Welcome to my how to blogging advice series! Today, I’m answering the age-old question of how to make an exclusive DNF shelf on Goodreads!
Goodreads automatically gives you three shelves that are mutually exclusive: Read, Currently Reading, and Want to Read. Being mutually exclusive means that a book can only be on one of the shelves. So, if you’ve marked a book as Read, it can’t also be on Want to Read.
But, you can make any shelf you want mutually exclusive as well! This can be super useful if you want to indicate which books you’ve DNFed or books you don’t want to read or books you didn’t like, or whatever.
(also I just want to preface this by saying my friend Satou Johns also did a post describing this a couple of weeks ago, and his is much more succinct than mine, so make sure you go check his out as well!)
How to add a shelf
This is super easy, but I thought I’d point it out just in case someone was lost.
- Select “My Books” at the top of the webpage.
- On the sidebar, under the list of your shelves, click “Add shelf”.
- A box will pop up for you to name your shelf. Just click “add” once you’ve named it, and it’ll automatically be made.

How to make a shelf mutually exclusive
This is super easy to do as well, but I see people on Twitter and Goodreads asking all the time.
- Once you’re on My Books, add a shelf and title it DNF (or whatever you want)
- Click (Edit) next to Bookshelves.
- Once there, select “exclusive” for the shelf you want.
- Make sure you click “I’m Done” at the bottom to save your changes!


And that’s it! Honestly, it’s that easy. But now, you know which books you’ve DNFed.
So that’s how to make a DNF shelf on Goodreads! I hope this was useful!
If there’s anything you want me to cover, let me know and I can do my best!
Thanks for reading! xx
Aww thank you for mentioning me here n.n great post! :3
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Of course! Thank you 🙂
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AH! I didn’t know that we could do this! So helpful! 😀 Now, the big question: Is there any way to capitalize our shelf titles? The OCPD part of my brain cringes to see “Read” (capital R) but “did not finish” (no caps …) …
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I’m so glad this was helpful!! And I know, that’s so annoying! I don’t think there’s a way to capitalize, unfortunately (at least not that I know of). You could rename the capitalized ones to lowercase, I guess?
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I didn’t know how to do this so thank u!☺️ also I would love a tour of your best of the best shelf!!
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You’re very welcome, I’m glad it was useful! And yes, that would be such a great post idea!! I love to talk about my favourite books lol
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This is really handy for making a goodreads shelf exclusive– I still don’t always understand goodreads as I haven’t explored it that much so this was great and really easy to follow!! 😊
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Ahh thank you, I’m glad it was useful!! I have a post next weekend about more Goodreads tricks 🙂
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Oh ok thank you I will look out for it!! 😊
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I was so happy the day I learned how to make a DNF shelf! It’s a huge help for me. I also have an exclusive shelf for books on-time-out. I haven’t given up on them entirely (like with the DNF), but I like to have the record of having tried them before.
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It’s so useful! That’s such a good idea for a shelf, too!
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Thanks! It helps me, since they aren’t quite the same as DNFs.
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