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Consider the points below when you schedule your book club and make club format decisions:
- What will you call yourselves (consider coming up with a name for your book club to help create a shared group identity)?
- Who will take care of the administrative details such as reserving rooms, sending virtual invitations, tracking the presenter rotation, sending emails, etc.?
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- What kind of book club environment do you want to create?
- Highly social/casual
- Highly academic
- Somewhere in-between?
- How many books will be read in a year? This will largely depend on the time commitment that your members are willing to make to the club. Some common choices:
- One book a month (some clubs read one a month and take a portion of the year off such as during the summer)
- One book every six weeks
- One book every other month
- One book a semester
- One book a quarter
- Where will the club meetings be held?
- Virtual meeting platform (Zoom, Teams, etc.)
- If you're meeting in person:
- Find a location that allows for food and drink. Many book clubs believe that providing or allowing for food is considered an essential component of book club success.
- Restaurants and cafes can be good options. However, if you decide to go this route you will need to keep in mind noise levels at the location and remember to make reservations ahead of time.
- Consider a location that has computer projection facilities. Depending on what type of club you have, you may want to look at timelines or figures showing study data as a group. If you do not have access to this type of location, consider sharing these as handouts ahead of time.
- You may also consider reserving and meeting in a library conference room or classroom.
- When will meetings be scheduled?
- First thing in the morning, during the lunch hour, in the evening during dinner?
- How often do you plan on meeting (every month, once a semester, etc.)?
- Who will be invited to attend?
- For book clubs it is often recommended that participation be kept between 8-16 members. Reasoning:
- This allows for a lively discussion even if several members are unable to attend the meeting.
- If the attendees do not know each other too few members can sometimes make the discussion falter.
- This also keeps the group discussions from being too unwieldy if everyone is in attendance.
- If the attendees do know each other and are comfortable conversing then too many members may make the discussion difficult to manage for the discussion facilitator.
- If this is an academic club, regular attendance by faculty can help the book club succeed. If a book club's attendees are largely overworked professional students, residents, graduate students, and postdocs; attendance by faculty may be needed to make the club succeed over the long-term. Comments and questions from faculty are important components of these clubs and faculty presence makes requiring attendance of the students, residents, postdocs, etc. possible.
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- Book clubs typically rotate presenter/facilitator responsibilities. Will each of your book club meetings have a presenter or will each of your book club sessions have a discussion facilitator?
- Do you want to ask participants to commit to attending and abide by a set of participation guidelines?
- Some book clubs ask their members to agree to a set of guidelines for participation. I have included below an example of one set of guidelines for a social book club that I facilitate:
- Read the book before the meeting (when possible, we understand that life happens and you may not finish the book every month).
- Participate in the discussion!
- Do not monopolize the discussion, allow all members to contribute.
- Avoid side discussions.
- Do NOT avoid difficult conversations because they may be uncomfortable or cause disagreements within the group.
- Disagreements are bound to happen; it is important that these disagreements remain respectful.
- Disrespectful/inappropriate/intolerant language and actions will not be tolerated.
