Hello, fellow writers and readers! I hope that all of you are well.
I previously wrote about ways you could find new books to read. However, what do you do with all those new books you bought, borrowed, and/or received from others? This post aims to tackle the issue of organizing your books!
If you’re anything like me, a fellow reader, the chance is that you might have a bookshelf or two in your house that might be overflowing. Maybe you don’t even have a bookshelf and you have books on the floor. If you’re looking for ways to organize your books, this is the post for you! Here are 5 Ways To Organize Your Books:
1. Separate Your Fiction From Your Non-Fiction.
Separating your fiction from your non-fiction is always a handy way to organize your books. That way, if you need to access your non-fiction for research or leisure-reading purposes, you know where the non-fiction is. The same goes for fiction. It would be awkward to pick up a book you think is fiction, only to realize that it’s actually non-fiction because you put them on the wrong shelf.
2. Organize your books into subcategories.
Once you separated your fiction from your non-fiction, you can further separate the fiction books into subcategories. For instance, if you have a lot of western books, keep all of those in a separate area, like a specific shelf. You can do the same for manga and light novels, fantasy fiction, etc. This way, if you want to read a book from a specific category, you can easily find it later. I use this technique to keep my light novels and manga separate from my mainstream fantasy novels.
3. Organize your books in alphabetical order.
After organizing your books into subcategories, you can organize them into alphabetical order. I prefer to organize my books in alphabetical order by the last name of the authors, but you could also organize them in alphabetical order by the first name of your author, or by the title of each book. This part is completely up to you, but I recommend organizing them by the last name of the author.
4. Organize books by their aesthetic appearance!
This is a trend I’ve heard of some book collectors and book Youtubers (also known as Booktubers) doing with their own shelves. They’ll organize their books by the colour of their covers, and end up making rainbows out of their shelves in the process. Some will organize them in creative-looking stacks, or create and/or buy shelving to shelve their books in a creative fashion. Like the previous tip, how creative you want to go with aesthetic arranging your books is up to you.
5. Discard the books that you no longer read.
If you do decide to get rid of the books you don’t read anymore, please, PLEASE don’t throw them in the garbage. You can donate them to thrift shops or libraries, give them as gifts to your family and friends, or you could sell them as used books and make some money on the side.
Those are my 5 Ways To Organize Your Books!
Have you tried any of these tips for organizing your books? How were the results? Let me know in the comments!
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All good ideas. Additionally, I track all my books with an app called Book Collector by Collectorz.com. It allows you to sort your book collection by a variety of fields, including title, author, publication date, category / sub-category and location (if you have your books in more than one place as I do. I have four book shelves, all in different rooms). The company also makes a similar app to catalog movies and audio recordings.
I’ve never heard of that app, but maybe I should check it out sometime. Thanks for the suggestion!