In Part 1, we talked about THE ASK. Making your book club appealing to friends and colleagues is important, requiring both attitude and confidence. After all, time is a precious commodity and we are wise to say yes to things that we find will fill us up instead of waste of our time. A bad book club is worse than no book club at all. In fact, when I launched Book End Babes back in September and did some preliminary research, I found that most people had dropped out of a book club because a) it was boring b) they hated feeling forced to read a certain book and c) felt guilty for going to book club and not having read the assigned book. Makes sense.

All of this led to the principles of Book End Babes, which encourages our members to read whatever they wish, while bringing attention to noteworthy reads on our site and in our e-newsletters. However, we know some of our chapters DO just pick one book a month, and we think that’s great, too. Deeper discussion can occur when everyone has read the same book. If that’s the case, we encourage those chapters to discuss additional books, because some members do read more than one book a month. This is where the index cards come in handy. If you’re like me, you forget the title and the book almost as soon as someone has mentioned it. My making index cards available at your meetings you can write down books that other members’ recommend. I call it spreading the lit love.

A book club requires members. And not all members will be able to come to your book club, for whatever reason. H1N1, scheduling conflict, stuff happens. So it’s important then to have ENOUGH MEMBERS for the host to still be able to carry on the party. I know last month along two chapters had to reschedule the meetings for this reason. If this happens too often, the book club doesn’t become a priority and falls apart. If you only have a few members, that may not suffice in the long run. BEbabes recommends you get a roster of at least 12-15 women in your book club for this very reason. This does mean you are going to have to ask at least 2 to 3 times that number of women until you get the right number of yes’. It’s also nearly impossible to get “clearance” on everyone’s schedules. It’s easier to get input, but then the host (our queenBs) to make the call and whomever can come, can come.

So who do you ask? An easy way to grow your membership is by asking each of your current members to invite 3-4 people into the book club. That way they are vouching for the fun factor. It becomes a referral, a testimonial, giving it credence over a simple ask from the host.
I encourage you to look beyond your circle of friends to interesting people you may know, but may not know that well.

I believe a great book club is a diverse club – in age, lifestyle, interests and so on. If everyone in your book club has children in the same school, belongs to the same country club, knows the same people, etc. – I wonder if the discussion would be as interesting or rich as it would if you get perspective from people from different generations, with women whose children are different ages, from different religions, backgrounds and so forth. When starting a book club, the low-hanging fruit – our inner circle – are the first asks, and perhaps the easiest. Yet I’d encourage us to climb higher into that tree for the harder to reach fruit, because that could be the most interesting of all.

What do you think? Have you met our challenge this week to ask someone new to book club? One of my members has committed to asking someone she says “is married to her work and doesn’t get out much” to our next meeting. Will you do the same? – ML