I guess it's fantastic for readers.  But as an author what use is it to me?

I've 2 friends shy of 1000 friends on Goodreads.   You have a book?  I can recommend it to my 1000 friends but it takes me 1000 clicks of the mouse.

I can't recommend my own book to my friends oh no I guess that stops me spamming them doesn't it.

So I popped onto everybody's favourite search engine and checked out some ideas.

You can link your blog to Goodreads - already done that and I blog fairly frequently as I am sure you can no doubt tell.

It makes your book easier for people to review - this is true but then you can just as easily post reviews to Amazon and I wonder does that dilute the process.  You really want ALL your reviews in once place and that has to be the point of sale.

You can join groups - I've tried joining groups but honestly don't have huge amounts of time to spend participating in them which is a shame.

You can hold events - this is where I think the benefit lies, at least I hope so as I have yet to try it. But I will when I get my hands on some real copies of my book.

As you can tell so far I've been able to increase my influence on the site but don't really know what to do with it.  Don't get me wrong I'm hoping it turns out that Goodreads really does help authors I'm just a bit at a loss at the moment to know how.

Phil