Which book clubs are most powerful?

Reese, Dua, BookTok, and learning from fiction

My thoughts are with those of you in Los Angeles. The links for books here are affiliate links, and I’ll donate and match any money generated from them to the LA Regional Foodbank.

At some point my desire to romanticize my life overcame my desire to learn useful things, and I realized that most of the nonfiction books I read didn’t teach me very useful things anyway. Since then, I’ve read mostly fiction. It’s a lot easier to romanticize your life when you are sitting at a café reading Age of Innocence than Atomic Habits¹.

I also realized that I was learning important things from some of the fiction I read. It’s been 7 or 8 years but I still remember the feeling that passed through me reading this passage in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, a beautifully eerie story following a man’s nocturnal search for his wife across Istanbul:

I must be myself, I said over and over. I must forget these people buzzing inside my head, I must forget their voices, their smells, their demands, their love, their hate, and be myself, I must be myself, I told myself, as I gazed down at the legs resting so happily on the stool, and I told myself again as I looked up to watch the smoke I'd blown up to the ceiling; I must be myself, because if I failed to be myself, I become the person they wanted me to be; if I had to be that insufferable person, I'd rather be nothing at all.

The Black Book, Orhan Pamuk (emphasis mine).

It sounds trite now, but I remember thinking, “whoa — I guess being yourself is something you need to actively try to do, it is not the default state, and it is really important.” I don’t think I could have learned that on the same level from a nonfiction book.

Anyway, as I’ve been thinking about fiction lately, I have been hearing a lot about book clubs (including this one on Substack, from

Ochuko Akpovbovbo

and

Pandora Sykes

which I think will be excellent), and of course about BookTok as that app’s future in the US is up for debate. I thought it would be fun to analyze which book clubs command the most power in creating hits.

Choosing Book Clubs to Analyze

I learned early in life that Oprah could singlehandedly create hits when she tried Cincinnati’s local ice cream in 2002 and said it was the best she’d ever tasted, catapulting it to national prominence (the black raspberry chip is still among my favorites, give it a go).

Oprah’s book club is less active as she’s stepped back in her career but I knew it was huge.

I had been aware of Reese Witherspoon’s book club for a while and knew that she often buys the rights to the books to turn them into movies. A few months ago, I learned that Jenna Bush (NBC host & daughter of the former president) has a popular book club & I have since seen little stickers for it on lots of books.

It has also happened to come across my desk a number of times that Dua Lipa is reading a book I just read (she’s obsessed with me…), and though her book club is newer and smaller than the other ones here I thought she might find it rude if I didn’t include her.

Finally, I figured I had to include BookTok because it’s so culturally relevant and I’ve heard that it can drive an enormous volume of book sales.

Which Book Clubs Drive The Most Bestsellers?

I used the New York Times API to pull the last 15 years of bestsellers. This was really fun data to play with in a lot of ways — some of these authors are INSANELY prolific. I’d heard about Danielle Steel, who supposedly works entry-level investment banking hours in producing hundreds of romance novels, including 76 that have made the bestseller list since 2011(!!!):

The books with the most weeks on the bestseller list is what I’m most interested in as it relates to book clubs. Who creates the biggest hits?

Where the Crawdads Sing has dominated since its release in 2018, with 193 weeks on the bestseller list². I read this book, and thought it was pretty good, but not amazing — perhaps that speaks to the power of Witherspoon’s influence. It Ends With Us comes in second at 146 weeks, but was recently made into a movie and was still on the list at the end of last year, so could have more room to grow.

Overlaying book clubs onto this list, we can start to understand which book clubs drive the biggest hits:

A couple of things become obvious. First, Reese’s Book Club is the most important driver among traditional book clubs, with 3 of the top 15 books recommended by the list, including Where the Crawdads Sing, which she recommended early after its publishing and launched it to number 1 before producing the movie:

Second, BookTok is, in fact, extremely powerful. Whether a book is “recommended” by BookTok is obviously less binary than being a book club pick, but 5 of these top 15 titles were clear BookTok darlings; Colleen Hoover especially seems to have become an epicenter of the community.

If we remove the unaffiliated books and look only at titles affiliated with book clubs, we can see that the scale driven by Reese’s book club and BookTok dwarf the others:

Read with Jenna is influential but is nowhere near the level of Reese’s book club or BookTok. The hey-day of Oprah’s book club was before the start of this dataset, but it can still drive bestsellers, which is pretty remarkable.

Dua’s book club is newer and she doesn’t seem to focus on new books as much. She recently shared a list of her favorite translated books, and it rocks. Unbearable Lightness of Being was the best surprise of my reading last year. My Brilliant Friend is phenomenal, a gritty & beautiful piece of Italy. And long-time readers of my ramblings will know that Murakami holds a very special place in my heart, so I love that she included Norwegian Wood (although it is not my favorite, lmk if you want a personalize Murakami rec).

BookTok’s crowding out the bestseller list

When looking at this over time, it seems like BookTok is surpassing Reese’s book club as a driver of massive bestsellers. There are only 15 spots on the list each week and so it’s a zero-sum game:

It also seems like TikTok’s rise coincides with a ~25% decrease in the number of authors making it onto the bestseller’s list each year. I am not certain this is causal but it makes sense to me. If a few big, prolific authors blow up on TikTok each year, and collectively they take up 2-5 spots on the top 15 each week, there are are fewer spots for other authors to cycle through.

If any of you work in publishing and know more about this than I do please comment..and we’ll see what happens with BookTok in this bizarre country of ours.

---

Read with Joe

A curious thing about looking at these big book clubs is that there aren’t any huge ones run by men. The closest I could think of was Obama (or one of his interns?) tweeting out his favorites every year. I’m not sure why this is (although I guess I don’t really want John Krasinski or whoever telling me what books to read).

To that end, I recently finished 100 Years of Solitude and I Who Have Never Known Men, both of which were weird and great. I am now reading A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. It is not weird, but it is wonderful so far, set in a war-torn Chechnya, which is not quite as depressing to read about as I’d expected.

Lmk if you’re reading any of these, or if you want a recommendation; it’s among my favorite things to do. If this post didn’t convince you to read fiction but you want a non-fiction rec, here’s a little post detailing my favorite non-fiction books; i’ll similarly match any money from this for the LA foodbank.

1. Atomic Habits has been at the top of the nonfiction bestseller lists forever, and gets a lot of flak because it’s such an ice bath 8sleep athletic greens optimizer podcast guy book, but it’s actually very useful (although it is incredibly unromantic, and also i’m unfortunately sort of an ice bath 8sleep athletic greens optimizer podcast guy)

2. This is a good example of the top items in a distribution being way, way bigger than the rest of the distribution, a concept I continue to find fascinating.