How to build your own book tracker in Notion (+ FREE template)

In this tutorial I’ll walk you through building your own book tracker in Notion. You can use it to track all of your books, take notes, favorites and much more.

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If you don’t want to build your own and just want the perfect book tracker, that comes feature-packed with a fully integrated book search and many more features, make sure to check out NotionReads. 👉 https://notionreads.com

Outlook: What we’re going to build

Here’s what the end-result will look like:

What the finished Notion Book Tracker looks like

Features

✅ Book database with a gallery & table view

✅ Single book view view showing cover, status, rating etc.

✅ Favorites view displaying all books rated with 4⭐+

✅ Quick overview for what you’re currently reading with quick for the current page and progress indicator

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Get the full template for FREE here

Step 1: Groundwork - Page & Book Database

Let’s start by creating a new page in Notion that will become our book tracker. You can name it anything you want, choose a fitting icon and a nice cover image. I simply went with My Book Tracker 📚 and searched for an image with books through Notion’s integrated Unsplash image module.

Our empty Notion page that we will use to build the book tracker

Click on Empty page with icon and then hit the upper right corner three dots and turn on Full width so we have some more space to work with.

Now, let’s add a new database to the page that will turn into our central book database. To do so start typing “/inline database” and from the context menu select Database - Inline. This will create an empty database to hold all of our book data.

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Step 2: Setting up the book tracker database

Let’s give our database a fitting name - I called mine Bookshelf. Now, let’s add some properties to the database that we want our books to have. You can of course add your own properties (i.e. add ISBN) but I went with these:

Title

Author

Current Page

Dates Read

Page Count

Progress

Rating

Reading Status

We’ll walk through creating each of these now:

Title

Here, we can just use the already existing Name property and rename it to Title.

Author

Click on the pre-existing Tags property. As you can see, this is already a Multi-Select property. This is exactly what we want. Why not a plain Text field? That would also do, but by choosing the Multi-Select we will be able to do things like filter for authors in our database later or even create a new database view only showing our favorite authors.

I simply renamed Tags to Author and also selected a better fitting icon.

Current Page

Add a new property by clicking on “+” and then select type Number. Then just rename it to Current Page and select an icon of your liking. I went with the bookmark symbol.

This property will let us keep track of the page we’re on when reading a book.

Dates Read

This is going to be a simple Date property that we can use to keep track of when we read a book. This is also interesting to use as a filter later, i.e. when you want to find out how many books you read in 2023.

Once again, click the “+” choose type Date, and rename the property. I find the calendar icon to be appropriate already, so no need to change it this time. If you want to change the time or date format, you can also do that. I’m just sticking with the defaults.

Page Count

Just repeat the steps from the Current Page property we added before (add a new Number property, rename it and choose an icon).

Progress

I wanted my reading progress to be displayed as a little progress bar. Similar to how it’s shown in Goodreads and other book tracking apps. The cool thing is, that this is now really simple to solve with Notion’s Formula property:

Once again, add a new property and this time select Formula as the type. You might need to scroll down a bit in the view to see this.

The formula to calculate the progress is really simple. We just need to divide the Current Page by the Page Count. So click on the Formula property’s Formula field (Edit) and add this Formula:


prop("Current Page")/prop("Page Count")

Now, select Show as to be Bar and make sure to set Divide by to 1 (default is 100) as we’re already getting a relative number from our formula above. If you prefer the Ring progress view, you can of course also choose that. Feel free to customize the color as well.

Rating

Since Notion does not yet have a native Rating property, we can use a little trick here: Re-purposing a Select property with some Emojis. Add a new property with the type Select, rename it to Rating and choose an icon. Then add some options and simply add multiple ⭐️ emojis to them. I like to go from one star to five, but feel free to add however many rating options as you like. You can also adjust the colors to your liking.

Reading Status

For our final database property, we’re going to add a Status type property. I like to rename the different statuses to Backlog, Reading & Read.

And with that, we’ve got our database set up. Next, let’s add some books to it.

Step 3: Add books to the database

Right now, all we have is an empty Bookshelf, let’s add some books to it. Feel free to add any of your own books to it, but you can also use the data below as demo data:

Either use one of the three entries that exist by default or hit the New button in the upper right corner of the database.

I’m going to add two books to the database:

Book 1:

Title: The Overstory

Author: Richard Powers

Page Count: 502

Book Cover URL: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/91ZrGWSUXpL.jpg

Book 2:

Title: How the World Really Works

Author: Vaclav Smil

Page Count: 336

Book Cover URL: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41IDXBLD1cL._SX323_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Feel free to choose anything you want for the other properties (Status, Rating, Current Page).

For Dates Read, if you want to add an end date, in the date view, you need to turn on End date.

Once we have the basic information in the database, let’s add the Book Cover to the books. All you need is a link to the image of the book cover which you can get from Google Image Search or Amazon. I’ve added demo links above.

I like to add the same image both as an Icon and as the Cover. This ensures it will be shown in all different database views in Notion.

Click on the book and now click on Add Icon. Once an icon was added, click on it to edit it and choose Custom. Here you can paste the image url.

Now, do the same for the Cover Image. Click on Add Cover, then once the Cover appears, hover over it, click Change Cover, select Link and paste the image url.

This is what our book should now look like:

Repeat these steps for the second book in our database.

Step 4: Create a Gallery View

The table view is practical for viewing all information about our books in one, but a gallery view is much nicer as a digital bookshelf. So let’s add a gallery view to our database.

Above our database title, where it says Table click the “+” to create a New view.

Then, on the right, select Gallery and choose Card preview: Page Cover, Card Size: Medium, Fit image: on. I also like to turn off Show database title to make things look cleaner.

I like to drag the Gallery view to the front to be the default view. This is what our digital bookshelf now looks like:

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Step 5: Add a Favorites View

I like to have a quick overview over my favorite books on my book tracker. To build this, we simply need to create a filtered view of our bookshelf database that looks for the books with a specific rating. To get some data, make sure to give one of the books in the database a rating of 4 stars or higher.

Below the Bookshelf database, type “/linked” and select Linked view of database. Then on the menu to the right select the Bookshelf as the data source and also select the Gallery View.

Then, add a filter to this view by clicking on Filter, then selecting to filter by the Rating and select the ratings which you would like to show as Favorites (I selected both 5 and 4 stars).

This is what the book tracker looks like now. No worries, we’ll make it look nice in just a moment.

Step 6: Add a Currently Reading tracker

Our final component for the book tracker is going to be a reduced view of our database, that only shows the books that we’re currently reading and allows us to quickly update the Current Page property.

Before we continue, make sure to change the Reading Status property of one of the books to Reading.

Now once again, type “/linked” and select Linked view of database to add a new linked view, also select the Bookshelf database, but this time the Table view.

What we want to have in the end is a reduced table that is filtered to only show the books we’re currently reading like this:

To achieve this, on our newly created linked database view, first let’s select to only show the relevant properties (Title, Current Page & Progress):

Click on Properties and then the eye-symbol next to the properties we want to hide.

Now, click on Filter and filter the view by Reading Status = Reading.

As a final step here, I like to hide the database title here to make things appear a little cleaner.

Step 7: Rearranging and Polishing

Now that we have all components together, let’s clean things up and make our Notion book tracker look beautiful.

This is what we have right now:

And if you scroll all the way up, you can see where we want to land.

First, let’s create two columns to put our Favorites and Currently Reading views next to each other. Thankfully, Notion recently made this very simple: Type “/column” and select the 2 columns block.

This will allow us to drag the Favorites view and the Currently Reading table right next to each other. Next, I like to give both a title, by adding a Heading 2 to each column and dragging it to the top of the view. There’s also the option to give the heading a nice colorful background.

Finally, I like to drag the main database to the bottom and add some Dividers and adjust the column widths. Feel free to adjust all of this to your own liking. This is what my version now looks like:

Conclusion

With a few simple steps, you can easily create your own book tracker in Notion. By making use of Notion’s rich database and linking features, having your favorites in view and easily keeping track of your current reading progress is very simple.

If you don’t want to build this on your own but want to use the template from my example above, check out the link below:

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Get the full template for FREE here

Recommendation: NotionReads

When I started tracking my books in Notion, I built a simple book tracker like the one above. But soon I wanted to achieve even more - instead of manually having to enter all book details and linking the book covers, I was looking for a way to have this data be pulled automatically.

That’s why I created NotionReads. It’s the ultimate Notion book tracker that comes feature-packed with everything we built together above, but also a fully-featured book-search that lets you find and add any book without manual data entry. Oh and if you’ve been a Goodreads user - there’s also the option to import all of your books from Goodreads with a simple click.

If you want to upgrade your book tracking experience in Notion, get NotionReads today. It’s a $49 one-time fee for lifetime access.

👉 https://notionreads.com