Do you have a Pinterest account? Pinterest is a great way to “clip and save” cool ideas for cooking, decorating, and crafts. No cutting required. But my favorite way to use Pinterest is for bookish pins!
Perhaps you’re already on Pinterest, and you don’t want to add another social media site, like Goodreads, to your plate. That’s fine; you can easily use Pinterest to collect ideas for future reading, find clever ways to display your books, or to meet other people who love books as much as you do.
Pinterest is a social media site, and is therefore supposed to encourage interaction, but I like it for selfish reasons. It helps me save ideas for later, without taking up a lot of time or space.
Get “Word Nerdy” on Pinterest
- The first thing you will need to do is get an account at pinterest.com. You’ll have to provide the typical social media information, like a user name, email, and short description about yourself.
- Set up a board or two dedicated to books using the “create a board” button. You might like to give your boards bookish names. You could start one called “Books I’d Like to Read” or “Favorite Books.” If you have one book / book series or a character that you adore, devote a board to that. For example, “Artemis Forever.”
- Start pinning images to your boards. You can do this three ways.
- Upload them from your computer/ phone. For example, a photo of your favorite book cover. Or a shot of your friend reading upside down in a chair.
- Repin them from other people’s boards, using the “search” box to find book stuff.
- Pin them off of the internet- my favorite way. When I’m reading blog posts and book reviews, I pin books I want to save for the future. To make pinning while you browse easy, you’ll need to get the “Pin It” bookmarklet. This is a function you add to your browser so that whenever you’re on the web and you see something you’d like, you can click the Pin It button and save it to a board.
Need some inspiration?
Word Nerds have found a lot of interesting stuff to pin about books. Check out:
- Author Jody Hedlund’s boards, which include “I love reading”, “Reading Humor”, “Fascinating Book Art” and “Stuff for a Book Geek.”
Several buddies of mine from Wordsmith Studio have fun book boards, including:
- My writing buddy Sarah Turnbull has a board called “Rather Be Reading“, a collection of funny bookish images, books she likes, and articles on books.
- Mona Alvarado Frazier has “Books Worth Reading” and “Beautiful Bookstores” boards in her profile.
- Joy Weese Moll has caught a lot of attention with her board “Healthy Lifestyle Books“, on which she pins reviews of, well, you can guess.
- “Bibliotraveler” Beth Saunders has several pins of famous people, like Walt Disney and Clark Gable, reading on her board “Books“. There’s also a cute little librarian Lego minifig.
- Linda Hatton highlights authors who have contributed to her publication Mouse Tales Press with a special board for their books.
- Kasie Whitener has a “Read This” board with pins of top YA and children’s books from Goodreads.
- And my boards include “Wordy Nerdy Tid Bits,” “Must Read Books,” and “Books I’d Like to Read.”
There are tons of ways you could use Pinterest to serve your addiction to books! Get pinning and have fun!
How do you use Pinterest for bookish topics? If you have a board you’d like to share, please do so in the comments.
Thanks for stopping by!
Julia
I’m a pretty frequent visitor of Pinterest but I have to admit I rarely use it for anything book related. (Most of my boards involve cooking & pastry, or travel.) I love Jody Hedlund’s idea of creating a board to illustrate a novel through photographs, though! Shoot now I may have to start making some of my own – but I hope not. My Pinterest is already unruly with how many boards I have. 😉
You always have the best “techy” ideas! You’re the Goodreads queen!
*blushing and bowing* Thanks Erin! Glad you find helpful stuff here!
Hi Julia,
You know what? I actually need to add a “book board” to my pinterst account. It seems I learn of a new title weekly that I want to read. 😉 Happy summer to you! Hester,
Great idea! I’m a little haphazard with my use of pinterest, but it’s a great resource and place to store all that STUFF you like out there. I never thought about it regarding books – thank you!
Thanks for the great list, Julia! I still haven’t gotten on Pinterest. It sounds really neat, but I think I’ll just peek at everybody else’s boards for now. I’m already overwhelmed with all the other social media sites.
I understand the overwhelmed feeling. Small steps work well. I hope you get inspired by the boards I shared!
I started a Pinterest account a few months back and started playing with it. http://pinterest.com/dksalerni/boards/
Then, right after the whole issue of posting and pinning copyrighted pictures blew up on the blogs, I backed off for awhile.
This summer, I’ve been trying to get back into it a little bit. But I know that when school goes back into session in the fall, this is the social media site I will probably drop first. Blogs, FB, and Twitter are my primary ones. Pinterest and Flickr have to take a back seat.
Dianne, you make a great point about copyrighted pictures. We do have to be careful. I think that posting book covers should be okay, but the other stuff could be tricky. Thanks for bringing up this important issue. And I agree, it’s impossible to effectively manage too many social media sites!
I’m going to bookmark this post and come back when I’m ready to take the Pinterest plunge! Twitter and Pinterest are next on my social media to-do list, but I haven’t found the time (or courage) to tackle either yet! Thanks for a great resource!
Glad to help, Nicole. Pinterest is fun- I bet you’d find lots of good uses for it. It’s really not that difficult, and you can start primarily by using it as a place to save ideas.