[Sticky] Help Us Grow: Your Ideas and Feedback Matter!

@nshezmin Thank you for your inquiry about how our book discussions take place!

Think of our book club as a social media platform optimized for book discussions and connecting with like-minded individuals. Here's how it works:

Discussion Format:

Independent Discussions: Members can freely initiate discussions about any book in our various sub-forums. You can share your thoughts, ask questions, and seek recommendations from fellow members.

Admin-Moderated Weekly Book Picks and Challenges: Every Monday, the admin selects a book and initiates a reading challenge with a deadline. This allows members to read the book throughout the week and then discuss it collectively. Before selecting the book, we also seek suggestions from our members.

Author Involvement: We are planning to involve authors in both our physical meetings and online discussions to enrich the experience.

Handling Spoilers:

Spoiler Alerts: We encourage members to use spoiler alerts in their posts to respect new readers. This ensures everyone can enjoy the book without having major plot points revealed prematurely.

Eg for Spoiler

In the book

I think your question is most related to our book picks challenges. You can find the admin-moderated forum for our weekly book picks and challenges here: Weekly Book Picks & Challenges. All other sub-forums are free for members to use as they please and discuss anything related to books.

Our platform is designed to foster a vibrant and interactive community where every member’s voice is valued. Feel free to dive into discussions, share your thoughts, and enjoy the shared love for reading once the platform is fully developed and ready to launch. 

As the platform grow, it would be good to add a site map for users to navigate the site easily.

@sankae that would be a great idea. we will surely look into that. Thank you!

@web-admin Super!

Have you taken a look at the books subreddit on reddit? It’s much similar to what you plan, the reading challenges, discussions and all that, so that’s a great space to get some inspiration. 

And since Sarasavi members read books in all three languages, wouldn’t it be great if there was a sub forum for Sinhala, English and Tamil language books, so that it’s easier to navigate?

Another suggestion would be a buddy read channel/sub, where I could post that I am reading a book, anyone wants to buddy read? and others who are interested or is currently reading would join in and plan together. 

We could also do something like reading Booker/International Booker/Pulitzer/Gratien prize winner, or basically awards winners, every 2 months or something like that. For example, if we take Booker, we start from Something to Answer for, the first booker prize from 1969.

And a Virtual option to join book club meetings would be much appreciated too.  

Also, something absolutely out of the blue and unrelated to the book club, it would be great it if you could try to integrate koko or mintpay into the site, so that more readers would buy.

And repost reader posts/stories/reels on Instagram removed link It sorts of increases engagement with readers and encourages them to buy more and review more and tag the page often.

Also, another suggestion is to be able to connect our socials to our profiles including goodreads and storygraph accounts as well.

And just curious about new releases, especially the ones under the Sarasavi printing press/imprint, do you send out PR boxes for reviews, ARCs? Because if you do, using the ebook app that you mentioned, you can send out ARCs for select readers in return for reviews, like netgalley does, but you can do it on the ebook app.

And I’m not sure how it works for English books, but we don’t have any bookshops/stores sending ARCs for book influencers in SL yet, possibling because we don’t have the branches for the presses in our country?

Srilanka has great literature, but I feel like it gets pushed under the rug and the bookish community here needs to be a bit more of the talk. 

@aimlib Thank you for your suggestions!

We’re inspired by the books subreddit and will consider sub-forums for Sinhala, English, and Tamil books. The buddy read channel and reading award-winning books are fantastic ideas, and we’ll explore adding these features.

Virtual book club meetings are on our agenda. We are currently integrating Koko into our website, so hopefully, you will be able to use Koko in the near future. Connecting Goodreads and Storygraph accounts is a great idea too, and we’ll add this to our development to-do list.

Currently, we do not send books for reviews from users, but as you suggested, it would be a good idea to share books with the community in exchange for reviews and to raise awareness about our ebook platform. We will look into this as well.

Thanks again for your great suggestions! 🤗 

Best regards,

Admin

When I comment on a post I get an email asking for seeking a subscription. 

I feel this is just a bit bothersome. 

We are all busy people. 

Comments and engagements should be a one step thing that only involves this forum, once a member registers.