How to Start an Awesome Book Club

I have been participating in book clubs for years. I LOVE reading new books and the motivation I get to read something new with a good book club. Lately, I have enjoyed facilitating the book club at work and thought I should share my thoughts on how to start a book club and make it AWESOME!

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Have you ever been to a bad book club? Maybe there isn’t a designated leader? To many people? Maybe the book selections were terrible. Whatever your experience has been, know you can make a difference and start a book club YOU love and your friends or family will LOVE too!

After facilitating book clubs for many people with co-workers, I thought it was a good time to share my thoughts so you have time to put together your own before the new year.

How to Start a Book Club

These tips are what I have found most useful! Feel free to adapt and update to fit your needs.

First, someone has to be the organizer. Pick a leader and rotate each year if you would like.
Size of book club doesn’t matter – but if larger than 10 people, only allow for 2 options per person in next step.
Every person submits 2-3 book options they’d like to read to the organizer by a certain deadline. I recommend 2 weeks before Black Friday to be the deadline for the next year’s book club (so that people can take advantage of Black Friday or Cyber Monday to get their books if they want to buy them.)
Organizer lists all the options from all people in a very easy to vote program (e.g. free version of Survey Monkey) – could even be done via email. Deadline of 1 week to respond is given. Vote for top 12 books – this gives some wiggle room to schedule 10-12 books per year to read.
Once all responses are received, or deadline has come, organizer tallies the most voted for books and reports the top 10 books to club in time for all December sales.
Organizer will schedule the 10 books into the calendar for the next year. The club may consider doing 12 books, but keep in mind that November and December are tough months due to a lot of holiday activities.
- Options: one book per month at set day (e.g. first tuesday of month). Or, in my case, I schedule longer books to get 6 weeks to read, shorter books at 4 weeks.
- We read at least 10 books, but we often have time to schedule an 11th book that we schedule in mid December and give November and December to read.
I also try to schedule books so that similar topics/genres are separated out.

Also, here are some other notes I thought might be helpful when you are thinking about how to start a book club.

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You can schedule a book club at work where you can easily meet a lunchtime 1 time per month. Book clubs don’t always have to be in the evenings.

My sister’s book club doesn’t do voting. They allow each of their members to select 1 book and that person hosts at their house when it’s their month to read their book choice. This means that you can’t have more than 12 people in your club as this is a 1 per month type club.

There are other variations, of course, but I have found that letting everyone vote on a list of books works better for the type book club I facilitate.

To make life SUPER easy for this busy time of year, here’s our book list for next year. You are welcome to start with this list, then start with a new list once you are done!