It occurred to me recently as a result of a question posted on Twitter that not everyone knows and uses exclusive shelves on Goodreads. This is actually an amazingly handy tool that I’ve been using for a while that basically allows you to place books on a shelf other than the typical three you find available: Read, Currently Reading, and Want to Read. Your exclusive shelves are basically the initial shelves that a book goes on where they have to fit into at least one of the categories. It stands to reason, though, with the fact that there are many of us who occasionally DNF some books that might not be for us or are just, for lack of a better phrase, plain awful that we would need a shelf for those. After all, if we DNF a book, we haven’t completely read it, right?

So, as you’ll see above when you go into your books, the three initial shelves you’re given are listed in the top left corner. As you can also see, I’ve added my own exclusive shelf already to hold the books that definitely do not fit the category of Read, Currently Reading, or Want to Read since clearly a book I will never read is not going to. It’s a relatively small shelf for me, but it takes out the books I know I have no interest in reading from appearing randomly in my Goodreads recommendations, which is nice.

And now I’m going to show you how to add a DNF shelf to your exclusives. You’re gonna want to start by adding a DNF shelf to your shelves and then proceed to click the edit link right beside “Bookshelves.” That will take you to the page below where, again, you can see the four exclusive shelves I have. We’re actually not able to remove any of the initial shelves from exclusive–which fortunately I’ve never wanted to, but I can see how that might get annoying–but we can add any current shelf that we have to your exclusive shelves.

From this point, you want to scroll down to your DNF shelf at which point you are going to click the little square almost at the end there to add it to your exclusive shelves. You’ll get a little pop-up warning about the fact that it will remove all those books from any other shelf that you currently have it on at which point you simply click okay.

You’ll have to refresh the page once you’ve done this and make sure that the shelf has moved up to the top of the page and is still checked in the exclusive section and that’s pretty much it. You’ve officially made your DNF shelf exclusive and no longer have to deal with keeping each of those books in one of the initial shelves that Goodreads offers. It’s a pretty quick and simple fix, but it really makes your Goodreads feel a bit more authentic and takes away quite a bit of annoyance.

I hope this post has been super helpful to some of you and that it solves any frustrations you might have with having DNF books listed on your read bookshelf. As always, I wish you all happy reading! Have a great weekend!

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