SA Book & Challenge Lovers discussion
Monthly Nominations
>
Author of the Month format change
date
newest »
newest »
Mod
I always try to read the books of the month and nominate. I hardly ever offer to host though because I'm not one to discuss books much, sorry about that.
However, author of the month is one category that I always seem to glance over. Maybe because it is too open ended and I have waaay too many books demanding my attention. But I think a new structure for the nominations will be exciting (especially this global tour). It will definitely make me more interested in author of the month.
My concern with this is that we'd have the current level of interest for authors from North America, Europe (mostly from the UK) and South Africa, but even less interest for authors from the other regions, especially if their books are harder to acquire. I love the idea of adding a theme to this, and encouraging everyone to read more widely, but I don't know if it's going to work. What would make people participate with the new system when they don't participate now? We're already nominating our favourite authors or the authors we most want to read (well, I assume). Keeping in mind recent discussions about the lack of reading culture in SA, I think we're working against a general problem in that our members just aren't that interested in talking about what they read.I do like to talk about books, but I generally don't participate in AoM because:
- it's usually too general. People aren't always reading the same books, so it's harder to have a discussion because we're not talking about the same thing.
- I like a good discussion, but the AoM doesn't generate much, so it's not worth the effort unless I was going to read the author anyway.
- I'd rather read the BoMs (more focused, more participation) and I usually don't have time for both the BoMs and the AoM.
Personally, I could do without the AoM. Even when I have participated or lurked, it's about the books, rather than the author. We don't look at the author's bio, check out their interviews and articles, read their short stories, talk about the way they write or the topics they usually tackle, etc. We just read one or two books and talk about those, so it's more like another BoM.
The one way I think we could make it more successful is to focus on popularity, as that's the one thing that definitely works - authors like JK Rowling generated the most discussion. So what we could do is each make two lists:
- Ten favourite authors
- Ten authors you most want to read in 2015 (could be an author you've never read before and just want to try, an author or won an award recently, an author who has a new instalment of a series coming out, an author everyone is talking about etc.)
We could take the top 6 or top 12 names to use as AoMs. Hosting still applies. We might have to rule out authors that were recently chosen. Authors should be allocated months depending on releases eg. if an author's new book is coming out in July, no point having her as AoM for Jan/Feb. If a movie based on a book is coming out in April, it'd be good to have the AoM in March/April.
Mod
I liked both ideas, the global one and the fav/want to read ones.
Maybe we should vote?
Or does anyone else have any other ideas/suggestions?
Mod
Mod
Mod
Mod
Mod
Mod
What I suggest we do:
Put up the nominations today or tomorrow, like normal. But the author one each person nominates:
- 10 authors they would like to read in 2015 and why
Then when the nominations end on the 10th we can sit and sort out the most voted for authors and allocate them months. If there are a few that only got 1 vote and we only have 6 that got multiple votes, we put the remaining ones in a poll. And the top 6 voted ones go in. Then we have 10 days to sort it out by month. Which should be fine
Would that work?
Mod
Mod
If I don't get anyone saying 'no don't do it' by tomorrow, I'll go ahead and set up the threads :)
For the record, we nominated 34 different authors this year, 4 of them more than once. That is an average of 2.5 nominations a month. October and December we had two nominations in total. We average about 11 comments a month (most comments 22 for JK Rowling who we also managed to read as Robert Galbraith).
I'd like to propose that for 2015 we consider nominating authors on a kind of global tour. Divide the world into 12 regions and each month we concentrate on nominating authors who were born or are associated with a specific region. So North American authors for Jan/Feb and Australasian for Feb/Mar etc. People should still volunteer to host.
We cannot really do worse than our current process and it would make us to consider some new/alternative options.
Anybody else have some interesting ideas?