The Book Club Network

Welcome to this week's Thursday Thoughts. This week I am introducing you to The Book Club Network started by Nora and Fred St. Laurent. Enjoy!

Do you like to win books, interact with authors and other readers? Looking for a book club in your area to join or want to start a book club and need some helpful tips to get started? The Book Club Network is your kind of place. 

In honor of the anniversary of The Book Club Network, ten books a day will be given away during the month of August. Join the network at: www.bookfun.org   to take part in the Birthday Bash giveaways. Currently a Kindle Fire is being given away on the site as well.

This site was started by Fred and Nora St. Laurent in answer to Nora’s desire to share good books with others. Her work at a Christian book store allowed her to do that for a limited time. She also directed two face-to-face book clubs in the Atlanta, GA, area, but, again, she could only share a book for a brief time.

In Nora’s words, “I was whining to my husband Fred about my problem. How can I get the word out about great books for a very long period of time??? Being a man who likes to face challenges head on, we began to talk about how we could do this. My dyslexia keeps me from reading books fast enough to keep up with its shelf life at the store.

I also told him, as a book club leader, I wanted to promote great books and share them with other groups. Not everyone has the advantage of working at a book store and seeing what new books hit the shelves each week. Another struggle I had was if I had an author speaking at my book club I wanted to share them with other book clubs in the area. How could I do that? Where are book clubs meeting?

Our answer to many of these questions and more was the birth of The Book Club Network - TBCN. Connecting authors to book clubs and readers to their books; it’s also a network of book clubs as they post what they’ve read and how the meeting turned out.

It’s a place to find where a book club is located. We have a member map where you can find a book club near you. Message them and see if they are accepting new members. I envision it to be similar to the Weight Watchers program (don’t laugh, {Grin}). You can go to a meeting anywhere in the country, right? All you have to do is look online and get connected. This is my hope for the future of TBCN.”

I have personally enjoyed my membership at TBCN. It’s fun to see what other readers are reading and recommending. Authors graciously interact with their readers and are readers themselves. The site provides a place to blog, chat and take part in discussions with members. Contests are held each month from the 19^th to the 21^st with winners being announced by the end of the month.  

The Birthday Bash, celebrating the second anniversary of TBCN, will include a giveaway of ten books per day during the month of August. Enter a new drawing every day. Winners will be picked once a week so you have all week to enter that week's contests! 

Join me at The Book Club Network before August 1^st so you will be eligible for the Birthday Bash freebies. 

Blessings-

Cathy

  

Nora St. Laurent’s Bio: Nora is the CEO of The Book Club Network Incorporated. Nora and her husband, Fred, can be found hanging out at  www.bookfun.org She runs two face-to-face book clubs near Atlanta, Ga.  Nora currently writes a Book Club column for Christian Fiction Online Magazine and is a Book Club Talk Columnist for Novel Rocket. You can read author interviews on her Finding Hope through Fiction blog,  http://www.psalm516.blogspot.com, and reviews around the web at The Christian Pulse Mag, Title Trakk, Novel Reviews, and Suspense Zone.