This post has been written about in our changelog:
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Users can create book clubs on The StoryGraph
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May 14, 2021
We haven't yet fleshed out what the feature set will be, and it'll evolve over time, but we reckon it'll include some mechanisms for selecting books, setting a meeting, seeing a history of books the group has read and what everyone thought, and more!
Please feel free to share any ideas that you have.
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I know the leaderboard updates periodically, but is that more in the every few days? Every fews weeks? Every month range?
I forced my book club to retroactively add themselves to every meeting we've ever had (I was bored during a layover and built them all) and would love to see how our stats breakdown
vonny3492 It updates every day, but we only run updates on meetings created in the last week — had to put some limit on it for performance reasons — even if the meeting date was years ago. So if you created these old meetings weeks ago and new members are only being added now, their ratings won't be included. I guess maybe I could adapt it to look at meeting attendances created in the last week... 🤔
Nadia so if I wanted the leaderboard to be accurate I should make the meetings now after all my book club members have joined and then it would be accurate?
vonny3492 Yes, if you create the meetings now, after up to 24 hours, the leaderboard will be accurate!
Nadia Okay follow up question (lol) if someone hasn't rated a book and they rate a book weeks/months after the book club meetings was made... does that get incorporated into the leaderboard?
vonny3492 No, because the thinking is that the ratings, and therefore leaderboard, are tied to the club/meeting at the time. Say you start a small book club with three people and you all read and dislike a book. The book is at the bottom of the leaderboard. Over the years, the club is now seven/eight people, and now more people than not love that original book....if we incorporated those ratings, now that book is at the top of the leaderboard without a club discussion since, etc. So for the oldest members, it won't feel like an accurate representation of the club's history. Even for new members, who read that book independently/in other clubs, it's not a part of that current club, but yet it's there at the top. That's the thinking anyway!
Nadia so what's the time threshold to review a book in relation to the book club meeting?
Is it one week from the book club being made? Or one week from the book club completing?
I would say half the book club is pretty in consistent on rating things promptly so it'll be good to have a range I can tell them, like "review within a week to get this incorporated into the leaderboard!" Or whatever the threshold is.
vonny3492 Book club meetings created in the last week where the date is in the past or book clubs that have happened up to one week ago are included in the daily leaderboard (re)calculations.
Nadia Thank you for the info!
I would love a way to have the option to set them private or public so we could search for clubs to join!
rainbowbrarian That's coming!
Nadia awesome!! Thank you!!
Finally, V1 is complete, including a reworking of the Community section of the app!
The three mystery features I was talking about:
Full Changelog post coming soon!
Nadia Amazing work! Thank you for all this extra features! I love the new navigation on community page, makes it so easy to go between pages. I'd love to have something like this to navigate between my books (owned, read, to-read, tags...) in the future.
Nadia Thank you for the book club features! I am excited to try it out with my book club! I especially love the concept of the leaderboard.
Just wanted to add to the wishlist for V2 - I would love to have TBR and Read lists for the book club page. Maybe on the TBR members could upvote books they are interested in reading, so there can be a kind of asynchronous ongoing poll. If a TBR is added, I'd love to also be able to use tags to help organize it.
I'd also be super interested in book club stats, if that's something that could be supported in the future. What moods are the books we choose? What formats/editions are members reading them in? What are our top authors within book club picks? How do members' reading outside of the book club compare to book club picks?
Just throwing around ideas. Thanks for all the great work you do!
martafvduarte Yess. Love this idea and was thinking this might be our navigation go-to in a bunch of places.
astropova Hello! Can you please post these ideas here? https://roadmap.thestorygraph.com/requests-ideas/posts/book-clubs-v2 . I just made that now after seeing your comment. And I have considered book club stats, but for Plus hosts only, or even expanding the "Leaderboard" tab to be a "Stats" tab. I'll see! Might be that there are basic stats for everyone, including the leaderboard, and more advanced stats for Plus hosts.
Is it possible to one day have the ability to add multiple books as up for discussion? In my book club, we sometimes will read multiple short stories or novellas to discuss all in one session.
Really loving testing out the book clubs! I was wondering if there is a chance it will be possible to add 2 books to a meeting? My book club tends to have sessions where we double up on books for certain meetings.
Secondly, I've been wondering if it could be possible to change the icon settings for the image from fill to fit? I had to do quite a lot of editing to get my group's logo to work within the constraints of the image box when setting it up. Thanks so much! ❤️
aftereliza Thanks for the feedback! I'm very unlikely to update the feature to support two books per meeting any time soon, especially as this is probably a rare ask. I'll take a look at the image stuff for V2!
aftereliza Ooops just commented and then saw that. Fwiw I would also like the ability to add multiple books to a meeting!
xandrade aftereliza Yup! Already had a couple others say it too!
The Book Club Question Bank is now live!
From a book club meeting, view the attached question back — it'll be a little while before these are built up — and add questions directly to your agenda! You can add in questions yourself and upvote others, helping the best ones float to the top and enhance book club discussions everywhere!
You can also explore the discussion questions independent of a book club, from the book page itself.
What's left?
Was hoping to finish by tomorrow but I have a business matter to attend to and a librarian issue on a popular book series that I need to unpick!
This message is to announce the SUPER soft launch of book clubs.
I still have some styling things to do and the mystery features to complete — one of which you will see evidence of 👀 — but you're free to start creating your clubs now and inviting members!
Once everything is officially complete I'll let y'all know and there'll be official announcements detailing all of the new functionality!
You can find the link to "Book Clubs" at the bottom of the Community page. This is a temporary placement! The way to access book clubs (and buddy reads, readalongs, and similar users) will be changing when book clubs officially launch.
Nadia thank you for all of your hard work! I’m looking forward to checking book clubs out 😊
kylethewild Thank you so much!
Didn't quite get as far as I would have liked but good progress was made:
Still to come:
I thought I'd get "Mystery feature 1" done today, but alas!
It's a lot to do on Sunday but it is doable!
Nadia you are a superstar!!!!!
saint_eleanor Thank you so much! Final stretch now before soft launch! 🤞🏾
Almost done with buddy read and readalong addons!
Hoping to get the bulk of what's left done tomorrow! 🤞🏾
Nadia How do you integrate a readalong with a book club? Is there a setting in the book club/when creating a readalong that connects these two?
velezfai It's the other way around — so you create the book club meeting and can then have a readalong generated once the book is chosen. If you have just one of these that you tried to create yesterday and it didn't work out, we can attach them for you (email us at support@thestorygraph.com), but in general, at least right now, you can't attach old readalongs to book club meetings.
Not the most productive day, but progress was made!
Did some of the UI/UX stuff and worked on marking yourself as "attending" a meeting, and how that interplays with what notifications you get, the invitation to join the attached buddy read or readalong, etc.
Really hoping to have the bulk of what's left done by the end of Saturday to launch on Sunday! 🤞🏾
Updates since yesterday:
Main things left:
Days of work left but still on track for this week! 💪🏾
Updates since yesterday:
I think I'm going to soft launch book clubs without the ability to assign other hosts — we'll see — but work on that next and in advance of any official announcement.
Book Clubs aren't ready! But they will be soon!
Since y'all have been waiting a long time and the ETA keeps getting pushed back I'm going to give you daily updates from today.
Right now, I think I'm days away and they should be out by the end of the week. Let's see!
High-level things that are left to do:
There are a couple other things as well but I want there to be some surprises for y'all when the feature launches! So let's leave it as:
👀 😁
So excited for this!
Rally hoping we see some book clubs being launched this month! Signed up for plus just to say this haha
mariancanread That's the plan!
mariancanread Me too! I've been checking notifications daily - ready to start inputting my book club data! 😃
holly14 Working hard to get it out before April 1st! For those on Instagram, I'm posting daily pieces-to-camera updates on stories. If April 1st hits and it's not out, I'll post daily updates here!
I'm going to be that annoying person.... A tag on this feature says "ETA February 2024". I know the "E" stands for estimated, but it is no longer February. Can we get an update? :-)
howardgo I updated the tag to March 2024 a couple of weeks ago. In which view are you still seeing "Feb 2024"?
Nadia Odd. It shows "ETA March 2024" now.
howardgo Yeah, I had to push it back a couple weeks ago when I realised I needed to focus in on Plus stats, which mainly went live today. So really hope it's out this month!! 🤞🏾
Sorry for the delay!
I was wondering if book clubs could eventually come to include a group TBR? I have a very dated excel spreadsheet to track the books my members want to read, when it was added to the list and when we actually read it. Some other categories that are relevant to us specifically are fiction/nonfiction as we alternate months, and country/origin of the author, to ensure we're reading widely! Very grateful for all the work you're doing on this!
aftereliza I'm not sure this will be included in V1, but there will be a group-wide forum and upcoming meetings as potential places to have a group reading list!
FYI, wanted this out by this week, but it will be further delayed because we just realised we need to have a book-club/group-wide forum, independent of any upcoming/past meetings/events.
V1 will not have push notifications, but the plan is to start working on introducing (highly-customisable) push notifications throughout the app from May!
I joined Plus just so I could upvote this feature. This is. the main reason a few of my book clubs on GR have not moved over - the lack of Groups on here. However, I think it needs to evolve to the ability to actually have a conversation (multiple conversations / threads) like is over there. I would be more than happy to continue to donate funding and help (I do not code) with this - because GR is eventually going to sunset and nothing out there compares to TheStoryGraph in being a close contender!
jenbrady V1 will be out soon — hopefully before Jan is up, if not early Feb — and then we'll be improving throughout the year!
A voting option would be nice.
Me and my friend choose a theme each month and then let the club members suggest books and then vote for them. So something like that could be quite helpful
ttwyman There's going to be a book choice poll (and each choice will either be suggested by the host, suggested by a member, or suggested by TSG) and a choice for the time/date of meeting.
Nadia oh brilliant that will help loads
Is this a timeline of when this feature will be ready? I am working on a Women's Group Bookclub and would love to host it on your site!
megan_unthank Was meant to be out last year but it got delayed due to other features — namely the barcode scanner and the wrap-up graphics — so now my goal is to launch it this month!
I can't wait <3
I would love to be able to see what the average rating of each book is for members of the book club, especially vs. our own personal rating.
chrisdennismyers Yes, there's going to be a leaderboard for each club too!
Nadia I LOVE that idea!
Moving existing/past buddy reads and reading challenges into a new book club would be a very helpful feature.
This might be an outlier use case that does not work for design, but I thought I would mention it just in case: I run a Silent Book Club where our group gets together and reads their own books. Sometimes this results in buddy reads between some members, but more often we are reading our own books. It might be cool to have the option to allow users to add their books to the group page so that we can see stats on everyone's aggregate reading in the group page. That way we could also do buddy reads from the group page for those that want to read books concurrently. :D
malorie Girl, tell me more about your Silent Book Club! I'm trying to start an in-person book club just like yours in my area, and your group sounds fun!
mbartman21 Nice! You definitely should! We are just getting started, but here is the instagram page with our info and links in bio in case it gives you an idea of where to start! https://www.instagram.com/baberead_boise/
malorie Don't think this will fit for the first version of this, but I love silent book clubs!
Love this idea and can't wait to see it implemented someday! I currently run a book club through Discord, but I'd love to have a way to collate and organize everything without using manual spreadsheets/docs.
I'd love to know if there is an update on how this feature is progressing. My org is starting a public bookclub and I'd love to set up an online bookclub for people who can't attend in-person. I'd prefer to set it up on StoryGraph!
mnmtbookworm It's on the roadmap for this year but I can't give any promises as to when!
I would love to see some features that would help with scheduling a meeting. Similar to how you vote on books, my book club also “votes” on what day we should have the meeting by listing what days they’re available and what top 2-3 days they prefer. If this was built in to the storygraphs book club feature it would be perfect!
I just was introduced to Fable, not for me, but I would love a Buddy Read/Book Club version within StoryGraph.
kmsourada Have you tried out our buddy reads yet?
Nadia Yes. But I like what Fable is doing by allowing hundreds of readers a place to 'gather' insights/comments/thoughts around a book. No invite needed just join in.
This would be awesome to have as a feature. I really enjoy the Buddy Reads feature, but I find it super difficult to find people who will even join the Buddy Read, let alone participate.
I think the people who join one of the book clubs would be way more likely to actually participate vs just sending a Buddy Read invite to someone who has the book on their tbr list!
kylethewild We'll also have a way for people to post open buddy reads to the app so interested parties can opt in!
Nadia oh that would be a great way of doing it! That would definitely make my Buddy reads more successful I think
This would be a lot of fun!
In addition to what you have there:
I love this idea and think it would be so powerful! It'd be great if we could also share resources, like discussion questions, interviews with the author etc. And have the same functionality as buddy reads to avoid spoilers.
The option to have mod posts/content that is displayed more prominently, for club rules, announcements etc. would be awesome.
A form of shared tags for the group would be nice. One of my book clubs tags books by genre or trope, so people can find what they're in the mood for. Another club tags books that haven't been read by the group yet, but that fit the topics we read.
The option to configure how many votes everybody gets in a poll.
If there will be a built-in feature for finding a meeting time, it would be great if we could configure our timezone in our profile, so everybody can see the suggested date/time for a meeting in their local timezone.
One of the more important use cases is asking for book recommendations. So it would be great if we had an easy way to add book links to a post, and maybe we can even have a list of all books mentioned in a thread, so when somebody searches for "generation ship scifi stories with multive POVs" six months later, they can see what books were recommended without scrolling through the whole conversation.
I guess that means there would also be a search function in book clubs.
In the time book clubs that I oversee, we use ranked-choice voting for book selection. The first step in the process is for everyone to nominate a book. Then I send out a survey where everyone ranks the books in order of preference. I usually use a vote calculator like this to do the final vote counting:
https://paul-lockett.co.uk/av.html
I really enjoy the ranked-choice voting as it reduces the chance of a plurality in traditional voting (i.e. the winning book is only picked by a few people). Also, I prefer it over taking turns as well where feelings can get hurt.
On another note, I love the buddy reads feature!
A rich quote feature in conversations would be nice. Sometimes, when talking about a book, conversations split up into different directions. Being able to quote whole posts, or specific parts of posts, would really help to keep things clear.
When creating a new book club, a "similar clubs that already exist" space directly on the create page, maybe based on the title. Just so that there won't be 10 different clubs dedicated to basically the same topic.
This would rock. My bookclub uses Facebook and it would be so great to switch over to here for this.
This sounds like it would be a really exciting feature. As another poster has suggested, for me, having the possibility of setting them to open/private/invite-only etc. would be extra useful.
In terms of the 'meeting' aspect, since this is a virtual space, people read at different speeds, and timezones are a thing, I think I'd probably personally find more use out of something that adapted the fluidity of the current buddyread format to larger groupings - allowing sort of simultaneous discussion/progress rather than a set meeting times.
But as the long way meetings worked was flexible I could see myself potentially getting a lot of use out of a virtual bookclub space.
Am I reading it right in that only the host needs to be a plus member? It would make it much less useful if everyone needed plus .
Yes, only the host will need a membership!
Hoping these can have subgroup buddy reads to opt into (since not everyone in the book club reads every book), and that this can be a version of all the buddy reads features but for a much larger group!
Yes, we see book clubs as having buddy reads at its core (though a book club will not be forced to set up a buddy read for each book/meeting), with a bunch of extra features around it and no limit/a very generous limit on number of participants!
Hooray, I can't wait!! Thank you!
Another idea from my book club - would be great to be able to see "Club stats" - so in addition to the Goal I've already mentioned, the same genre, length etc stats you get as an individual, but for the whole book club (could be anything a book club member read, or could be just books that were selected as book club reads, or an option to set it either way - in my book club, we'd probably prefer the 'everything read' option).
Additionally, perhaps some kind of book club league table & pie chart where you can see who has read the most books in a given time period/the most book club books? We've been doing this manually for the month of December in our club and lots of people find it really fun!
I love the idea of club specific stats. I think it would help my book club expand our reading horizons. We tend to stay with the same types of books even with the best of intentions to broaden our reading. I think stats would help us during selection time.
Someone in my book club just mentioned the idea of having a "Book Club" communal annual reading goal. So basically just somewhere that shows the sum total books read by all members of that book club this year i.e. adds together each person's read that year. So the club can set a goal to read e.g. 500 books this year.
Thought this was a fun idea! I guess maybe you could have a checkbox option to not count duplicates as well, in case the club wants to read X many unique books between them?
I love the subpoint of having unique book goals.
The ability to vote on group reads would be great for book clubs. Also the ability to set them to either public or private/invite only.
This is very specific and would probably be really difficult to code, but it would be really cool if comments on a book could be page or percentage locked to prevent spoilers. So like someone makes a comment on a book club book that contains a spoiler for half way through the book (which they would have to mark) and it only shows up (or shows up without a spoiler warning) if the person viewing has also read to that point in the book. Maybe just something with comments that show how far the commenter is in the book and they can be sorted that way so folks can see comments without spoilers?
kestrellady This is the way things are currently set up in the Buddy Reads feature, I have to assume they will carry it over to book clubs!
I'd love to see a feature that is similar to Challenges where the club 'owner' (or other members?) can maintain an ordered list of what books the group has read together (I've mentioned wanting ordered lists in a different ticket but feel like it would be particularly useful in this context :) ). I had my own ordered "label" in GR before I made the switch, but what was really frustrating was that I HAD to add those books to my TBR in order to add the label to them and maintain the list. One of my favorite features about StoryGraph is the ability to add things to Challenges and not necessarily also add them to my TBR, because having my TBR be too long and uncategorized is overwhelming to me. Having the ability to maintain a list of all of my book club's back catalog, in order, in one easy-to-find location would be really nice, both for me and for current or future members of the club.
I also would love a way to have some kind of commenting conversation on individual books. I'm trying to work my way through all my unread book club books right now, and I'd love to have an easy way to re-open conversation with people about the books that I'm now reading, or reading other people's thoughts that they posted at the time. Perhaps also an easy way to view an aggregate of club member's reviews of books? One of the social features from GR that I do miss is being able to comment on reviews in general, so having some kind of conversation functionality would be really awesome!