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Have the next few books been chosen?

Assist us in selecting our upcoming FICTION book for group discussion in this forum. A minimum of 5 posts is required to participate here!
JulianTheApostate
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Have the next few books been chosen?

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The Booktalk home page lists several upcoming books: A Thousand Splendid Suns, Wicked, Atlas Shrugs, Come on People, and If I Did It.

Have those books been chosen, or are they placeholders to catch people's attention? I didn't see polls for selecting those books, but I haven't been reading all the forums.
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Chris OConnor

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Yes, those books have been chosen. It was in our best interest to jump start the fiction section and have fiction books announced far in advance. Polls are not a thing of the past, but a few executive decisions have recently had to be made in order to get the ball rolling again.

Make some quality fiction suggestions for upcoming fiction books in this forum. But our new rule for "Official" selections is that our books need to be best sellers. We have dabbled in niche books of appeal to only a select audience for long enough. I am still researching this issue, but I believe the rule will be that the fiction or non-fiction book must be in the top 1000 on the Amazon.com sales list. If it isn't we cannot afford to have it as an official selection.

As membership increases we will have more people to pull into the Additional Book Discussions forums to niche book discussions. Want to discuss Norwegian Ship Building? Sounds exciting to some people, but not to most readers that wander by our community via search engine searches. We need books that are appealing to a vast audience. Then those people will join and explore the site and learn of the more niche or narrowly focused book discussions. But for now all official book discussions need to be top selling books.

You're getting a little ahead of me though. I am working on announcing these things in the Announcements forum. But all the other changes are sapping my time.
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irishrose

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Wow, that's really disappointing, particularly for the non-fiction selections.
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George Ricker

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irishrose wrote:Wow, that's really disappointing, particularly for the non-fiction selections.
Ditto.

George :sad:
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Chris wants more participants. He has tried so many ways to attract Freethinkers, Athiests and quality members...but we just cannot get them to join or stick around. I am dissapointed as well about this, but lets give it a shot. We have had no activity (FAI&P) for a while now. Lets try to stick with Booktalk during this experiment and membership drive.

We can always have our own side book discussions as well as experimenting with the 'official' choices.

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Chris OConnor

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Thanks Nick. Yes, I'd really appreciate the support and loyalty. Six years of experimenting and spending money and we have not succeeded in being a niche book group. My logic is that we need to open the flood gates by discussing popular or best selling books as the official discussions. As new members join there will be an ever increasing chance of attracting some of them to the niche books. Those niche discussions can be positioned in the Additional Book Discussions forums until this place has grown significantly.
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MadArchitect

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Chris, why don't you go ahead and slap that private forum together? It doesn't have to be anything fancy, so long as we can talk about the subjects you don't want discussed in the pubic forums. If it's a matter of not having found a way of limiting access by post count, just go ahead and make it private and give everyone who's already posted in this thread the proper permissions to post in that forum as well. Anyone else who wants to participate in that discussion can request to be added by replying to this thread. People obviously want to discuss it, and I think putting off the discussion is only likely to cause frustration.
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MadArchitect wrote:Chris, why don't you go ahead and slap that private forum together? It doesn't have to be anything fancy, so long as we can talk about the subjects you don't want discussed in the pubic forums. If it's a matter of not having found a way of limiting access by post count, just go ahead and make it private and give everyone who's already posted in this thread the proper permissions to post in that forum as well. Anyone else who wants to participate in that discussion can request to be added by replying to this thread. People obviously want to discuss it, and I think putting off the discussion is only likely to cause frustration.
Second.


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Chris OConnor

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I've created "The Chamber" whihc is only open to members with 100 posts or more. We can discuss subjects there that are not really appropriate for the public forums.
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JulianTheApostate
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Chris, this is your site, and you can choose its goals and how to achieve those goals. However, I doubt that your latest tactic will help you make this a popular book-discussion site.

Here's why. A web community needs to grow organically. In other words, people need to discover the site, find stuff of interest, and choose to contribute to the discussion.

Right now, there is a small group of frequent posters to Booktalk. To get a book discussion off the ground, a few of them need to participate. Someone who discovers this website for the first time isn't going to lead the discussion.

Now, we could try to select books that appeal to both a wider audience and a reasonable subset of the regulars. And, other changes you've made, such as the improved forum software, should help.

In any case, the handful of regulars is Booktalk main asset, and it would be foolish to drive them away.
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