If you love to read and love to share your thoughts and experiences you have while reading, a book club could be the perfect situation for you. However, finding your way into an already established book club isn’t always easy. Because of this, you might be thinking about starting your own book club and creating a safe space for yourself and others to read and share together.
To help you in getting started with this, here are three tips for starting a book club.
Find People You Enjoy Talking To
The people that you have in your book club can really make or break this group. With the right people, a book club can be a thought provoking place where you can share your thoughts and ideas while also learning from others as well.
To create this kind of group, you’ll want to find people that you enjoy talking to. While the bulk of your book club shouldn’t be about catching up with old friends, if you know of people that you genuinely enjoy speaking with, that make you feel comfortable, that have a wide variety of opinions and ideas, and that you could enjoy spending a few hours each month with, creating your book club with these people in mind could put you off to a really great start.
Make The Meetings Convenient
In people’s busy lives, joining a book club can feel like a big commitment. In addition to having to read a new book on a regular basis, they will also have to find time to meet together and discuss the book.
To make this part of the book club as seamless as possible, you should do everything in your power to make meetings as convenient as possible. If there’s someone who has a hard time leaving home, be it due to living in an assisted living facility or other health reasons, consider holding your meeting close to them each time. Additionally, try to pick a time of day that will work best for everyone involved. Once you have this, try to stick to this schedule so that everyone can plan their personal schedules around this known time.
Set Guidelines For Choosing Books
Once you have the people and place all set, you now have to get to choosing the books that you’ll read as part of your book club.
As a good starting off point, you should speak together as a club about what guidelines you’ll want to follow when choosing a book. You might allow everyone to choose one book in a rotating order, you might want to vote on suggestions given by the ground as a whole, or you might choose some other way. Just make sure that you stick to the guidelines you set up so that everyone knows what is going on and how to function within your book club.
If you’re thinking about start your own book club, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you get off on the right foot.
