Nominating & Voting - How It Works

[Sara W]

For the time being, I'm going to use the same strategy for this group read as we have been using for the European royalty group read (only the dates will be different). We can always change it later. Here is how the nominating and voting will work:

11TH OF THE MONTH

Each month (around 11th), I will start a nominating thread. We have been nominating books by theme in the European royalty read, and that seems to work well. I propose that for this read we rotate through the three main sections I created dealing with history, so one month's theme will be North or South American history, the next month would be European or Australian history, etc. We can always come up with a different method later, but this seems like a good way to get us started.

Once the nominating thread is posted, anyone who would like to nominate one book (based on the theme) may do so in that thread. I will let people know what the theme is, and I'll try to put the theme at the top in all caps or something so people see it clearly. We can certainly allow flexibility within the themes (so if a book covers both Europe and America, it could work under either of those themes).

All we ask is that you please try to check amazon or some other site to make sure the book is easily available - the last thing we want is to nominate some great book that no one can get!

In addition, if you nominate more than one book, only the first book listed will make it into the voting thread (so save additional books for the next months!). And lastly, if the book simply doesn't match the theme of the month, I won't post it for voting that month, but I will carry it over to the next month that it would work within a theme if you so desire.

15TH OF THE MONTH

People can feel free to nominate one book of their choice in the nominating thread until 9pm Eastern on the 15th of the month. At around that time, I'll make a voting poll and list all the nominated books in the poll. I will also close the nominating threads to comments once the voting poll is posted.

19TH OF THE MONTH

Once the voting poll is created, people can vote until the poll closes. When the voting poll closes, I'll start a general thread for the chosen book under the History Monthly Group Read heading (for an explanation of how this type of thread works, just look at what I have up right now for the upcoming monthly read - it's the same each month).

1ST OF THE MONTH ("COUNT TWO")

Discussions start on the 1st of the month ("count two"). So if voting takes place during the middle of June, the discussion will start on August 1st (second month after June, hence the "count two" idea - I'll post the month, so you won't need to figure it out). This will allow people to have a little over one month to find the book selected.


ANYONE can NOMINATE and ANYONE can VOTE - it doesn't matter if you are new to the group or have been here since the beginning! I'll leave this thread open in case anyone has questions about the process.

[Emily]

Hey all! Since I'll be in charge of organizing read, I wanted to reach out and see if anyone had any ideas about themes, etc. Sara suggested that we do regional, but is there anything else we wanted to do? Just suggest your ideas here, and I'll put them into an order to provide us with variety. Very exciting!

[Sara W]

lol, you have no idea how happy I am to see that message! You are awesome!

[Misfit]

I'll bet it takes a lot of time and effort to be a mod, so my hats off to both of you.

Nominations by era, i.e. medieval,19C, WWII, etc.

or by country by era i.e. 19C India, England Plantagenets and/or Tudor, etc. - that might narrow things down a bit. I know US history doesn't go back so far but if you just picked France or England -- you've got a lot of centuries worth of options there.

Decisions decisions!