How to Start An Online Book Club
Reading Guides, tips and websites for Oraganizing a Reading Group
Sep 16, 2008
Choosing What Kind of Book Club You Want
An excellent guide to starting an online book club is Book-Clubs-Resource.com. This guide can also help you with the decision as to whether you want the club to be a general or special interest one. Search around for existing online book clubs and reading group blogs and see what other groups are reading. Oprah.com lists all her past selections and provides reading guides and discussion questions for many of them. Here is another extensive list of free reading guides.
Spreading the Word
Once you have a good notion of what your tone, style and selections will be, choose your first book and start sending out the invitations. What other websites do you normally go to? Any social networking sites are a great place to start. Any smaller special interest groups like Mac users or scrapbookers might be another good place.. Don't forget your non-cyber friends and family.
You might want to use Qlubb.com to send your invitations, and to post your calendar, notices about club doings, and book discussion questions. Have everyone in the new book club mention it in their blogs. Also you can use some of the message boards available on the Freebie List,
Keep the Qlubb site or whatever site you are using current, and don't get discouraged if there's not much interest at first. You have to grow a book club.
Establish Ground Rules
Share ideas with your new members. Do they want to avoid expenses and stick to only books available in paperback? What methods do they suggest for selecting what books are to be read? Decide on a system. Pick a leader. It doesn't have to be the person who started the group. How will discussion leaders be selected? Try to involve as many people as possible to make it everyone's group.
Try to avoid spoilers by making sure people are reading at roughly the same speed, and no one is giving away any secrets. Before you post or answer someone's question, read the responses you've missed so you can tell how far everyone has read.
If All Else Fails
If you decide that setting up a book club is too much responsibility after all, Book-Club-Resources.com provides a list of ready-made ones and you can Google up many more.
And should you decide you are going to go stir crazy if you don't get out of the house once in a while, Meetup.com will help find a book club near your zipcode.
Happy warm winter reading.
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