Pop quiz, three questions, all of them about book groups. Please e-mail me your answers. I'll be grading on a curve.
- How important are book groups to the publishing world now?
- Why don't more men join book groups?
- What is the most innovative or unusual book group you've seen?
By "you" I mean anyone living and/or working in the book universe, including publishers, booksellers, writers, librarians, and, of course, active book group members.
"You" know who you are.
For the next couple of weeks, we'll have a conversation about book groups, a conversation that officially began quite recently after I read an essay by Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony (Pantheon, $23.95, 9780375424359/0375424350). To get this started, I invite you to leave the room and read his guest post last month at Books on the Brain. Don't worry, I'll wait for you . . .
Welcome back.
I was particularly intrigued by the passage in which he states that when his novel was published, he "never would have imagined that, seven months later, I'd have participated in approximately forty book group discussions (some in person, some by phone, some online), with fifteen more scheduled in the months ahead."
We know this is happening, but when I read "given the choice between giving a public reading and visiting a book group, I would, without hesitation, choose the latter," I had to find out more.
This has led to our new conversation. Henkin told me about a book group event he attended earlier this week: "I drove two hours each way to meet with a group of twelve or so women. The woman who runs it, Julie Peterson, is a stay-at-home-mom who started blogging four months ago, and is now getting increased traffic. The publishers are catching on because she tells me she's now getting sent about 25 books a week. This is a woman who reads more than I do. She says she reads 3-4 hours a day, and I believe she has read 93 books this year so far, or some such figure."
Julie reported on the meeting at her blog, Booking Mama.
Writers talking to readers.
For authors willing to start such a conversation with their readers, book group appearances offer a seemingly perfect strategy for drawing people's attention away momentarily from all those titles that everyone is supposed to read and discuss--The Kite Runner or Eat, Pray, Love or, well, you know.
Great handsellers have always known about the power of conversation. If booksellers can do it for less-publicized titles, why can't the authors?
You'll hear no argument from Henkin, who is concerned about the diminishing options for getting new books noticed and views book group appearances as a great alternative: "I think word of mouth is a very important thing, and I'm not saying that I think people should choose books for their book club that absolutely no one's heard of, nor, even if I wanted that, do I think I'd have a chance of convincing anybody of this. What I'm concerned about is that the avenues for word of mouth are becoming narrower and narrower such that everyone hears of the same few books."
I ask whether he thinks those of us who toil in the word biz fields can sometimes get a little jaded about the "reading public." Do book group appearances offer surprises?
"It's less a question of specific surprises (every book group is different, so there are always surprises of one sort or another) than that by visiting book groups, I end up seeing a much larger cross-section of the reading public than most people in the word biz (and I include myself in that category) generally see. There's a lot of legitimate concern about the decline of reading, but book groups are cushioning some of the blow, in that they're leading people to read who otherwise wouldn't.
"Although it's not true of everyone, there are certainly a sizable number of people in book groups who wouldn't be reading were it not for the book group. They join the group for social reasons, but because the group is reading and discussing a book, they end up reading it, too. These are people who are not going to bookstores all that often, and they certainly aren't attending public readings. So I think through book groups one can reach beyond the usual channels."
More from Joshua Henkin next week. And don't forget your pop quiz.--Robert Gray (column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now)