3 ways to fill up your BookLikes profile information
BookLikes is a blog platform for all book lover. Thais means that when you register you set up your own book blog with an endless virtual bookshelf (YAY!). Here are three places to add your details in order to fill up your BookLikes profile information and to present yourself to other readers and bloggers.
1. Settings
When you log into BookLikes you see Dashboard -- your feed, a place where you see the blogs' reviews and bookshelf updates. Remember that in order to add a blog to your Dashboard you should start following the blogs! If you're looking for new blogs to follow, go to the Explore page (menu->Explore), click the blog name and click FOLLOW in the upper right corner.
Remember that all your actions done in your Settings and in your Dashboard view will be presented on your blog page (your account on BookLikes IS your BOOK BLOG). The Dashboard view is internal and will always stay the same.
Your blog page on BookLikes is: yourusername.booklikes.com.
Let's get back to Settings. So once you're on Dashboard, you gonna view one menu button in the upper left corner. Click it and go to Settings. In Settings, select tabs to add your details:
Settings: add your photo and username, e-mail, change password, select language and e-mail notifications, connect your social media
Settings/Blog: add your blog name, your short bio, select comments settings, and a blog theme
Settings/Import: import your books & reviews collections from Goodreads and other book social sites
Settings/Pages: add a new subpage to your book blog
Settings/Affiliate Programs: add your affiliate IDs to earn on your book blog
As you can see, each Settings tab let's you fill up your personal information.
Make sure to click Save once you add new information.
2. The Customization tab
Your book blog needs personalization. Make sure to visit the Customization tab to select a blog's layout and add your social profile links.
To enter the Customization tab view, go to Settings/Blog, scroll down and click Customize.
Here you are! Add your short bio, your social profile links and widgets. You can also select a new blog theme and customize the color and layout.
Remember to Save all the changes and check how your blog looks like (your blog is at yourusername.booklikes.com).
3. Add a new Page OR new links
If you prefer to add a new sub-page with your longer bio, you can do it in Settings/Pages.
If you wish to add links, to your other webpages, you can also do it in Settings/Pages.
Your new pages and links will be visible in your Settings/Pages:
Remember that all your actions done in your Settings and in your Dashboard view will be presented on your blog page. Your blog page on BookLikes is: yourusername.booklikes.com
You may also want to check our previous tutorial and how-to posts:
- How to start a book blog on BookLikes
- 7 tips how to write a book review on BookLikes
- BookLikes How-to: Advanced Shelving Options
- BookLikes How to: book search tips
- It's time for a reading challenge!
Consider Finding Good Homes For Your Books And Spreading Literacy
Consider finding good homes for your books and spreading literacy when you need to clear your bookshelves. Reach those who need it most. Books are my friends and there are certain ones I will never give up, especially signed originals. However, as I have no willpower in bookstores, or online retailers, the flow of incoming books can exceed the space on my bookshelves (and stacks on the floor.) I eventually need to find good homes for those books I have read and can pass along. I think it’s good karma to share the gift of reading and great stories. Here are a few ideas for new homes for gently-used books. If you don’t wish to donate books, please consider contributing financially to support the gift of literacy.
LIBRARIES – Support Literacy
“Reading should not be presented to children as a chore or duty. It should be offered to them as a precious gift.” —Kate DiCamillo
Your local “Friends of the Library.“ Most public libraries have a support organization that raises programming dollars for the library. Library of Congress - home of nation's booksMany do so by reselling donated books. Financial donations also go directly into programming.
A Little Free Library. Little Free Library is a nonprofit organization that inspires a love of reading, builds community, and sparks creativity by fostering neighborhood book exchanges around the world. If you don’t know of one in your neighborhood go to littlefreelibrary.org and search for the one nearest you. Not everyone registers theirs, but I still found three registered near me.
School Libraries. Check to see if your nearby K-12 school accepts donations of gently used books. Also consider that as funds for education shrink, sometimes the first budgets to go are the arts and libraries. In Arizona, there are two school tax credits available to taxpayers. This past year I directed my entire tax credit donation to the library budget of a middle school in a lower income area where a friend taught. The school literally had zero budget for the entire year to add to their collection. The donation doubled because my husband’s employer matched the donation. It was deeply appreciated.
MILITARY – Support Our Troops
Operation Paperback. Operation Paperback is a national, non-profit organization, whose volunteers collect gently-used books and send them to American troops overseas, as well as veterans and military families here at home. Since 1999 they have shipped 2.2 million books to America’s military community.
Books for Soldiers. This non-profit began as a one-person operation sending books to troops. Books for Soldiers is a non-profit corporation, operated as a ministry of the non-denominational, interfaith Order of the Red Grail church in North Carolina. Since 2003, the organization has shipped over $30 million in care packages and aid to US troops serving overseas.
Worth a mention: United Through Reading. This organization only accepts financial donations, but what a great program. It connects military families in a unique way. Deployed service members/parents can choose an age-appropriate book to read to their children. They are video-taped reading the book and the recorded videos are then sent to their families. I teared up at this online video. Among the program’s awards, it received The Library of Congress Literacy Awards Program 2015 American Prize.
Books for Africa
Books for Africa remains the largest shipper of donated text and library books to the African continent, shipping over 41 million books to 53 different countries since 1988. This is the only option I found that accepts and needs textbooks if you have any of these leftover from school (and are fairly current.)
Prisons and Domestic Violence Shelters – Send Encouragement and Hope
“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.” —Frederick Douglass
Important note: most prisons ban hardbacks, and require that books be ordered directly from an online retailer to avoid contraband. A kind and generous friend recently ordered nine new copies of HENRY to send to nine different prisoners she corresponds with, as an uplifting story of hope. What a great idea!
I found quite a few programs nationwide that collect books for prisoners. Most are regional to the states and areas they serve. Rather than list specific ones, the Prison Book Program in Quincy, Massachusetts maintains a list of programs nationwide. Click here. The site states the list was current as of 2016.
Most communities have domestic violence shelters and half-way houses for recently released prisoners. In both cases folks generally appear on their doorsteps with no possessions and only the clothes they are wearing. As they try to rebuild their lives, how wonderful if stories and books could be a part of that new life.
Bookmarks for HENRY For anyone wishing to donate new copies of HENRY: A Polish Swimmer’s True Story of Friendship from Auschwitz to America, please contact me. I’m happy to mail you signed bookplates and bookmarks to include with your donation. These can be mailed separately, especially in the case of prisons.
I think most communities have lots of options for donating books to local organizations. Because these would be local, rather than list them here I encourage you to search online for the programs that touch your heart.
Please conduct your own due diligence before donating to any organization, and always contact them in advance to see if, when, and where they accept donations of books. Many groups have very specific criteria as to what they will accept, and often have ‘most-wanted’ lists. The programs listed above are for the United States. Search locally for your own programs.
Do you have more ideas? I’d love to hear them. Post a comment so others can share in the ideas. Feel free to share and spread ideas for literacy.
“The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” – Dr. Seuss
Happy 4th of July! 10 Quotes to cherish your freedom and independence
Enjoy the following quotes and share your favorite book passages!
Stay free, stay happy!
Happy 4th of July, folks! In honor of the US Independence Day we're sharing quotes from literature about freedom, liberty and independence referring to all life fields.
Remember, be free, be happy.
Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country...
Written in 1948, 1984 was George Orwell’s chilling prophecy about the future. And while 1984 has come and gone, Orwell’s narrative is timelier than ever. 1984 presents a startling and haunting vision of the world, so powerful that it is completely convincing from start to finish. No one can deny the power of this novel, its hold on the imaginations of multiple generations of readers, or the resiliency of its admonitions—a legacy that seems only to grow with the passage of time...
They say that the cure for Love will make me happy and safe forever. And I’ve always believed them. Until now. Now everything has changed. Now, I’d rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie.
Mademoiselle: Coco Chanel and the Pulse of History - Rhonda Garelick
Certain lives are at once so exceptional, and yet so in step with their historical moments, that they illuminate cultural forces far beyond the scope of a single person. Such is the case with Coco Chanel, whose life offers one of the most fascinating tales of the twentieth century—throwing into dramatic relief an era of war, fashion, ardent nationalism, and earth-shaking change—here brilliantly treated, for the first time, with wide-ranging and incisive historical scrutiny...
A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
"A Room of One's Own", based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Carlotte Bronte to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity.
A novel of intense power and intrigue, Jane Eyre dazzles and shocks readers with its passionate depiction of a woman’s search for equality and freedom. Orphaned Jane Eyre grows up in the home of her heartless aunt, where she endures loneliness and cruelty, and at a charity school with a harsh regime. This troubled childhood strengthens Jane’s natural independence and spirit—which proves necessary when she takes a position as governess at Thornfield Hall. But when she finds love with her sardonic employer, Rochester, the discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a choice...
Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century. The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez.
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing...
Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
Set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality. With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a moving, highly controversial story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.
Happy Independence Day!
