It's good that you're picking up the book club torch. The scifi club rolled on its own momentum and once that ran out so did the club.

I can add a few pointers from things I learned while doing it, since it was initially just an experiment to see if I could make a club more efficient and raise participation. It was spawned by some comment I made ages ago and can't find anymore--to make a club based on short, online/free material, scifi just cuz that was what appealed to me--and people noted interest so it actually happened.

So my lesson boils down to this:

There is one thing and only one thing that will determine the longevity of your club, and that's accessibility of the material. Accessibility has two main parts to it: how physically accessible the material is (do I order it on Amazon or can I just click a link?) and length of the work. Roadside Picnic is accessible. Moby Dick not so much.

So you should note right there that was what killed #scificlub. You might like to think it was people's reaction to the material but the plain fact was that the club's health went from fine to shit as soon as we hit something as long as Blindsight. There was even substantial interest early-on to read Blindsight, but I didn't want to hit it too early because I knew it could be the breaking point if there would be one, so I steered the club towards works that wouldn't demand more than an hour or two of your time.

Beyond that, there are other finer points that I knew would determine actual participation in the club:

1. Having a selection of materials that were relevant to your interests. "Sci fi" may be open-ended but compared to "books" or "non-fiction/fiction" it's surgically categorical. How can I expect that the next choice in a club will interest me if it could be anything from Twilight to Darwin's The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs? I knew I couldn't with existing club, so I made the offshoot themed. The theme also helped justify its existence.

2. Prompting actual discussion. A thread labelled "discussion" didn't really compel me to write anything, especially if I had no strong thoughts on the material. The prompts I wrote were intended to make people at least say something that could potentially spur further discussion. I tried to keep them argumentative without sounding like an English course essay prompt. I think people became too focused on answering the prompts though; they were really just placeholders.

So that's what I found to be important for the club. Pacing may have also been important: keeping threads not so far apart so that you wouldn't completely forget about it. That probably hurt Blindisght as well, but for the first 7 chapters I'd say the club was as good as you could expect.

You're simply not going to get a small group of internet-bound strangers to commit to hours of reading for a book club, so keep it brief. Only the most devout would stick around for a club like that. Material selection can make a difference--I think we saw that with Watchmen--but the central rule still applies. Even Watchmen couldn't garner impressive follow-through, although it was better than most. Participation was mixed throughout the 7 short works we covered. If people can't commit to that then novels are an all-out bust.