BookTalk.org

We'll be having Susan Jacoby as our guest on Sunday, September 18th at 11:00 a.m. eastern. Please mark your calendars folks!Chris Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 8/29/05 9:26 am

Great! I have been enjoying reading her book!

I'm going to be canceling this live author chat for a variety of reasons. The author chats are a wonderful complement to our discussion community, but by no means essential.Chris

not going to be able to reschedule?

GinoAt 9:00 p.m. on Thursday August 25th only TWO members were logged into the live chat with Victor Davis Hanson. It was humiliating. People straggled in over the next 30 minutes, but we never exceeded a total of 9 people in the chat room, which included Dr. Hanson and myself. Our authors see that we have hundreds of members on our membership count, so they are naturally expecting more to attend. We all know that our membership count is misleading, as the number goes up by one every time a new person drops by and makes a single post. But do we really only have 7 active members?All author chats are canceled until we gain some new members or see a higher activity level out of our existing members. I'm not going to allow these author chats to add stress to my life. Every author chat I sit nervous wondering if members will find the chat session worthy of their time. If a session starts at 9:00 p.m. and people show up at 9:45 - 10:00 p.m. it is very embarrassing. The authors are kind enough to accept our invites and to show up on time, yet members don't seem to appreciate the effort that goes into setting these up. If a chat were to start at 9pm it would be wonderful if the room already were full.I'm going to do my best to attract some new members, but I cannot afford to allow BookTalk to stress me out. For years these author chats have been a source of tremendous stress. I really want to provide the benefit of live chats with authors, but it seems not enough people really appreciate them.Chris Edited by: Chris OConnor  at: 9/2/05 9:43 am