From Esquire, July 8:
Three famous readers hold immense influence over the publishing industry. Their recommendations can make or break a book—but how do they make their selections, and is their influence waning? Insiders take Esquire behind the scenes.
In the fall of 2019, I found myself wandering around Times Square in search of a billboard featuring National Book Award-winner Ta-Nehisi Coates’s debut novel, The Water Dancer. “I’m not sure what street it’s on, but you’ll see it,” the book’s marketer had told me that morning, so there I was, dodging tourists with my head and iPhone turned to the sky. At the time, I ran social media for Random House (Coates’s publisher). We typically celebrated a book’s publication week on the company’s Instagram account by posting a stylized photograph of the finished book, but whenever Oprah Winfrey got involved, as she did by selecting The Water Dancer for her eponymous book club, the publicity, sales, marketing, and advertising plans expanded exponentially. It’s not every day in publishing you get to see Oprah and Ta-Nehisi Coates in conversation at the Apollo Theater.
In an industry that sees five hundred thousand to a million new titles published each year in the United States alone, there are very few ways to make a book stand out. In recent years, programmatic celebrity book clubs—mainly Oprah’s Book Club (Oprah Winfrey), Reese’s Book Club (Reese Witherspoon via her media empire, Hello Sunshine), and Read With Jenna (Jenna Bush Hager via the Today show)—have exercised significant influence over which books garner buzz both among readers and within publishing companies, elevating sleepy debut novels to best-seller status and making big books even bigger.
First, a disclaimer to any self-important readers expecting a fiery takedown of the celebrity-book-club format: As someone who wants to see more books in the hands of readers, I am wholeheartedly in support of famous people using their immense clout and privilege to promote books instead of the many other products they could be paid handsomely to endorse. An article built on cynicism for something so overwhelmingly positive would be disingenuous click-bait, and you will not find that here.
But just because these book clubs are a net positive doesn’t mean they’re above investigation or critique. Ever since their rise in the late 2010s, the biggest celebrity book clubs have held immense sway over which titles land on the best-seller lists, and their future has an outsize impact on the commercial publishing industry. In order to better understand how these groups operate, I spoke to the teams behind the scenes, as well as to other publishing-industry insiders....
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