I think it’s about time I start another regular series, to join Charity Shop Tuesday, and this is another simple one. I will be writing about one thing, every Friday, that has brought me joy or inspiration or has made my life more productive or convenient.
This week, let me introduce you to Litsy. Litsy is, essentially, Goodreads meets Instagram. The photos are optional, the books are the whole point. It’s an app that was originally released for iOS and my friend Jim at YA Yeah Yeah was really enthusiastic about it, so when the Android version came out a couple of weeks ago, I jumped straight onto the bandwagon.
What I really like about it is that all posts fall into three categories:
Reviews – which are limited to 451 characters, so you have to be succinct when you’re writing them, and it’s easy to read several whenever you have a spare few minutes. I’ve really embraced the character limit, almost all of my posts on Litsy are reviews. It feels a lot less pressured than writing reviews for my blog.
One of my reviews got featured by Litsy. I’m still not entirely sure what this means, because I don’t seem to see any ‘featured’ posts in my feed, but it has been pretty cool!
This photo, that I originally took for Instagram months ago, has been up on Litsy since last Tuesday, and is still getting likes and comments from Littens (that appears to be the most common term Litsy users uses to describe themselves and each other). It currently has 310 likes, plus 131 more people have added it to their stacks!
That’s another thing I really like, the Stack feature. Litsy lets you add books other people have posted about to either a to-read, currently reading, or have read ‘stack’ (list). It’s wonderful that this is part of the app and that I don’t have to jump across to Goodreads to keep track of books I want to read. You can also rate books using a really simple system – ‘Rate’, ‘So-So’, ‘Pan, or ‘Bail’ – much quicker than dithering over star ratings!
Blurbs – this is any comment about a book. I like to use blurbs to share photos of things related to books, and I plan to use it to show books I’ve just acquired in the future.
Quotes – does what it says on the tin!
Every post has to be tied to a specific book, which makes it slightly confusing when people just want to post memes and pick a random book to associate them with. I hope this is something that Litsy sort out in future updates.
