A few people have reached out to me since the publication of my lengthy treatise on fanfiction on Book Riot earlier this week. While the odd person was glad to have the words as I expressed them, others were more interested in my reference to tracking my reading, both of books and my stories. So I figured I might as well give someone the leg up if they were interested.
First, I start out with the Book Riot Reading Log. I’ve been using this log for a few years, and I definitely keep it up much better than I do my goodreads account. Having it open on every computer and device that I use on a daily basis definitely helps for that, and it also just has a nice and easy format. Nothing like some good old fashioned data to keep me focused and honest.
When I started reading more fanfiction again (thanks in part to Her Majesty Cat Sebastian), I realized from some conversation and Cat herself that I wanted to track my reading. I spent many a year spending an unimaginable amount of time reading fanfiction, whether it was in the “computer room” in my family home, my bed or desk in the dorms, or on the couch in various apartments (and the bed, now that I both have a smartphone and know how to send longer fics to my kindle). What did that add up to? And what was a good way to record what I was reading in the first place?
So I thought of the most important bits of data to me and made up a spreadsheet. Title, author, grouping, when I finished, were all important. But the key thing to me? Word count.
Here is a template that you can use if you want! It’s view only so you’ll have to make a copy.
What I actually did was make that a tab in my reading log, but y’all don’t need to see that. And then, since I have a very minuscule understanding of how formulas and conditional formatting works, I went to the Stats tab and found a nice little place to add a row for my fics.
As I mentioned, I’m not a genius, so I just pulled in number of fics and number of words. Here are the formulas to do that:
Number of fics: =COUNTA(Fics!A2:A500)
Number of words: =SUM(Fics!C2:C501 )
(Note that if you change the name of the tab or move your rows, you’ll need to make a couple small changes in the formula.)
Et voilà! You are now tracking your fics. If you want to do anything else with your tracking, you’ll have to be way better at formulas than me.
(And if you are doing other things with your tracking, tell me! I want to know!)