Organizing Your Bookshelf

Photo Credit: Call Me Crazy Reviews

I know there are plenty of people who have books all over the place. The floor, the coffee table, the sofa…just about everywhere. I wouldn’t consider myself one of these people. I have my two shelves right here that are a bit dusty, but nonetheless fairly organized.

I’ve always wondered at how people organize their own shelves. Not really because I care, but because I can’t see myself organizing mine any differently. Before I tell you how I have my books organized, let’s talk about some ways you might organize yours.

Author Last Name

Fair enough. I think every bookstore I’ve ever been in has organized their books by author last name. The books are easy to find and you have all of the author’s books in close proximity to one another.

Genre

For all of you diverse readers, this may be best suited for you. Maybe you read some romance and sci-fi and YA and mystery and you want them to be separate for when you go back and reread your books. I mean, bookstores are basically set up this way with the different aisles for different genres, so why not your personal collection?

Book Title

Can’t go wrong here. You have your books in alphabetical order based on the book’s title. Easy enough.

Now let me tell you how mine are organized. Answer choice C. I  have my books in alphabetical order based on the book’s title. I suppose I could just as easily have them listed by author last name, but I’ve never liked that. I know it works for others because I’ve seen their shelves, but eh I like my way.

So that’s it. How do you organize your bookshelves? Do you use one of the three systems I mentioned or something else?

Coming up With the Perfect Title for Your Book is…..Nearly Impossible

Photo Credit: Water for Sixth Grade

See! I promised you guys that I’d get back to some great book posts today. And this is one of those posts that I definitely ask for your input.

Let’s see, there are four parts of a book that can be seen without ever reading a page. The title. The author. The blurb on the back. The cover. I’m sure I’ll be hitting on those other topics at some point, actually I know I will be, but for now let’s just talk about the title. You’ve worked months upon months writing your masterpiece. You finish it! Celebratory glass of wine! Or bottle if that’s what you like. You likely spend a few months getting it out to beta readers and revising and rewriting and then……YOU’RE ALL DONE! Uhhh not quite.

You’ve spent all that time working on the actual story and not particularly worrying about a title, because how hard could it be to come up with the perfect title for the book that you know inside and out. Hard. You come up with a short list of potential titles and realize that they’re all pretty much the same thing. And they all suck. You ask some of your beta readers to offer up some suggestions and you realize that they’ve already spent hours giving you feedback and reading your book. They don’t care.

Now you’re stuck.

Then weeks later after you’ve already battled depression and forced yourself not to think of your book just sitting there in your desk drawer collecting dust, it comes to you. The perfect title! You rename your Word document and jump up in the air. Tears may even be streaming down your face as you run over to whomever it is you run to screaming that your book has a title.

For me, I actually had about half of my story thought out before I ever started writing. I came up with the title before I ever typed a single word. One of the things that I’ve asked some of my readers is whether they had any idea where the title actually came from. Some did, some didn’t.

So tell me how you managed to come up with the perfect title for your book. There have got to be some great stories to be told about this particular topic. So tell me!