I wanna help, but I’ve told myself I won’t pick up any more rn.
If it helps, I set all up my book clubs threads so that they update on Saturday night (my time). So I just create/update them altogether. Also I found simplifying the nomination template can make a huge difference for me.
The problem there is if nobody wants to grab it. But I guess it defaults to the club organizer
I know with the ones I’ve made (Beginner’s LN & Class S), I kinda felt like I had to in the beginning - just to get things on track (well both Class S picks have been my noms anyway)… But I think in the future I’ll probly ask the nominator if they’re up for running the book threads. Especially with novels I’m not interested in, the work gets tedious very quickly. For manga it’s much easier.
Yeah; the worst case is literally what is right now happening all the time.
Also at least on WK, like 95% of the time the one nominating the book takes over organizing the reading threads.
I feel like always asking the nominator first is a good move either way. I can’t be the only one who is actually excited to organize the club threads for a book I nominated. Honestly, it would feel like someone taking something fun away from me if I didn’t have that option.
Having now run both a WK “main” book club pick and an “informal” book club here, I’m a big fan of the informal style. It’s so much easier to be able to just post a reply to the thread once a week to say “Hey, it’s week X, we’re reading chapter Y”, compared to “create new thread for the week by copying the text for the previous week, edit it to have the right page and chapter details, edit last week’s thread to link to this one, edit the home thread top post to add this week’s thread, post to the home thread about the new thread”. Plus if you have a book club that’s not super busy you end up with a lot of threads with two or three replies in them, which feels a bit sad.
Agreed the single thread approach is so much easier… interesting that you’ve combined it with also having a set schedule. For Class-S we’ve done no schedule, and it’s resulted in a much faster reading pace than other clubs I’ve been a part of (ex マリア様がみてる 1 finished in less than 1 month, which averages about 56 pgs/wk). Note: I’m not saying that is/isn’t a good thing - it just caught me by surprise
My only hesitation with single thread for more structured clubs, with larger participants, is that it makes it much harder for latecomers or people joining afterwards to participate in the earlier discussion. Particularly if it’s novels, with a slow reading pace, the volume of replies make it cumbersome.
I guess you can somewhat ameliorate that by linking to the individual replies, where each new week starts, in the home thread
On WK for the VN club back when it was active, we did informal clubs too without a set schedule. It was more like finish the VN within x months but otherwise read at your own pace with no weekly schedule. We didn’t really have any issues with a single thread (although for VNs with multiple games in the series, we made a new thread for each game). Our club was relatively small though so that might have made it easier to look at replies in a single thread.
Right it’s really for books like Home Thread for また、同じ夢を見ていた / 또다시 같은 꿈을 꾸었어 📖 🇯🇵 🇰🇷 (which was probably around 600 replies for the whole book) where would be an issue. Tho the readership for the beginner LN club has been substantially lighter since then. I’m retrospect, Summer Wars really should have been single thread (it’s dwindled down to < 5 replies per week, pretty quickly )
For comparison the first flowers thread had 55 replies (idk whether that’s representative or not tho), and the マリみて 1 thread had 96 replies. Maybe I’ll try the structured single thread for the Beginner LN club in the future tho, when it’s not something huge like また、同じ夢を見ていた, and see how it goes. Thx
Btw, while I don’t think this has been done before, there is always the option for starting out structured, but then deciding to switch to “all answers from week X on in a single thread” when it turns out that replies per week are very low. No need to keep a format when it turns out to be unnecessary.
For Flowers we held a vote for how long we wanted to read each game before moving onto the next one. In the main club, we looked at the character count of the VN and for every 25k characters we’d add a week to the length (so a 100k VN would be read within a month, 150k in 6 weeks etc) but set a limit to a max length of 4 months. So anything longer would just be read at a faster pace, but still no weekly schedule for any of those.
The Island VN has the most amount of replies (360+ and some people are still reading). I think some people did have some issues reading older posts as the thread got larger but Akashelia made a post near the top of the thread linking to everyone’s thoughts at various points in the VN to help solve that. I guess if you made a wikipost at the start of thread so anyone could edit their post into that it’d make it easier for people to reply to older posts or read thoughts on earlier chapters.
It doesn’t have to be that way! That would be fair game to change and make the club organiser’s role a lot easier. If people voted for the pick, surely at least one person can step up to run it, and it shouldn’t be the overall club organiser at all unless they really want to. I hadn’t noticed that here or I would have said something!
I’m currently running 4 clubs at WK so a no, sorry, but you have my commiseration. Thanks for keeping them going up to now.
One idea if you don’t get any takers here is to start with one and step down on that thread and ask for volunteers to step up. I wouldn’t do all at once, but one at a time, probably someone would rather step up than have the club fall asleep. That has been how the transfers have gone at wk, people probably won’t volunteer until you basically say you’re done.
In theory sure, but that doesn’t mean someone will. So what do you do if there is a situation where nobody steps up? Not saying it’s likely or frequent - but it’s still the possible failure point for that model.
A truly Sci-Fi Book / Manga Club, no light fantasy stuff. Examples… well I have a hard time finding them myself at my level so I need to crowdsource recommendations ~L26-30ish but think Steins Gate, キノの旅 (borderline SF), 星を継ぐもの, 三体, here we go this one at my level: メカニカル バディ ユニバース (just found these via Amazon).
Here here. I haven’t attempted to run a club but the main people in place seem to know the rules and process around it so it feels a little daunting. Less daunting than trying to post on Reddit but still daunting that I will be in “violation!”
The easiest way to start a structured club (i.e. one where people vote for a book, read that book, and repeat) would probably be to look at the first post of existing clubs, e.g. Light Novel Book Club. Do the rules make sense to you? Do you like the nomination template? Maybe look at some other clubs, and then shamelessly mix and match the parts you like and rewrite the parts you don’t like. Post it, and done - you have a club!
Are you not sure there is enough interest or reading material for a club yet? Make an informal thread “Gathering interest for a Sci-Fi Book / Manga Club” with a first post explaining your club idea, your intention to see who is interested, and a call to post Natively links to books/manga the club could read, and then see where that goes.
Rules and processes only apply to already existing clubs, so there’s no way to be in violation of them. It’s your club! The only reason I’m suggesting to look at existing clubs for inspiration is because that way you don’t have to come up with everything yourself.
Anyway, those are my 2 cents on the topic. That’s how I would make a new club here if I ever had the desire to.
Sounds good. Is there an SF club anywhere else like WK? I might just start one anyway even if it is for myself at some point. But, even now my queue feels quite full I would have to drop and switch.
So yes, Mystery Club was all me at the start to get things rolling. Currently it’s offered to the nominator but they are allowed to decline and I’ll run it. I’m currently quite happy with the system we have for the Mystery Club (should all be documented in the OP) and while other clubs are welcome to reorganize to suit their needs I think we’ve found our stride for our audience at this time
I might be able to take over as administrator for either the children’s club or the iyashikei club (or maaaaybe both), but probably not until after my trip to Japan, so around the end of February… would that still help?
Iyashikei has already voted on a start date and won’t be done until after you get back I’d imagine. Children’s club will be voting pretty soon, so based on timing, iyashikei might be the better one if you’re in the market for just one.
There is a sci-fi tag. It’s a pretty tough genre to find stuff in that difficulty level though - or, there’s plenty at that level, but most of it will not look like a classic science fiction story at all, if that’s what you’re looking for.
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