The Book-Club Hustlers

Although it’s difficult to quantify just how much of book sales are due to book groups, the economic incentive is taken into consideration by many authors. Bohjalian says book groups don’t influence what he writes so much as they influence what he says. “When Skeletons at the Feast came out in hardcover in 2008, I was talking about it almost exclusively in terms of the Second World War. Then I met with book groups, and when the book came out in paperback in 2009, I was more likely to be talking about it as a love story. That might just be a common sense thing given than 90 percent of my readers are female.”

Group preferences are also playing a growing role in what’s being published. The first draft of Robert Alexander’s The Kitchen Boy, the first novel of his Romanov trilogy, was initially rejected for publication 15 times, at which point Alexander hired an outside editor. She told him to shoot for a book-club “gem”—to cut the manuscript from 460 pages to 250 and hone in on the historical fiction. Alexander did and got three offers in eight days. His Viking and Penguin contracts, he says, even state that his books should be around 250 pages.

The Kitchen Boy is now in its 22nd printing, and was optioned to be made into a movie by Glen Williamson, the man behind American Beauty and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. “People are saying…we had one of the best discussions,” says Alexander, who has spoken to over 250 book clubs, increasingly over Skype and iChat. “And that’s what makes a good book-club book—is it interesting, is it discussable.”

“One thing that’s true,” Dara Horn says, “maybe now more so than two or three years ago is that readers have this idea that they know you, or want to know you and want to have this personal connection to you, however tenuous… Unless you’re someone like Stephen King, there is this sort of expectation that you’re available to readers.” When her novel All Other Nights was published in April, she couldn’t travel because she had a new baby. Phoning into book clubs was one way she could help promote from home.

“People used to write with hesitation,” Horn says. Now she wakes up to all sorts of emails. A British reader recently lauded a specific page of her novel, then asked how he, being an older Gentile, might woo a much younger “Jewish American princess” in his office. He apologized for his drunken email the next day. “Who drunk dials writers?” Horn laughs. Bohjalian says that readers will come up to him at readings and say, “Don’t you recognize me? I’m Haley from Facebook!”

“There are book groups who collect authors,” one author notes. All it takes is Google. If an author has a Web site, locate the tab that says Book Groups, or click on Contact, and shoot off an email. But it’s not impossible to snag those without Web sites. Take, for instance, Julia Glass, whose debut novel Three Junes won the National Book Award in 2002. A former New Yorker, she now lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and attends groups in the area when asked. When she was profiled in New York magazine, people advised her to remove her contact info from the phonebook. She refused. “I’m not a movie star,” she said. “I have kids who have friends who want to call them for play dates.” She received three cold calls and a letter of invitation from the MTA book group. “I got to this building in Midtown. And of course, it’s the people who never set foot in the subway and love to meet authors. It’s all the lawyers and the executives. They said they have great success getting New York authors.”

The authors who attend upwards of a hundred discussions wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, if it was pure drudgery. Some writers are pleased and revitalized to hear complete strangers illuminate their work in interesting or unexpected ways. Others treat it like reconnaissance. They get to scope out their audience (or at least learn what sweets they eat) and what else they’re reading. “Certainly the initial impetus and the continuing impetus is: sell books. But I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it,” Henkin says. “Fiction writers are gossips. What fiction writer doesn’t want to be invited into a stranger’s living room?”

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Francesca Mari has written for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The Believer, and other publications.