Membership, Voting
and Making Recommendations

Membership in the Guild:

• Membership is free
• Membership is open
• Membership allows you to participation in the book selection votes.
• Membership comes with a card enabling you prove your "card carrying" status to strangers . . . I swear I will do this someday . . . hopefully soon.

Voting:

• We do voting from time to time as necessary.
• We collect recommendation from all over and make one big list of suggestions. If you would like to make a recommendation . . . enter it below.
• We wrangle with that list of suggestions to get it to around 100 books . . . Then we vote.
• When voting, each member gets ten weighted votes to apply to ten different books from the suggestion list. Those votes are weighted 10-1 . . . 10(their strongest recommendation) to 1 (their weakest recommendation.) These ballots are collected and scored . . . weighted for popularity, finally summing the points for each book. If you are interested in how the results look, just click on this sentence.
• From this sorting process . . . high scoring popular books become relatively obvious. We just take the right amount from the top of the ranked list . . . ensuring we get a good balance of fiction and non-fiction . . . pulp and prose . . . and apply those newly selected books to the syllabus.
• That's all there is.

Recommending a book:

• We live off of group member recommendations. We encourage you to enter one below . . . but only if you intend on particupating.
• Books should be interesting to a wide audience and have "something to talk about."
• Both fiction and non-fiction are great!
• We tend to try to do about 100-150 pages per week, sometimes more sometimes less.
• A book shouldn't take more than 4 weeks, so don't suggest War and Peace.
• Help us out . . . Join us!