A New Tracking Spreadsheet, Part II: SubTrackers

Previously on Her Royal Pinkness Reads: Part I: Stats.

I explained the recent Google Sheets tracker that I modified to suit my needs and covered the first 5 or so sheets of the document that cover the bulk of what a tracker would need. In all fairness, any reader could stop there.

But you know I am extra, so I didn't stop there.

If you get all the way to the bottom, tell me what my husband gave me in the last few days. 😉

Original Doc

For a bit of a key... Deleted, Used/Slightly Modified, Heavily Modified

The original document picks up where we left off with the following pages:

6. Acquisitions: Keep track of the books you pick up throughout the year, either by purchase, book thrifting, or library borrows. 

7. Series Tracker: A handy little tracking sheet for the 50 million book series someone like me reads. I don't like to give up on my characters. I want them to come back and keep me company indefinitely.

8. Buddy Read: Since I don't Buddy Read, I'm not quite sure how to use this sheet.

9. ARC Tracker: Advanced Reading Copy... Nope. Not interested. I don't have the bandwidth to read a really good rough draft and then read it again to see if the problems were fixed. But if you do, here's a handy tracker, particularly for creators that need to stay on top of the ones they've completed in exchange for sponsership.

10. New Releases: This is an awesome freaking sheet. I added a few things to make range sorting easier, but otherwise, it's really nice to keep track of the new authors I'm needing to become aware of.

11. TBR Pile: Again, an awesome page to use and pretty self explanatory.

12. Authors: This sheet collects the authors as you populate your Reading Log. It also counts the number of books listed by that author. The information does go back to one of the stats pages and shares your highest read author. Again, these formulas do not take into consideration the read status and just counts all of them. So if you're anything like me and are reading anywhere from 3-7 books concurrently and have books planned listed in your Reading Log, these get logged on the Author Sheet too. Therefore.... Heavily modified this one to make it work for me.

13. Read Hard Challenge: I don't use this challenge, but I definitely felt I needed to include a challenge tracker of some kind.

14. DNFTracker: When you use Goodreads and DNF a book, it no longer counts towards your stats and you also cannot easily find when you started it, how far you got, etc. This page provides you with a date that you DNF'd the book and why. It will also keep track of what month the DNF occured in. I added a Date Started column just so I have all the stats I might need.

The Stuff that Makes it All Work

The last two pages in the original doc are Categories and CAWPILE cheat sheet. As for the latter, it's not necessary if you've been using CAWPILE for a while. If you are new to CAWPILE, it is very handy to pop up and help you take such a subjective concept as rating a peice of art and making it a bit more objective. While the initial CAWPILE breakdown of the category ratings is very broad, Renee added to this sheet (maybe she got it from somewhere else, I don't know), a Rough Guide to really zero in on what constitutes a Mediocre 4 vs. 5 vs. 6.

I liked this info so much that I used a greeting card to make a physical version for my Happy Planner style physical book to help me use critical thinking skills.

front

inside

back

Now. Finally I'm touching on Categories. This page is where all the drop down menus in all the other sheets comes from. Y'all, this thing was heavily, heavily modified. It's also background and you can hide it so you don't accidentally mess it up, but since I was modifying so many of these lists, I had it visible for much of my modifications. Once all the Sheet modifications were probably 90% done, I rearranged the columns into an order that made more sense to me based on where they are in the main tracking pages.

MY Version

5. Challenges: Challenges and Book Clubs are essentially the same page setup entirely. I thought I had modeled it after one of Renee's pages, but comparing the two files, I can't tell which one. Perhaps I just had gotten so used to her style of pages that I slipped right in and went with the flow. Now my challenges page is literally every challenge I've ever jumped into and I don't really care if I get the challenges done in the month they are supposed to be done. I'm not pressuring myself like that. Instead, I use them as reading prompts to help expand my horizons and introduce me to new authors, genres, and writing styles. So it looks a little overly complicated.

Ohhh! The colors!

Each challenge gets color-coded based on the publisher of the challenge. Now you can also see that there is a hidden column between author and title. This hidden column filters the titles from the Reading Log based on the "Read" status. The two greens indicate if it was read this year or previously completed. Conditional Formatting is so much fun. Next year when I duplicate this file and delete the books from the Reading Log, all these green fields will be colored the lighter of the two greens and any books done that year will be colored the darker green as they are filled.

Stats!

This brings us to my stats at the right side of the column. I feel like it's relatively self-explanatory, but I'm still working on bringing some more data collection into the main stat pages. I want this data to translate into which challenges were completed in that year. Still tweaking.

The best part is that the top cell actually reads =UNIQUE(Categories!AA2:AA). All the stats in the next 3 columns refer back to the first column for data just like the January, February, etc. Stats. If a new challenge is added and I sort the challenge list differently in the Categories page, the stats will always realign themselves properly.

6. Book Clubs: Book Clubs is literally a carbon copy of Challenges except that it is geared toward the nation-wide online book clubs I follow. Right now that is literally only Reese's Book Club and as of a week or so ago, Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf.

7. Physical TBR: I modified Renee's TBR Pile page. I have a lot of books I have not read and needed to get going on reading them. I'm not for physical books these days, but I need to get back to it for rest and relaxation. Take time out to do nothing but. Even as I type up this and as I typed up the previous post, I'm listening to The Count of Monte Cristo at 1.3x speed. I need to take time out to not multi-task.

Additionally, my husband finally relented and brought me home a cat. It's been three years since I had a cat, having spent the time mourning my 17 year old Tigger who passed away fall of 2017 and my 18 year old Mia who passed away in the spring of 2019. 2 year old Star is more rambunctious but has moments of sleepy time where sitting on my lap means I will read.

minor mods

8. Recs: My Recs (Recommendations) sheet is the repurposed ARC Tracker sheet. Instead of slips of paper that get lost, notations in my bullet journal that get forgotten, etc. It'll all get transferred here as soon as possible. As a result... take a look at those total recs! This isn't even the bookmarked lists in my browser!

346 Recs!

9. Acquisitions: Only minor modifications on this page. The notable changes are the order in which the page sits and the added hidden column that I also put into the Challenges, Book Clubs, & Recs pages that allows read titles to be highlighted. When I migrate to a new file at the new year, any book listed here will need to get moved to Physical TBR, so I may need to make sure that these pages are far more in sync than they currently are.

Making better progress with these!

10. Authors: Minor modifications here. I corrected the Books Read formula so that it properly shows the number of books read, not number of books listed. I also added in Nationality (that I still need to get updated for this year's authors) and added a Author Backlist Completed checkbox. Obviously Alexandre Dumas is deceased and recently my beloved Carole Nelson Douglas passed away, so when I'm looking at this page, I want to know if I need to go looking for any more books by some of these authors or if I am done done. I also changed the column "Debut" to "Debut 2022". All the new authors I'm reading, I really didn't want to try figuring out if the book I read actually was their debut work or if they were a debut author. Labelling it as 2022 takes away that question as to what I meant.

Fixed the Books Read formula

11. DNFTracker: No Changes as of yet. We'll see what happens if I DNF a book this year.

12. SeriesTracker: This is going to be truly helpful to me. Tracking series is predominantly the reason I've beeen using Goodreads for all these years: to help me keep track of where I left off in a series. I decided to use the same color coding of series read this year the way I did book titles in some of the other sheets.

Which series have I read from this year?

Revamped the stats for my own purposes

13. Categories: When it was all said and done, I added the category options that I wanted in here, removed what I didn't use, reorganized them in the order that made sense to me so I can quickly add in more whenever I want, and made it my own. I loved that it was so well stocked to begin with.

14. 2022: I renamed New Releases to 2022. I added in a full date column and removed the day of the month column. I wanted the releases in month order easily sorted. And considering only half of the year is over and I already came up with this many interesting book blurbs?

I'm in trouble.

Seriously. My TBR is never going to be empty.

And I'm nerd and geek enough that I put this all out there for very few people to read. I'm not good at making sure I am found in the Google searches. I'm not up to date on the marketing of the blog. And frankly I do not care. I'm unapologetic about it. If someday a reader or crafter comes across my pages and gets something out of the effort I made, so be it. If they never do, oh well.

Cause the internet is forever, mate.

Until the computers and AI rise up to kill us that is. Then it won't really matter, now will it?

HAPPY READING!!