I was coming up with this when gmw commented and said basically what I have below. I'm not going to change it though, so here's some data to back up what gmw was saying.
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Some numbers to chew on.
Average books to vote from: 9.4
Average books not fully nominatead: 1.8 (16% of all books nominated)
Most books to choose from: 15 (Mar '18)
Minimum books to choose from: 6 (3x, Nov '18 - Jan '19)
Average nominators: 12.2
Most: 18 (Mar '18)
Minimum: 8 (Nov '18)
We've had 28 different people nominate books. 4 people have made a nomination every month! Another 4 people have only missed 1 or 2 months, and another 1 has nominated in more than 1/2 of the possible months for 9 total
regulars. 8 people have only nominated in one month.
We've lost a few regulars since last summer (maybe we should ping them?), and we have a couple people who's participation has increased in the last couple months. But, overall, fewer people have "tested things out" in the nomination process recently which is why the number of options has dropped.
What does this mean?
To me, there isn't really a problem here. I think the ratio of books that aren't selected is reasonable. Probably even a bit low. There is not a single month where we didn't have enough nominations to get EVERY book nominated onto the vote. We just haven't used all the available nominations for various reasons. All an additional nomination would do is make it so that second/thirds don't matter since pretty much everything would go to the vote. Already over 5 out of 6 nominated books make it to the vote. Giving an additional second/third would only make this go up. In which case, why do we even need to second/third books? We could just as easily say "you can nominate 1 or 2 books that will be voted on" and not bother with the second/third process. I worry about where that would lead us. I think the possibility of a book not being selected helps us to make sure we nominated what we think are good books that the group will like and be able to discuss. Without that impetus would we get as many good selections?
That said, there are a couple people whose nominations are on the "not fully nominated" list more than others; one of whom has more than twice as many as any other one person. I can guess as to why but I can understand their frustration.
