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Hi I'm Laura from young writers workshops dot com and I'm going to talk about how to
start an online book club. One of the things to think about when you are pondering starting
an online book club is if there's already one out there that might meet your needs.
This is good to think about because starting an online group can take a lot of work. So
you know ask yourself if you are up for the work or if you rather find one that already
exists because there are, there are definitely a lot of online book clubs out there, but
if you feel that there's nothing that's going to meet your needs or you are really interested
in the experience of starting an online book club then go, you know, go for it and one
of the places that you can begin is with a tool like Yahoo groups or Google groups. These
are really easy to run groups, you can become the owner and moderator of a group and it
walks you through the steps and how to set it up. You have to make some decisions about
how you want it, what kinds of permissions you want the people who are will join your
group to have and how you want the emails distributed. So set up your group that way
and then your next step is to get people to join, you can promote the book through other
places where you might visit online to read about books, so you can get some of your friends
from real life to join your group. I don't suggest you know sending notices out every
where because that can be considered rude. But definitely do some promotional tactics
to find people to join your group. Another thing to keep in mind is that people's experience
in an online book club is different then in a real life book club because they can't be
acknowledged by someone nodding their head or smiling at them. People don't know if they've
been heard unless you directly respond to whatever they say in the group, in the online
group. So you have to be very vigilant about replying, doing a lot of communication so
people feel like they are accepted in the group. You also have to remember you have
a real short time to make an impression on someone because it's very easy for them to
click away, where as if they came to a group in real life they wouldn't probably leave
within a few minutes if they weren't acknowledged. So you have to spend more energy to make people
feel welcome, make them feel they are part of the group and reply to their comments and
questions. So keep that in mind, also know that it takes a while to build up people's
conversation, they may be there but not be willing to talk for awhile because maybe just
observing what's going on so you may have to do a lot of discussions starters and getting
people you know conversations going with people that you've brought to the group just so that
there can be some discussion to start the ball rolling. So these are some of the things
you have to keep in mind if you are starting an online book group.