How well are you doing at your New Year’s resolution to read more? Start a book club with friends to help keep you accountable and get outside your comfort zone with reading! Here’s our list of 7 steps to creating your book club!
- Invite members
- The perfect, intimate book club consists of eight to twelve members. Invite three or four of your friends and have each invite someone else, so you can meet new people!
- Decide what kind of book club you want
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Are you here for the reading or more to socialize? How seriously are you taking the book club? What do you want to get out of this? Your answers could determine the types of books you choose or how often you choose a new book.
- Based on your type of book club, choose a setting
- Do you want to meet more intimately at someone’s house or somewhere like a restaurant where you can escape the craziness at home for an hour? Maybe you don’t even want to meet in person! Let’s be real, not all of our friends live right next door (unfortunately. Meeting online through something like Zoom is a great way to get together and hang out long distance, while also reading a good book!
- Selecting a book
- Follow along with nationally known book clubs like Jenna or Reece’s Book Club! With monthly releases, you’ll never hit the rut of not knowing what to pick next!
- Feeling a little overwhelmed with the millions of choices of books out there? Decide on one genre, author, or maybe a series to focus your club!
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Letting each member choose a book is a great way to get out of your comfort zone and read something you may have never picked up on your own!
- Find discussion questions
- Shout out to all those authors who add discussion questions to the back of the book! That makes this step so much easier! However, not every author does that, so you may have to find some book-specific questions, ask generic questions, or have each member bring in a question or two to lead the group.
- Set a meeting schedule
- Decide how often and when works best for everyone to meet and carve out an hour or two to socialize and discuss your book! Once you’ve figured out how often you’ll meet, decide how many books you’ll read this year. Life gets busy, maybe it’s not realistic to read one book a month. Figure out what everyone can do and set a goal for your club!
- (Optional) Field trips
- It’s not all about reading! Every once in a while, plan a day out to a winery or a dinner to hang out with your members outside of the book club to get to know each other better!
Once your book club gets started and everyone gets to know each other, your club will start to develop its quirks and traits that will make meetings more fun. You will also start to see what works best for your group and what doesn’t. You’ll get into a groove in no time! If you need more hosting tips, check out our ‘Hosting a Book Club 101’ Blog!
If you use any of these tips for your book club or use any of our products in your meetings, we would love to see! Tag @jollityandco and use #partywithjollity!