The internet tentacles of the bookternet run far and wide. I'm just one passionate book blogger in a sea of book bloggers and book media outlets. I feel like I'm always running across one spectacular article after another, and if you follow me on Twitter, you've probably seen me RT a few of them.

But with Twitter's fast-paced feed and arbitrary 140-character limit, it's not the best outlet for deep conversation. And comments threads on articles are okay if you want your thoughts out there in the public discourse.

I wanted a space where book nerds can come together to share the interesting pieces of book news they find and have meaningful conversations in a non-public way. With some inspiration from the blogging goddess Javacia Harris Bowser, I decided to create a Facebook group: Off the Beaten Shelf Book Nerds.

The group is absolutely open to anyone as long as you love books. I have the group's privacy settings set to "closed" so we can have meaningful conversations without any creeper in the world coming to lurk. Hey, books bring out the deep feels sometimes.

There are only 3 rules:

No negative book reviews. It's totally cool if you hate a book, but other people might like it and I don't want to discourage anyone from reading something that they might like. Feel free to share opinions openly, even negative ones, but please don't post links to negative book reviews.
No self-promotion buffets. If you have a book blog, you're welcome to post links to your blog here. However, please don't turn this into a self-promotion free for all. If you post links to your blog, be sure to also post links to other book-related stuff. If I see too many posts from one person's blog, I'll start deleting them to keep the conversation diversified. I have a book blog and will be following this rule myself.
Be nice. We all have different tastes, but I feel that as book nerds, we should just be happy other people are reading and not judge them for what they read. All tastes and genres are welcome here. Judgy McJudgerpants folks will be banned. Everything is welcome here--fiction, nonfiction, YA, kid lit, self help, erotica, romance, self-published, comics, graphic novels, LGBT, EVERYTHING.

That's it. Easy, simple, fun. Some awesome conversations are happening over there now, so feel free to dive in! You're welcome to be as much or as little involved as you like. Follow the link to join.