A few days ago the ルリドラゴン book club ended. I’m a bit sad because that means that it’s time to say goodbye to Ruri for now, but it’s also time to celebrate your success! A lot of you have finished their first manga, and I’m sure a lot will follow. I hope you learned a lot, and I also hope you had fun reading with us.
Well… let’s find out, shall we?
Polls
- I finished it
- I’m still reading and I plan on finishing it
- I don’t plan to finish it
- I never even started
0 voters
- ★★★★★
- ★★★★☆
- ★★★☆☆
- ★★☆☆☆
- ★☆☆☆☆
- Unsure
0 voters
- No effort at all
- Minimal effort
- Moderate effort
- Significant effort
- So much effort my head might explode
- I don’t know
- I have read harder manga/books than this one but I still need to click a poll option
0 voters
- This was my first book club
- I had joined the Absolute Beginner Book Club before
- I had joined the Beginner Book Club before
- I had joined the Intermediate Book Club before
- I had joined the Advanced Book Club before
0 voters
(Select the highest that applies.)
- This was my first manga
- I had read other manga, but only easier ones than this
- I had read other manga or books around this level
- I had read other manga or books that are harder than this one
0 voters
- I didn’t like the manga after all
- The manga is still too hard for me
- Reading took longer than I thought
- I fell behind
- I didn’t like how book club works
- I didn’t understand how the book club works
- The threads were too hard to follow
- I didn’t feel like I was part of the book club
- Other problems with the manga
- Other problems with the book club
- Personal problems that have nothing to do with the manga / book club
0 voters
Stats
Participation
First, let’s look at the participantion in general. The X-axis are the weeks:
As you can see, it’s the usual pattern: A sharp drop in the beginning, and then we’re continuing to lose participants and participation, but less and less rapidly. You can also see that all those values follow the same trend.
I have no idea what happened in week 5 and 6 (the last 2 weeks of chapter 1), to be honest.
Mood
Next, let’s see what the mood was like. First in total answer numbers per category, then in percentages:
That looks pretty good to me. Between “It’s going well” and “I’m struggling, but I manage”, just where you want an ABBC. Reading your first manga is never easy, and from those results it seems that people are challenging themselves, which is fantastic!
It’s interesting that “It’s going really well” is dropping in the beginning and never recovers, despite the expectation that reading the manga would be much harder in the beginning and then gradually getting easier. I guess the beginning had especially easy dialogue?
I assume that a decent amount of people dropped the book due to difficulty without clicking the red/purple options, so we can’t see them here, but well…
(Also I can’t help but notice that the “It’s going well” line is following that mysterious thread replies drop/spike in week 5 and 6. I wonder if happy people are more likely to post? It might just be a coincidence though.)
Also note something that you can’t see in those graphs: People dropping the club more rapidly because the reading volume got bigger! Until week 9 we read a steady 10/11 pages per week, and from week 10 onwards it was suddenly 17 pages, which is a lot more. And yes, we get a few more “I’m struggling so much”, but also a lot more “It’s going well”, and the participation trend (“Reading along + Already finished chapter + Planning to catch up”) just continues on.
New vs experienced participants
And lastly, “new participants” vs “experienced participants”. This one is completely based on who participates in my “For our new readers: How are you doing so far?” polls, and who clicks “I have read harder manga/books than this one but I still need to click a poll option”, so it’s probably wildly inaccurate.
We can see that the trend points a bit towards “New participants drop the book club more likely than experienced readers”, but that’s no surprise I guess.
Offshoot Bookclub
Currently the manga is on hiatus, but when the author gets better and writes more:
- Yes
- Maybe
- No
0 voters
Also, feel free to leave your user name in this post (it’s a wiki, you can edit it) - I’ll ping you when there’s news regarding the manga!
So, you finished your first manga… what now?
First things first: Congratulations! That was probably not easy, but you did it! There are a few things you I can recommend now if you continue reading:
- Register on Natively! It’s a fantastic website that compares the difficulty of different mangas/books for learners, and lately it even has TV series. Don’t forget to add Ruri Dragon to your collection!
- Read another book with the Absolute Beginner Book Club - for example the freshly started ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん ・ The Wolf of the Small Forest book club!
. - Level up with the Beginner Book Club. My club there has is in its second week already, but if you want to try and catch up you’re very welcome: ロジカとラッカセイ ・ Rojica and Rakkasei
.
And that’s it from me. Thanks for participating, all of you! It was a joy to host a book club for you.