Are you a librarian or teacher that’s starting your own teen book club? Are you a teenager who wants to get some of your friends together and read? I’m a teen librarian with some experience in starting and running three different young adult book clubs and I’ve got some top tips I’d love to share with you on how to run a teen book club.
Hit up my amazon storefront for all of my ideas on books, Harry Potter, Harry Potter Christmas, and more!
First Step: Find a space to meet
I recommend meeting once a month for an hour if you are a teacher/librarian/mentor starting a book club. If you’re a teenager starting a book club with friends try figuring out how often and how long your friends want to meet and go from there. If you cannot use someone’s home go to your local public library. You should be able to rent the meeting room for your group. You could also meet in a park, coffee shop, or other public space.
Second step: Getting Books
I was able to purchase 5-10 books per month through our library purchasing department, so this was easy for me. If your budget is smaller, try asking around local businesses for a donation to fund your book club. Make sure to tell them you will mention their contribution on any promotional blogs and flyers you create. If you’re a librarian, make sure your copies are reserved for your book club only. You always want a copy available if someone new wants to join.
For teenagers, try going to your local friends of the library book sale, your public or school library, asking your parents, or buying a copy or two to pass around and share.
Third step: Picking your first book
I’ll discuss my suggestions for picking books below, but your first book should be a book that’s trending with teens right now. I picked The Hunger Games for my first ever teen book club because it was coming out soon in theaters. Make sure you’re picking a YA book that teens actually want to read and not one that’s dry and informative. Here’s a list I made of 5 fantastic suggestions!
Fourth Step: Recruitment
Already have interested members? Then skip this section and go on to the next. I’ve started two book clubs from scratch and while it wasn’t easy, it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Do you have teen volunteers, or teenagers who frequently come to your programs? Ask them first if they have interest. If they do, try to get them to convince their friends to join. Make posters and flyers to recruit teens to your book club. Make the posters huge and put them all over the library/school/other building. Promote your new book club on a website or social media if you have them. Ask any teenager checking out YA books if they are interested in joining a book club. If they are and you haven’t started one yet, get their name and email to contact them when the club starts. If you already have an established book club, tell them more details and get them a copy of that month’s book. You will get a lot of rejections with this strategy so get used to it, but this is actually the best way to get new members to join.
For teenagers starting your own book club, ask your friends or other students who seem interested in reading. You can start small and have your members recruit people as well.
Tip: Make sure to stress to the teens that this is NOT a book club like you’d have in school, even if you are a teacher or school librarian. The whole point of book club is to be fun and informal.
Fifth Step: Giving the books out
This step might seem obvious at first glance, but its one of the trickiest in reality. What I did was place my book club only books on a special spot on the holds shelf with a piece of paper attached. On the paper, I wrote the member’s name and email, and then checked the book out to them. If you are not in a position to check out a book officially like I was as a librarian, make sure you get some information from the person you’re giving the book to so you can get the book back. Two strategies that helped attendance were emailing the members the day before to remind them of the meeting date and time, and creating a bookmark on card stock paper to slip inside the book when I gave them out, also with the date and time. I heard many times from my book club members that this helped them remember the meetings, and they loved the free bookmarks.
If you’re a teen with a phone get numbers and text a reminder.
Sixth Step: Preparing for Book Club
To prepare for book club, make sure you read the book yourself. I often made sure I read the book before we even selected it to make sure it was a good choice. I always wrote a list of questions/conversation starters in case there was a lag in conversation. (This happened at least once a week so I strongly suggest doing this.)
Tip: If you can, make sure to provide snacks. This a necessary element of the meeting. My local grocery chain provided me with a gift card after I wrote a letter asking for donations.
Seventh Step: Running the book club meeting
Through trial and error find what works for you and your club, but here’s how I ran mine. To begin, I would talk with anyone who showed up for a few minutes while we waited for all expected members to arrive, asking them about their week and talking about shared tv, movie, and book interests. Get them comfortable since this is a fun and relaxed atmosphere. After five minutes or so, start even if not everyone has shown up. I always go around the group and ask if everyone liked the book or not. I’m a big fan of this because you will find some members of your group are more outspoken than others. I like to start the meeting with giving everyone a chance to speak. Once that happens, conversation usually starts flowing without much input from me.
I generally only step into the conversation for a few reasons. First, I will attempt to get quieter members of the group more involved in the discussion. Second, I will back up someone with an unpopular opinion. It takes some guts to be the only person who hated/loved a book out of a group of people, so I will provide backup even if I felt differently about the book myself. Some suggestions include saying, “that’s interesting, why do you feel that way?” or, “I can see what you mean about ___part.” This way they feel like they aren’t being ganged up on. Third, I will jump in if I feel someone is being a little too combative in their opinion and defuse the situation. Last, I will talk if there are lots of silences and provide my questions and topics of conversation to get the talk moving again. Once the meeting is almost over, I will transition to discussing the book club selection for the next month or two. It’s always important not to stick to a strict structure. Adapt as needed so everyone has a good time.
Tip: I often had book clubs go quiet, where after half an hour no one wanted to talk about the book anymore. Let them talk about other books they’ve read, or any other topic. The purpose of the club is to enjoy themselves, so don’t force them to stay on topic.
Eighth Step: Selecting your next book club books
If you’re selecting books as a teenager running a club you don’t have a lot of restrictions and can go wild.
As an adult running a book club, you have to be aware of your demographics. Are they middle schoolers? High Schoolers? Do you live in a conservative area? Make sure you pick books that aren’t too adult if you have thirteen year-olds in your group, and make sure you don’t pick books that are too juvenile for older teens. I often looked through lists of upcoming and recently published books to make suggestions, or created a list of books I thought they might like. I would read out book descriptions at the meetings and they were also free to make their own recommendations to the group. Try to find out what kind of books your group likes, but also try to pick different genres so you can recruit new members. Don’t worry about picking a book they all hate. In fact, some of my best book club meetings came when we discussed a book everyone loathed! This gives them more energy to discuss the book and some of their insults were very amusing.
Ninth Step: Get Creative!
You can do all sorts of fun things at your teen book club. We made buttons at one meeting, took funny social media pictures for another, and one memorable meeting we discussed The Rithmatist and engaged in a chalk drawing battle like in the book. Make it relaxed and fun, and if you’re worried about getting too strange, run your ideas by your group! The great thing about your book club is they will be honest (sometimes brutally honest!) with you.
I hope you enjoy my tips on how to run a teen book club. It is one of my favorite parts of being a librarian and I found it very fulfilling.
Do you run your own book club and want to add some advice? Have a question for me? Leave a comment below! Follow me on twitter, instagram, and pinterest for more content! In the meantime, here’s a post on my Top 5 Tips for Working with Teens and my list of 5 fantastic books for Teen Book Clubs!
Check out my amazon storefront for all of my ideas on books, Harry Potter, Harry Potter Christmas, and more! This blog does contain affiliate links.
Thanks for the info
Hope it helps!
Thanks! Also, We use Zoom breakout sessions (10 min) works for the teens. They become more acquainted, relaxed and its fun. Just ask a question from the book and separate them into groups. Let them Choose a spokesperson for the breakout session as everyone discusses question. Everyone returns to main session and the the leader of the groups discuss. (It usually takes 15 minutes). No one gets bored!
Yes Zoom is great during these times! I wrote this during pre covid of course, but zoom is a lifesaver now. 🙂
How do I encourage teenagers to read? All they wnat to do now is watch videos on their phones. So much cultural literacy is being lost. I love the advice you have offered. I just dont know how to get this age group interetsed in reading in the first place