Book Tracking Database

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A couple people have asked me about the book tracking base I use, so this is a slightly simplified version of it, with some example data filled in to show how it works.

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The main fields I track are Title, Author, Series, Genre, Pages, Status, Rating, Release Date, Read Date, and Notes. I also track protagonist gender/sexuality and type of romance, which I'll explain in more detail further down. Add, modify, or delete fields as you like.

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Tables included are Books, Authors, and Series. Authors and Series only have one view and should be fairly self-explanatory, but Books has a whole bunch of views, as explained below.

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(These are all grid views unless noted otherwise.)

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All

Shows all books in the database. Sorts by Author Sort Name > Series > # in series > Title. (Author Sort Name is a calculated field from the Authors table.) I usually hide the # in series column; it doesn't need to be visible for the sort to work.

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Read

All read books. Sorts by Read Date, with the most recently read at the top.

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Read - 2018

Same as the Read view, but only shows books read in 2018. You can easily modify this for different years (or other time periods) by changing the date in the filters.

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Unread

Books that been released, but not read yet. I have mine set up to include both owned and wishlist books, grouped by genre and sorted by number of pages. Modify this however you'd like!

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Unreleased

Books that haven't been released yet, grouped by release year/month. I've included a couple of dummy example books, so you can see how it works even if you're viewing this much later and the real books I included have been released already.

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Release Calendar

A calendar view showing the release dates of upcoming books. I like to feed the iCal subscription for this view into my personal Google Calendar, so I can easily see if anything's coming up.

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Queer

One of my big reading goals for 2018 has been to read more books with LGBT+/queer content, so I set this up to help me track that. If you're not interested in tracking this sort of thing, you can just delete this view, and ignore the rest of this section. If you're interested in tracking something similar (books with characters of color, disabled characters, etc.), you should be able to set that up using a similar structure to this.

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This view is based on the Protagonists and Romance columns:

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  • Protagonists tracks protagonist gender and sexuality; included options are Male, Female, Nonbinary, Other, Transgender, Bisexual, and Asexual. (I haven't included Gay and Lesbian just because for most of my books this is covered by the Romance column; you can definitely add those in if you'd like.)
  • Romance tracks the type of romance in the book; included options are Male/Female, Male/Male, Female/Female, Other, and None.

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The view then filters by those two columns, and includes any book with options other than Male, Female, or Male/Female. I like to have it grouped by Status so I can easily see books I haven't read yet.

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Updated July 6, 2018 at 12:07 AM
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Explore the base
All
Read
Read - 2018
Unread
Unreleased
Release Calendar
Queer
Grid view
Grid view