If you've been sharing book titles with family, friends, neighbors and your office coworkers for any length of time, you've already planted the seeds for a new book club to grow. The first step is to query your fellow readers and determine if there's sufficient interest to take your informal chatter to a more structured forum and hold regular discussion groups. If you're brand new to the neighborhood but would like to put together a group of kindred spirits who enjoy reading books, your best bet is to put out some fliers at coffee shops, libraries, and on grocery store bulletin boards and ask interested parties to contact you. If you want to expand participation beyond your immediate zip code, you may want to consider starting an Internet book club and staging your meetings in chat rooms. Whatever approach you take, it would be helpful to have a questionnaire at the ready which queries whether prospective participants primarily read fiction or nonfiction, who some of their favorite authors and books are, and why they would like to be part of the club. Although book clubs tend to function best when there are 10 or fewer members, you need to keep in mind that work and family commitments as well as vacations and sickness may preclude participants from attending every session. You should, therefore, encourage anyone who is interested to attend the first planning meeting. If you decide to operate your book club in an electronic environment, the best way to start is with a website where your members can post their book reviews as well as participate in different forums and exchange comments and recommendations with one another. This would be practical if you have participants who live in different parts of the country (or world) or if your membership's respective schedules make it impossible to physically get together on a regular basis. You can either make your website accessible to anyone who goes trolling for book club information or set it up as a password-protected venue. Another option for an Internet-based book club is to generate a biweekly or monthly newsletter and invite members to send you their input for publication. Although this lacks the energy you'd get from personal interactions, it still serves the purpose of getting people to talk about books they love and loathe and getting recommendations for new reads from like-minded individuals
At your first planning meeting - which could easily take place as an email chat - you and your fellow book lovers will need to determine how often you're going to get together and where your meetings will take place. For small groups, it's often fun to rotate the meetings at each others' homes and have the hostess serve light snacks such as wine and cheese or dessert and coffee. If it's not practical to hold book club meetings in each others' homes, a coffee shop, restaurant, library or park might serve your purposes. If it's a public facility or a commercial venue, you'll need to check with the proper authorities and obtain permission to hold your meetings. If some of your members live in an apartment or a condo complex, they may have access to a community room or conference room that you could use. In the preliminary meeting, your group will need to decide how often it wants to get together in order to give everyone enough time to read the selected titles. On average, book clubs meet once a month, and the person hosting each month's event is responsible for calling or emailing everyone in the club to remind them a few days in advance. A maximum of two hours is a good length for a book club meeting.
In order for all of your book club members to fully enjoy the experience of participation, you'll need to decide how you're going to pick each month's book(s) for review and discussion. In concert with this is the decision of whether the group is only going to read one type of book (i.e., romance, SciFi, biographies) or an eclectic mix. Book selections for the next month's meeting can either be put to a vote by your membership or announced as a surprise by whomever is hosting that month's event. So as not to break anyone's budget, it's important that books be easily accessible to everyone participating; i.e., via the library, electronic downloads, borrowing from fellow members. You'll also want to decide how your book discussions are going to flow. For instance, you may want to have a generic checklist that addresses elements such as plot, theme, dialogue, characters, setting, and resolution so that everyone will literally be on the same page insofar as knowing what to look for as they read. Another idea would be to have everyone write down a question or two they'd like to toss out to the group for reflection, clarity or debate. If the author of the book lives locally or if there is a nearby university, the discussion portion of your meeting may include a guest appearance by the writer or a literature professor who can point out things the rest of you may have missed in your reading. Reprints of classic literature as well as new releases may contain study guides and discussion questions in the back pages; these can make for a great jumping off point for your book club members.