Short and Sweet Book Club (Closed)

Week 8 - Feedback and Brainstorming

Hello book club members!  This week, since it's getting difficult to assign everyone to books they haven't read yet, we're going to skip assignments and do something different: feedback and brainstorming.  Instead of reading and commenting on a story, for your assignment I want each of you to participate in helping me figure out how I can better run this club.

Feedback

So, this club has been running for a little while now and I'd like to know what you all think of it so far.  Are you enjoying it?  Are there things you would change?  Do you have any ideas to improve it or make it more fun?  Please comment and let me know how you feel about it.

Brainstorming

There are a few things I want to do with this club that I'd like your help in figuring out.  Please give your thoughts on as many of these topics as you can and we'll all have a talk about where the club will go from here.  Use in-line comments on individual paragraphs to make it easier to talk about each separate topic.

- First of all, we need to try to attract new members.  As of now, we only have four members including myself (two have left) and it's very difficult to make a club work with such a small number of people.  I don't know if there's much we can do about this aside from posting in the book club promotion thread (which I'm already doing) and using as many hashtags as possible to get people's attention.  But if you can think of anything that might help, let me know here.

- I want to try and get everyone more active and chatting in the club.  How do you think we can do this?  A chapter dedicated to club chat?  Some sort of game to get to know each other better?  Picking topics to talk about?

- As I mentioned in the early chapters of the club, I'd like to get members involved with interviews and articles.  Can you think of any writing or short story related topics you'd like to learn more about to help with your writing?  Or is there something you'd like to write about and share with the club?

- I think it would be fun to do some sort of writing contest and I'd like to hear any ideas you guys might have.  How do you think a contest would work?  What could the prize be?

- Lastly, if we want to make sure the club continues, but we don't get more members, how should we handle that?  Should we come up with other activities to do when we're unable to pair everyone up with stories they haven't read?  Should we figure out a way to change what stories we've enrolled in the club with every month or so?  Maybe there's a way to assign one story for everyone to read each week?

I'd really appreciate your feedback on at least a few of these issues.  Let me know any thoughts you have  about them or just about the club in general.  Thanks in advance.  :)