I’m kind of impressed we’re looking at this kind of situation, to be honest. I agree with you here, I think; I guess the best thing to do at this point is to just wait and see if there are any last minute voters and consider two clubs from there.
For me personally, I voted for コップクラフト but own and have wanted to read 本好き; most of the reason I haven’t started the latter yet is that I don’t want another long series on my plate. >.>; But if there’s a book club for it then it’s a good excuse to at least sample vol. 1… I think what needs to happen is that we all need to vote for a terrible mystery club book for the next round so I can be free for two potential threads in this club, haha.
I think I’m with you here as well. I guess it helps that most(?) LNs I’ve seen probably do tend to hang around the <L30 range, so just making an official rule to keep things consistent would make sense. Granted, the default level for an ungraded LN is 30, so there’s the possibility of voting for some book that ends up being a L36 one or something. I don’t know if there’s any way to avoid that other than encouraging people to look at a preview version beforehand, though, or make a rule that you can only nominate books that already have X number of gradings. I’m not a huge fan of the latter idea, granted.
Personally I’m only joining if Cop Craft wins, I’ve been eyeing it for a long time before I even could read Japanese, but was always too busy reading other things. A club would be a nice way to get some traction.
There was/is already a WK book club for Honzuki, where I tried to read it, but couldn’t really get into it.
I’m aware of that book club and I fear that might produce it to not be feasible to be honest.
For people who have been in book clubs before: What’s a healthy start of members usually? Do joins happen with any sort of frequency after the 2 first weeks?
I can’t speak super authoritatively towards healthy starting members; my gut tells me a good start is something like 8-10+ for a new club or a solid base of regulars for an existing one; the existing base could be much smaller, around 4-5. This is just from personal experience and observations in higher-level clubs, though; I don’t know how the numbers change in lower level ones.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a join after the first two weeks, unless that person expressed interest in the beginning but mentioned they’d have to start later anyway. It’s very possible some people do join but remain lurkers. Really it’s just how steep of a downward curve you have for participants more than anything.
You should generally expect around half of the initial members to make it to the end, though of course it varies. So I think a minimum of 8-10 at the beginning is preferable.
I think both of the last ABC books started out with a lot of people and quickly became just 2-3 people due to the various factors. Also the MBC before 告白 ended up being just 4 with 2-3 of us finishing it out of spite.
I don’t think I’ve seen a book club before where (it seems like) many of the participants are rereading it rather than it being as new.
The Absolute Beginners Book Club over on WK often starts with more than a hundred members. From those, around 20 tend to stay until the end, and out of those 20, it’s roughly 5 people who actually participate with posts in the book club threads. These numbers are from memory and may vary a lot from club to club, of course. The smaller the number of people participating, the more active they tend to be in the book club threads though. In a book club with 50+ people, it’s easier to just lurk, I suppose.
After catching up with the thread I think I’ve shifted my position on the split a bit, and I guess I’ll toss it out as a suggestion since we’re closing in on the end of the voting period:
If コップクラフト does end up winning (which it seems like it will), I think we should hold off for a few weeks until after the reading begins before considering setting up another club. Hopefully this will give the winner here some breathing room and encourage more people to give it a shot. Then for those who do end up bouncing off of it but still want to participate in a book club, there will be another chance not too far into the future.
This would also give the forum some time to discuss and sort out how we’d like to structure our book clubs, and since コップクラフト will be ongoing it would serve as a nice pilot run to reference in addition to the mystery novel club.
Is only fair for コップクラフト, even if it’s a close win, a win is a win.
I’ll just keep on my reading on my own, until the next opportunity comes. I’ve even have new nominations in mind, in case there’s another voting round.
Handily, the poll for when to start should come in handy here. First choice is June 26, and second is July 10, so we could use those two dates if people are interested.
Okay! Voting has officially closed (I think I might have set it to close a day early sorry guys) with our winner being コップクラフト and a very healthy second place going to 本好き. There’s been some discussion about how we want to handle this first winning pick, given that コップクラフト is a bit of an outlier difficulty-wise and it and 本好き share very little overlap in terms of voters.
Here’s the rough plan as has so far been discussed:
As the official winner, we will begin reading コップクラフト on June 26, as voted on in this poll (scroll to the bottom of the post).
On July 10th, we’ll reconvene here to check out the situation on コップクラフト’s side. If club participation has tanked significantly, and/or if there’s still significant interest in reading 本好き separately, and/or due to some other circumstance, we can discuss setting up a separate club thread for it.
Ah, and I’ve added a (temporary?) rule about only nominating LNs <=L30 in the home post, since we’ve had some discussion about keep difficulty consistent in this particular club. Let me know if I should change anything!
That seems a bit intense. Almost all of the nominations are L30 or above (one exception), including the winner, コップクラフト | L35. Honestly unless a lot of people are requesting a level-based limit, it doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
I’m happy to hear other opinions; I feel like the prevailing ones have been “I don’t care” or “Copcraft sticks out for being at a higher level”, so I just went with the latter for now. We have until our next voting period to decide, at least.
By the way, I don’t think that コップクラフト is particularly hard for a light novel. I could see it drop in the N2 range with more gradings (so far only 3 people graded it, including myself).
Yeah, comparing JPDB ratings for some well graded books, Sword Art Online and Danmachi are both rated harder at 8/10 compared to 7/10 for Cop Craft. On Natively both are lvl 32 33 and 32 respectively ATM. Of course that’s just a statistical rating, but supports the fact it’s probably a bit too high.
sorry guys) with our winner being 
There can definitely be some wiggle room, haha. I’ll update that.