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This essay is a reprint of Marcia Preston’s Final Draft column in the June 2006 issue of ByLine. All rights are reserved. Please do not copy or reproduce this article in any form without written consent from Marcia.

Join the Clubs

by Marcia Preston

You'd have to be sleepwalking not to be aware by now of the proliferation of book clubs in the United States. I have to admit that we may have Oprah to thank for this development. Whatever the source, the book club phenomenon might be the savior of reading in the early twenty-first century.

And apparently it's not limited to this country. I recently learned about Richard and Judy's Book Club on British television, which highlights ten books per year and then asks viewers to vote for their favorites. Any one of the ten chosen will become a bestseller.

From the writer's standpoint, there's a major distinction between book review clubs, and reading groups. In a book review club, members tend to hire someone to review a book for them, so they don't have to read it. These members aren't necessarily readers, nor are they avid book buyers. Reading groups, on the other hand, are devoted readers who like to discuss what they've read with other intelligent people. They are library users and book buyers. In short, a writer's best friends.

Nowadays, every suburb and village seems to have at least two active reading groups, sometimes more. Individual members often belong to more than one club. If they enjoy a book one group has chosen for discussion, they might recommend it to their other groups. In some clubs the members get to choose the book when it's their turn to host; in others, it's done by nomination and vote. In this way, books they enjoy benefit from word-of-mouth advertising that an author couldn't possibly buy. (And it's an unfortunate truth that publishers buy little or no advertising, word-of-mouth or otherwise, for their authors who aren't already famous).

Marketing to readers' groups is the latest hot trend in bookselling. Publishers are printing discussion questions at the back pages of their new releases in an attempt to make the titles more appealing for group analysis, and asking authors to be available for phone chats and personal visits.

I have supplied discussion questions for my last two novels, and I've done two long-distance phone chats so far. But I have visited perhaps a dozen such groups in person. Most of them were local, but once I flew to Denver and met with two reading groups in two days.

At its best, the experience is an ultimate writer's high; intelligent, polite readers sit around and discuss your work. They ask questions you'd love to answer, and they tell you what they loved about the book. Meeting the two Denver groups was an ego trip beyond compare.

At its worst, though, there's always the chance that some of these readers hated your protagonist, didn't like your writing style, thought the whole story was too depressing, and aren't afraid to say so to your face. This hasn't happened to me yet, but I've read accounts of such occurrences from on other authors' blogs. In this happens, you can only hope the refreshments include wine.

One author reported doing a phone chat where the speakerphone was set by the swimming pool. She heard splashing and gurgling along with the members' questions. Then, in the distance, she heard a doorbell ring. Someone said "that's the food," followed by the unmistakable clatter of high heels and then silence. She called out to the group leader, but no one answered. And they never came back.

Each reading group has its own personality, and though I know of men's groups and mixed ones, most are composed of women. All are fairly social, but some get down to serious discussion and analyze the themes of an author's book in relation to their own lives and to modern society. Others spend part of the time conversing about children and cellulite and new jobs, and the rest trying to decide which actors should play the book's main characters in the movie version.

Either way, they've read the book, and they're passing the news. As your first-grade teacher used to say, book clubs are our friends.