if they don’t write reviews.

All of the Gals have Goodreads bookshelves that are dedicated totally to audiobooks. It’s a good way to get a glimpse at those audios we loved, detested, or found just plain boring.

 

Melinda’s Goodreads Bookshelf

Brenda’s Goodreads Bookshelf

Lea’s Goodreads Bookshelf

 

If you want to know more about Goodreads, here’s How It Works.

 

See you at Romance Audiobooks Goodreads!

Lea Hensley