Want to start a new book club?
We recently announced a major evolution of the reader community on BetaBooks.
- The former Beta Reader Pool has now become "Pam's Beta Jam," our inaugural "Book Club."
- We now have the tools in place to host more than one book club on the site.
This is an exciting opportunity for new curators to join Pam in leading communities of authors and readers. If you're interested in potentially starting one, here's what it would look like.
If you're not familiar with them, Book Clubs are groups of readers led by a curator. The curator receives submissions from authors, screens these, and picks good books to share with the group at a regular interval (ie. once a month). Readers in the group get to discover new authors and new books for free. Authors get a free wave of feedback on their beta-stage manuscript. It's a lot of fun, and a win for everyone involved.
To start a new club, the first step would be for you to decide what kind of book club you want to run. Specifically do you want to focus on a particular genre or genres? How broad or narrow do you want to go? Based on that decision you can set a submission policy so authors know whether or not to submit for your group.
From there, the curator has two main ongoing responsibilities:
1. Maintain a healthy pool of readers. This means you probably go on Facebook, Goodreads, etc. and post to let people know about the book club you have and invite them to join. In my experience you need more than 50 people to make a sustainable pool, because only about 10-20% of your people will read any particular book. But the more effort you put in as a community leader, chatting and asking questions, generally just being a friendly host, the higher the participation will be.
2. Maintain a stream of books to read. This is the same basic idea, tell people what kind of submissions you accept, invite them to submit, and then review and pick submissions when they come in. This part is actually pretty easy. The number of authors out there who want to be read is quite large, they're easy to find and very eager to follow if you tell them there's a chance strangers will read their work and give feedback. If you do it just like Pam's group, picking one or two books one time per month, then it doesn't take too much effort to find the submissions.
On the BetaBooks side, we've learned that it's important not to put too big of spotlight on something when it's brand new. Instead, it's best to start small and grow in little steps. For potential curators, our plan is to give you the tools, tips, and encouragement to help you get started, then give you time to get used to running a book club with a small, private group that you build on your own.
Once you've gotten comfortable running the group and things are going smoothly, if you'd like to open it up to the broader BetaBooks community (in other words, go public), then we can do a little bit of promotion and list your group on the book clubs page. That should result in a nice influx of people, and by the time all that happens you should have something pretty awesome running :)
This whole thing is new to me and Paul, so the other big responsibility for new curators will be to tell us what's working and not working in the software, and how we can do better. I'll do the best I can to continue refining the tools so they make your life easy. Since Pam's group is running on this same set of tools, I know that it's already good enough to get by, but I also know from Pam that there's plenty of room left to improve :)
If you're keen to give this a shot, I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an email with the idea for your group, and I'll be happy to create a book club for you in the BetaBooks app so you can get started.
