Membership
Endpapers are the plain sheets glued inside the cover of a book, and they're the reason the pages stay attached to the boards instead of coming loose in your hands. Nobody notices them until they give out, which seemed like a fair thing to name a membership after.
Membership comes down to one thing we'd rather not keep for ourselves, which is the choice of where the books go.
Every quarter, members pick the theme for Shelf Life and then choose which three books go to the public vote. Before any of that, the program lead reads every submitted title against the published criteria, a pass or fail check with no taste in it, and books by board members or their close family never qualify. Members pick up from there, which is the genuinely fun end of the job.
Membership is $50 a year, and you can pay it in one go or arrive at it slowly, because everything you give to any Folklore campaign over the calendar year counts toward it. Ten Shelf Life votes at $5 apiece will get you there. So will a gift to the Author Fund in the spring and another to the General Fund in the fall, long after you've forgotten about the first one. It didn't seem right to charge you twice, once for the program and once for the privilege of being counted.
Give more than $50 and the extra stays with whichever program you sent it to. There's no gold tier and nothing to upgrade into.
Round Table runs on its own clock. A book club asks for copies whenever they're ready, the program lead runs the same mechanical check, and everything that qualifies goes into an open pool and waits. If a single request is sitting there on its own, it gets funded and nobody votes on anything.
When there's more than one, members choose. A request that doesn't win keeps its place and carries forward without anyone reapplying, which we tell clubs right on the form, because someone who fills out a request on behalf of their book club deserves to know that a no this month isn't silence. Each club can receive one Round Table per calendar year.
We're doing it this way for a slightly awkward reason. All four of us on the board either own a bookish business or run a book club of our own, so any meeting where we picked the winning club would be a meeting where everyone at the table had a horse in the race. We could write a recusal policy, follow it to the letter, and still end up with something that looked from outside the room like a few friends passing money to each other.
Handing the vote to members fixes that rather than papering over it. It's also a better story, since a room full of readers choosing a book beats four people deliberating in a shared document.
Everything Endpapers votes on is program money. Governing the organization stays with the board, where our bylaws put it in Section 2.1, and that half of the job is mostly insurance renewals and filing deadlines.
When there's an event we're part of and seats are limited, members get the link before it goes anywhere else. Once a year we write to members with the actual numbers, what came in and where it went, without the rounding that makes a small budget sound larger than it is. If you'd like your name on the members page there's a box to check, and if you'd rather give quietly, plenty of people do, and nothing else about your membership changes.
There's also a welcome gift, which we haven't chosen yet, and which is the honest reason this page has a banner on it instead of a button. We'll tell you what it is before we ask you for the $50.
Endpapers opens once the welcome gift is settled and we've picked a month. Leave your email and we'll write to you before it goes out anywhere else.
No spam. Just events and updates.