Since Reese’s Book Club launched in 2017, it has become an industry phenomenon with the power to catapult titles to the top of the bestseller lists. Constance Grady from Vox looks at how Reese became the new Oprah… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!
This summer, author Megan Miranda won the publishing lottery.
Miranda, who writes thrillers and young-adult novels, is the kind of author that publishers usually call midlist. She’s well established, and one of her books has even been a New York Times bestseller, yet outside of her genre, she’s not exceptionally famous.
But in June, Miranda published her 10th novel, The Last House Guest, about a murder in an exclusive Maine vacation town. In August, Reese Witherspoon selected it for her book club.
“My editor called me up,” Miranda said by phone a week after the pick was announced, sounding still slightly dazed. “I had just gotten back from my first leg of the book tour when I found out, and I was so ecstatic.”
Miranda was already well aware of Reese’s Book Club before her own anointing. (She “adored” Daisy Jones and the Six, Reese’s March pick, she says.) Writers or people who work in the publishing industry frequently are. Since Reese’s Book Club launched in 2017 in partnership with the actress’s media company, Hello Sunshine, it has become an industry phenomenon with the power to catapult titles to the top of the bestseller lists. And Witherspoon — of Legally Blonde and Big Little Lies and Wild and Cruel Intentions — has become, like Oprah Winfrey before her, one of a select few tastemakers who can launch a book into the stratosphere.
Last September, when Reese’s Book Club picked Where The Crawdads Sing, a debut novel by the unknown 70-year-old author Delia Owens, it pulled the book out of midlist obscurity and put it on the path toward megastardom. Where the Crawdads Sing’s first print run was 27,500 copies; industry tracker NPD BookScan reports that it has since sold over 1.4 million print units, not including ebooks. It has been at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for 52 weeks.
Read full post on Vox