Indie Book Collective discussion
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Goodreads "Rescue" of Amazon titles
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IMHO, this isn't as big a deal as some people are making it out to be. That is, as long as you rescue your book, you shouldn't have any problems. It took me a few minutes to provide the required information to save each of my books. I suspect, the only authors, who'll be hurt by the change of policy are those who don't visit Goodreads often enough to know about the change or those who are entirely indifferent about it.
Well... it isn't as easy as all that when you realize how many books will be going away and how much of an inconvenience it will be as far as looking up books goes. For example, an extreme amount of foreign language books will be deleted after the 30th, which will be troublesome to those who aren't sure how to go about looking up the ISBNs of them. It might seem like it'd be an easy idea to look these books up until you figure that some books will be in Japanese, which will pose a problem because it's a lot harder to do a search in Japanese (if you don't speak it), especially if all you really know is the English title of a book or series that has never been officially brought over to the US.
Even for the indie English titles, this means that people will have to re-upload all of the books, which will be time consuming. It's not the end of the world, but what most people are worried about are any potential reviews being lost on books that weren't rescued. If a book isn't rescued and there isn't another copy to merge to, a review for a title (let's say Sammie Sandwich) will be assigned to an unnamed book without an author name attached to it. That means that even if someone later uploads the book, odds are that those reviews are lost forever unless the original user re-uploads their review to the proper book.
This is why I wish that GR had a big list of titles rather than just the titles for each specific GR user. I've been doing random searches to see which Japanese manga or random books are in need of rescue. It'd save a lot of trouble in the long run.
Chibineko wrote: "Well... it isn't as easy as all that when you realize how many books will be going away and how much of an inconvenience it will be as far as looking up books goes. For example, an extreme amount..."
Now that I've gotten a little more information on the problem from other authors, I admit that I didn't understand the full scope of the problem. I'm hoping Goodreads will find a better way to transition to their new feed so that the mass of books at risk isn't lost from their database. That would be a tragedy, especially considering how expansive the catalog of books here on Goodreads is right now.
Thanks for posting this ... i had no idea this was happening. I went in and rescued my friend's 4 comic books. For some reason, mine was safe. Phew!
I'm not sure where they're pulling the new info from, to be honest. I know that some titles are safe while others aren't. I know that Love and Capes (a webcomic that is being published by Dark Horse) was one of the titles that needed to be rescued while a friend whose books are being published by an indie house didn't need to be rescued. It's kind of weird, to be honest. I know that there's two lists if anyone's interested:
http://www.goodreads.com/rescue_books... (the link specific to the user)
http://www.goodreads.com/rescue_books... (part of the bigger list)
How are indie authors supposed to keep their titles listed at Goodreads under this new policy (which goes into effect Jan. 30)? Here's what Goodreads Librarians group is saying about this: http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/7....
Any advice would be appreciated! I still haven't seen anything that says my books are on the rescue "hit" list, but am probably just not figuring out how to read the page. (I have a lot of difficulty navigating the Goodreads site in general.) But I have 9 days to figure out how to rescue my books before they revert to untitled books, which is pretty useless. What are other indie authors doing?
Thanks!
Kally