The result - the intended result, I see now - was a slower generation of discussion, with many of the best discussion posts coming half a week and more after the thread was started. That isn't really a problem in itself, and has its advantages (other than the personal convenience for you), like making it more likely that people who are a bit behind in reading the book will still participate after all (cf. several people stating in the Dr. Zhivago thread that they weren't finished with the book and so wouldn't participate, or my failed attempts to get that thread active again nearly a month after its opening). But on the other hand it's a simple fact that on this site, even threads stuck permanently on top of the board get most of their attention in the first few days, and to get large amounts of attention again after that, you'd need to get a large amount of additional posts in a short time, creating a kind of snowball effect like what you get in controversial CMB threads. I have often noticed on the CMB - with ordinary threads that move down the board, admittedly - that a thread needs to get a certain amount of replies early on if it is to last and get a good bit of attention and feedback.

So, I don't know, really. In this case, it worked well enough, as we got a sizeable amount of replies and some good discussion in the end (although it's impossible now to say how much of that was due to Larry's "So is there anything to discuss about the story itself?" post and the reactions to that - controversy always helps, and Rohini's pointed comment to Tom led him to make his subthreads).

I think looking ahead to a next time, the basic two-pronged longer-lasting approach might work again, but perhaps with more discussion-stimulating initial questions. Your two initial questions had the benefit of being simple to answer, so that even someone like myself who doesn't have the book at hand and hasn't read it in a few years could reply to them, but the downside was that the replies to them weren't likely to spark much further discussion. Additionally, I have to say it wasn't entirely clear to me in the beginning that you were going for this time schedule, and the posting of those two questions suggested that more questions would follow soon - that you were going to take a fairly strong leading role in the discussion, in other words (despite what you said in your post indicating you wouldn't, so much), which discourages people from making general replies with their overall thoughts.