Jimenez Julien, the person behind BookClubRoster

Why I built a tool for reading groups

The first version of BookClubRoster existed because a librarian in Ohio sent me a spreadsheet with nine tabs and asked whether anything could replace it. One tab was a title vote she tallied by hand from email replies. One was attendance she kept for a grant report. One was a hosting rotation that had drifted so far from reality that three people had hosted twice in a row and two had never hosted at all. She was not disorganized. She was running nine reading circles with the tools a library gives you, which are a calendar, an inbox and patience.

I spent the next several months sitting in on meetings. Some were in branch meeting rooms with folding chairs and a coffee urn. Some were in living rooms where the host apologized for the dog. What struck me was how consistent the failure points were, and how little of the work was about books. The host was doing admin during the part of the evening she had joined the club to enjoy. Whoever picked the title carried a low grade guilt about picking it. And nobody knew how many people were coming until people arrived.

So the product is narrow on purpose. It does four things: it runs the monthly selection vote, it collects RSVPs without asking anybody to make an account, it keeps a host rotation that members can trade among themselves, and it holds the discussion guide for each title in one editable place. It does not try to be a social network for readers. It does not rate books or recommend them. There are excellent tools for that already, and a book club does not need another feed.

What I learned about this trade

Three things changed how I build. First, the members are not the customer, the host is, but every design decision has to survive contact with a member who will not install anything and will not remember a password. That is why voting and RSVP happen from a link. Second, fairness is a feature. A ranked ballot with a visible result ends more arguments than any amount of polite moderation. Third, library coordinators are held to a different standard than living room hosts. They have to defend attendance numbers to a board and a funder, so the export has to be plain, dated and boring in the best sense.

I also learned to say no in public. We do not integrate with library catalog systems, because doing it badly would put wrong availability in front of a patron. We do not sell member data, we do not run advertising trackers, and we do not have a feature that emails members more than three times a cycle unless the host asks for it. When somebody requests something we will not build, I say so in the reply rather than adding it to a roadmap that nobody reads.

How I work with hosts and coordinators

Every new Library Program account gets a working session with me, not with a sales team, because there is no sales team. We open your actual reading list, import your actual attendance history, and set the ballot on your actual meeting night. For One Club and Multi Club, setup is short enough that you will not need me, but if you write, you get me.

What I am accountable for

Uptime around your meeting nights, an export you can take with you whenever you like, a support reply within one business day, and honest answers about what the product does not do. If BookClubRoster ever stops being useful to your club, the door is open and your reading history walks out with you.