The StoryGraph Book Clubs - What You Need to Know

Last updated on 23 April 2024

This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase with one of these links, I recieve a small commission at no additional cost to you. Read the full Affiliate Policy.

It’s here! One of the things that has been in the works for a little while now is The StoryGraph Book Clubs. And in April 2024, the launched version 1, along with some other tweaks to the community page. We’re going to take a look at the book clubs on The StoryGraph and see what they’re like!

What is The StoryGraph?

The StoryGraph is an alternative Goodreads, basically. If Goodreads has been doing your head in or you no longer want to support Amazon, but you still want to track your books, then The StoryGraph is a fantastic way to do that. You can read my full breakdown of the website on my The StoryGraph Review post.

What are book clubs?

A book club is an in-person or online club where members read the same book over a set period of time, and chat about it. There are tons of online book clubs that you can join, but I think The StoryGraph one is really going to take off.

What you need to know about The StoryGraph Book Clubs

The StoryGraph Book Clubs were launched in April 2024, and as version one rolls out, I’m really looking forward to how people use this new feature. I love the idea of an online book club, so when the news dropped, I was super keen to check it out.

Even just a brief look at the book club feature on The StoryGraph I can see that they’ve really thought about how book clubs tend to function, what people might be looking for in terms of features within the feature, and actual user experience and ease of use.

How to create a book club on The StoryGraph

If you don’t have a StoryGraph account yet, it’s really easy (and free!) to join. If you’re currently on Goodreads then you can easily transfer over to The StoryGraph and take all your books and shelves with you. Learn how to do that here.

Once you have an account set up and you’ve moved all your books from Goodreads to StoryGraph, then you can get going with a book club!

Step 1: Head to the Community tab on The StoryGraph website

This is right across the top of the website and you can’t miss it.

Step 2: Click the Book Clubs tab

They’ve revamped the Community page, and now you can find the News Feed, Buddy Reads, Readalongs, Book Clubs, and Similiar Uers all along the top. I love this change; it’s now so much easier to navigate. You’ll want to click the Book Clubs tab.

Step 3: Start a book club

When you first click the Book Clubs tab, it will invite you to create a new book club. Super simple!

Step 4: Enter your book club details

Now you have the opportunity to enter all the details about your book club (and don’t worry! You can edit these later).

Pop in the name, add a club logo/image (note they have a recommended size for this image at 500x500px), an optional description of your book club (you might add things like an introduction, how your book club works, perhaps you’ve got some resources to share, or images to add!), and also a code of conduct (if you have any rules or requirements for the book club, pop them here!)

When you’re ready, click ‘create’.

Step 5: Start using your book club!

When you’ve clicked ‘create’ from the previous step, you’ll be taken to a pretty empty-looking book club. But that means it’s time to populate it! Honestly, the most fun part, right?

You’ll be shown some tabs:

Upcoming meetings
Past meetings
Forums
Leaderboard
About
Code of Conduct

Let’s go through your book club in a little more detail now.

How to run your The StoryGraph Book Club

There are so many things you’re able to do with the book club feature in The StoryGraph! Let’s go through them all now, so you can head off and start clubbing! Book clubbing that is … 🤣

All these can be found along the top menu with your Book Club. And it’s worth noting that you don’t have to have all of these things in your book club – the only then you need to have is a title. But they’re some great ways to connect with your friends and other people online in this book club space.

Upcoming meetings

Here’s where you can create a meeting for people to attend. When you click ‘New meeting’ you will be directed to this page, where you can pop in all the details about the upcoming book club meeting.

Book

Enter the title or ISBN of the book you’re going to be reading together, or you can set up a poll later and choose one together. If you’re doing the former, as you start typing a drop-down list of books will appear and you can choose the one that you want.

Date & Time

When are you going to be meeting up (in person or online) to chat about the book? You can pop that here.

You can also set up a poll later if you need people’s input. Just select ‘set up poll’ here instead of choosing a date and time. If you choose the latter, you’ll be able to edit it and choose a bunch of different times. You can set how long you’d like the poll to last, too.

Location

If you’re meeting in person you can enter the location of your meeting, or you can add a video conferencing link, such as a Zoom link or a Google Meet link.

Meeting Hosts

If you haven’t got any members yet, then you won’t have given anyone admin privileges yet, but once you have you’ll be able to add co-hosts to your book club meeting here. You can add admins under the Edit section.

Group Read Add-ons

You can also add a related StoryGraph buddy read or a read-along from the edit page, which you will then be able to include here.

Editing the meeting

Once you’ve entered all the things you wish to add, you click ‘Create meeting’. You can then go back in and edit it. At the bottom of the editing page, you’ll also have the chance to add a wee note. This might be the agenda for the meeting or something you’d like to say before you meet. You can also ‘view question bank’ from here too.

Question Bank

If you click ‘view question bank’ you’ll be able to see all the questions people across the entire website have asked about the book. Anyone in the app can view the questions, and they can be accessed from any book’s page.

Here’s a pretend question I popped in so you can see what I mean. You’ll be able to then, as an admin, Add to Agenda. Questions are then automatically added to the meeting.

When you have edited and saved your meeting, you’ll be able to see it on the Upcoming Meetings tab back in the main Book Clubs page. You’ll also be able to see Suggested Club reads, as the algorithm begins to understand what kind of books your club likes to read together. When the meeting has happened, it will move to the Past Meetings page, so we’ll skip that tab.

Forums

In the Forums tab, you’re able to set up a new forum. You can add new questions or discussion points here, to encourage people to get interactive and share their thoughts. This is book club-wide, rather than specific to a current book/meeting. You can use the Questions section for that.

Title

Add a title to your forum! This could be a general discussion type of title, or you could get more specific and ask a question that people will be able to chip in on.

Description

If you need to, here’s where you add more information about your question or further details about your forum thread.

Once you’ve created the forum, people will be able to comment and add their voice to the discussion, and it will also show up in the Forum tab, along with all the other questions or discussion points you’ve added. It will also show how many comments are in each forum.

Ideas for your StoryGraph book club Forums

Introduce yourself!
General discussions
Favourite authors
Books you’re loving at the moment
Future themes to explore
Favourite quotes
What are you reading?

Leaderboard

The Leaderboard is the next along the StoryGraph book clubs tabs, and this one is harder for me to show you, as my imaginary book club hasn’t done any reading yet. But once you’ve had your book club for a little while, you’ll be able to see the club’s all-time highest-rated books, and this will be automatically updated every so often.

This would be a really cool feature, especially once you’ve been established for a little while. You’ll be able to cater your next read based on the books that have been popular in the past.

About

If you added a description back in the set-up phase, then this is where that shows. If you didn’t, you can select the three dots by your book club name, and select ‘edit’.

Once you have a description of your book club in place, it will show up here in the About tab, like my pretend one below.

Code of Conduct

In the same way, your code of conduct tab will show your code of conduct. Again, you can edit this in the same places as the About/Description.

Other things to note

You’ll need members for your book club!

To invite members, click the ‘invite members’ link (okay, duh), and from there you’ll be able to search for members by their username or their email. Users who have a private StoryGraph account won’t show up when you type their name or address, but you can send them the link to your book club instead. They will show up as ‘pending’ members like you can see below with Sophie, until they accept the invite.

How to join a book club on StoryGraph

At the moment, it looks like you need to be invited to a book club on StoryGraph via the way I’ve just shared, or by someone sending you the direct link. (Confirmed by StoryGraph!) In future versions, they will include a way for you to discover book clubs to get involved with and join.

As the Book Clubs feature is still very new (as of writing this in April 2024), there will be future updates, and I’ll pop back in here and update you when those happen.

Overall thoughts

I love the idea of StoryGraph Book Clubs! While I don’t think I actually have enough time in my life to run my own right now (will put a pin in my new These Splendid Stories book club 😉), I would absolutely love to run one in the future, and have thought about it many a time.

I think this is going to be super cool for book bloggers, too, as well as bookstagrammers and booktokers, and will allow them to run book clubs for free with ease.

Definitely looking forward to seeing how this one plays out! But in the meantime, let me know:

Have you tried the book club feature on StoryGraph? What do you think? Is it something that you could join in on in the future?

Disclaimer: StoryGraph did not ask me to write this. I’m simply sharing my thoughts on a new feature on a bookish platform that I love. However, if you’re from StoryGraph and you wanna collab … you just let me know! 😉