Say “book clubs” today and most people think Oprah and Twitter. (Yes, Twitter: Picador recently announced its new 140-character book club. Followers will be able to correspond with the featured books’ authors and editors and win free copies of the books.) But once upon a time, book club members didn’t win free books on Twitter; they bought them at discounted prices from Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild, in massive numbers; Time magazine estimated that there were 1 million regular book buyers in the U.S. before the clubs, but by 1946 there were 3 million book club members alone. (For more on the Bookspan clubs, click here.)
Many of those former members are now buying their books online or downloading audiobooks with Audible’s monthly subscription service (plans start at $7.49 for one credit). Who belongs to a “traditional” book club anymore? Well, depending on whom you ask, liberal and conservative readers are both underserved audiences, and the Progressive Book Club and Conservative Book Club seek to fill the respective gaps. David Rosen, editor of PBC, and Elizabeth Kantor, editor of CBC, say their book clubs are necessary because they are reaching out to readers who can’t find the books they want to read anywhere else. (NYT nonfiction bestseller list, be damned!)
Founder Elizabeth Wagley conceived of the PBC as “a club to counter and balance the inequity of what had been the history of publishing books in conservative areas,” explains Rosen. PBC is designed to “balance out twenty years of publishing wherein it was viewed in many publishing houses that conservative books sell and liberal progressive books don’t. So how do we fight this? We fight this by founding a book club.”
“Since the sixties, developments in business and technology, from the chain bookstore to the internet to Amazon, have brought more books within the reach of more readers,” says Kantor. “But the publishing industry is dominated more than ever by a liberal mindset. Titles of interest to conservatives can be needles in a haystack, and the folks working in your local bookstore are not necessarily interested in helping you find that needle! We let our members know about books they might otherwise never hear about.”
So even if they’d agree about little else, at least in politics, Kantor and Rosen both agree with Rosen’s statement that book clubs today “do need a niche. They need to offer something more than being just another way to buy a book, a reason for someone to pay attention in a very crowded world of information.”
“Publishing in a general way is dominated by left-wing folks—so much so that when the Progressive Book Club was launched last year, David Rosenthal, Publisher of Simon & Schuster [imprint], was quoted in the New York Times repeating what the reporter called ‘an oft-repeated maxim’: One might say the entire book industry is largely a progressive book club,” says Kantor. “If the ‘average’ book buyer is buying the ‘average’ book published by the ‘average’ publisher, he’s getting something very different from what he can find at CBC…We find books that are going to interest conservative readers and provide really detailed descriptions from a conservative point of view. We’re one-stop shopping for the conservative reader.”
Online retailers’ deep discounts, however, have lured away readers who might once have joined book clubs because they wanted cheap books, and any book can be found online, so today’s book clubs must offer something beyond price and selection. For PBC, that means an active online community; in fact, the club is online only. To expand its reach, PBC has linked with 37 “Alliance Partners,” including the Huffington Post and Daily Kos, and e-mails these organizations’ members about new books once a month. “Those people may buy books through us or may go on to Amazon,” Rosen says, claiming, “We just want to help these books sell, the books to do well, and the authors to do well, and this is our mission.”
Nevertheless, it would be helpful if the books would sell through PBC’s site. “We are very actively promoting reading groups,” says Rosen. “We have a community section where people can log on and we hope to evolve this into a national conversation that we can create around our main selection.” He says that much of the community has created itself: “There’s all of these people out there who have fought hard and battled to elect Barack Obama President, and now everyone is asking, what next? What can I do? Our answer is, you can read a book or two or three” and create conversation around it.
Kantor, meanwhile, has seen a CBC-ready community spring up around Obama’s election. “The mainstream media, the politicians, and the publishing industry are doing a lot of conservative community-building for us at the moment,” she says. “Right now folks who aren’t on board with the radical transformation of our economy and culture that Barack Obama has launched are bound to feel a kind of kinship in exile.” Her political column, “And Rightly So,” runs in the Club Bulletin and aims to create a community of its own: “I do a sort of running commentary on the political scene as well as on conservative books being published.” CBC’s website says, “Many members rank her column as the Club’s most valuable benefit” and invites them to respond to her via e-mail.
