Chris (and whomever else is interested) --
I just thought I'd point out something I noticed. The "Charles Taylor and Liberian War Crimes" thread is drawing a little bit of attention, which made me a little hopeful about the chances of a book about Liberia getting chosen for next quarter's non-fiction reading. Which, in turn, made me think about the success of BookTalk's "The God Delusion" discussion. I'm wondering if maybe part of the reason that discussion took off -- not to mention why it attracted so many readers -- isn't that there was already a thread about the subject. And a long thread at that. By transferring that thread to the forum for "The God Delusion", you increased that forum's post count by about 230 posts.
What I'm getting at is that non-quarterly threads probably serve as primers for the official discussions. If the "Liberia" thread we already have running continues to generate interest, then it's a solid bet that a quarterly discussing centered on a book about Liberia would benefit from that interest.
So how do you use the one to make the other more successful?
Well, I don't think you can plant threads like that. You probably have enough experience with a forum like this to know that contributors will pick up a theme or ignore it according to their own whims, and nothing you can do is going to whip up their enthusiasm.
The best alternative I can think of off-hand is that you can use the popular recent threads as a guide in trying to determine what books to nominate. If a thread about stem-cell research is getting a lot of diverse attention, then it might be a good idea to include a book about stem-cell research in the voting ballot.
More to the point, when you see a particular topic gaining popularity, it may be good to drum up some suggestions. You sort of did that with the "Liberia" thread, but in this case it was your own interest that inspired the suggestion. In the future, just looking at the number of different people involved in a popular thread may be cause enough for suggesting a book in that field.
Maybe all of this is already obvious to you. It's just a point that struck me while looking at that thread. I hope you can parlay it into some useful strategy for making the readings more successful.
I just thought I'd point out something I noticed. The "Charles Taylor and Liberian War Crimes" thread is drawing a little bit of attention, which made me a little hopeful about the chances of a book about Liberia getting chosen for next quarter's non-fiction reading. Which, in turn, made me think about the success of BookTalk's "The God Delusion" discussion. I'm wondering if maybe part of the reason that discussion took off -- not to mention why it attracted so many readers -- isn't that there was already a thread about the subject. And a long thread at that. By transferring that thread to the forum for "The God Delusion", you increased that forum's post count by about 230 posts.
What I'm getting at is that non-quarterly threads probably serve as primers for the official discussions. If the "Liberia" thread we already have running continues to generate interest, then it's a solid bet that a quarterly discussing centered on a book about Liberia would benefit from that interest.
So how do you use the one to make the other more successful?
Well, I don't think you can plant threads like that. You probably have enough experience with a forum like this to know that contributors will pick up a theme or ignore it according to their own whims, and nothing you can do is going to whip up their enthusiasm.
The best alternative I can think of off-hand is that you can use the popular recent threads as a guide in trying to determine what books to nominate. If a thread about stem-cell research is getting a lot of diverse attention, then it might be a good idea to include a book about stem-cell research in the voting ballot.
More to the point, when you see a particular topic gaining popularity, it may be good to drum up some suggestions. You sort of did that with the "Liberia" thread, but in this case it was your own interest that inspired the suggestion. In the future, just looking at the number of different people involved in a popular thread may be cause enough for suggesting a book in that field.
Maybe all of this is already obvious to you. It's just a point that struck me while looking at that thread. I hope you can parlay it into some useful strategy for making the readings more successful.
