Practice Resource Just Got Even Better: The Get Booked Recs Spreadsheet

One of my favorite resources to direct people to if they want to practice their RA skills is the Get Booked Podcast by BookRiot.

Here are all of the reasons why I love this podcast as a practice tool:

1. Just listening to the questions gives you a broader sense of what types of books people are looking for.
2. The questions also illustrate how readers don't connect books in as straight a line as we think. We can hear from actual readers why they like the books they do in plain language, and often in their questions alone we learn so much about why someone likes the books they do.
3. You can use the podcast to actively practice your skills of suggesting books. Listen to the question. Pause the podcast. Work on the question. Come up with a few suggestions and why on your own. You can even write in with feedback as to more suggestions and they may include them in a future episode.
4. You can use Amanda and Jenn's suggestions as examples of how you take a reader query and turn it into a suggestion, both in how they match the reader with a title and in how to book talk based on appeal [not plot]. 

But probably the best thing I take away from this podcast is how just by listening to Amanda and Jenn book talk the titles they are suggesting, I have added hundreds of titles I will never get around to reading myself to my suggestion arsenal.  

I regularly use the titles they suggest and the reasons why they suggested them to suggest to other readers. They have helped me to build a broader list of possible suggestions, a list much longer than anything I could even compile along.

However, until now, there was no single place to go to get a list of everything that has been suggested on the show. But thanks to a librarian listener named Stephanie, we now all have access to this wonderful spreadsheet. It lists every title and the author in reverse chronological order of when they were mentioned, and includes the link to the episode so you can go in and hear the hosts talk about the book and why it may appeal to the reader in question.

Thanks to Stephanie and her Get Booked Recommendations Spreadsheet, Get Booked as a RA practice tool just got even better! Check it out for yourself.

Click here to see the spreadsheet