Oprah Winfrey Revives Her Book Club
Published: Monday, June 4, 2012 at 9:26 p.m.
Last Modified: Monday, June 4, 2012 at 9:26 p.m.
Oprah Winfrey, the publishing industry's unrivaled tastemaker, revives her book club this week after a two-year hiatus, promising the book business some of the sales and publicity it thought had vanished along with her one-hour weekday talk show.
But if it appears that Winfrey is riding to the rescue of a struggling book industry, it could be the other way around this time. The move could provide a lift to her beleaguered cable channel, OWN (the name is short for the Oprah Winfrey Network), by restoring a popular component of her old show. Since making its debut on Jan. 1, 2011, the network has limped along, with low ratings.
Before she stopped selecting books altogether in 2010, Winfrey had picked 65 titles since 1996, a mix of contemporary and classic authors. For many years, a selection as an Oprah title translated into instantly skyrocketing sales of more than a million copies, extraordinary numbers for any title.
Winfrey is expected to make several selections each year. Her first is "Wild," by Cheryl Strayed, a nonfiction retelling of the author's hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, which was published in March by Alfred A. Knopf.
"I love this book," Winfrey writes in the July issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, which will highlight the new club on its cover and feature an interview with Strayed. "I want to shout it from the mountaintop. I want to shout it from the Web. In fact, I love this book so much and want to talk about it so much, I knew I had to reinvent my book club."
Called Oprah's Book Club 2.0, the new club will resuscitate many of the familiar markers of its first version, including the sticker on the jacket of each book that proudly designates the title as chosen by Winfrey. (By Tuesday, bookstores around the country will display copies of "Wild" with the Oprah seal.)
In a nod to the millions of readers who have shifted to ! e-books, Winfrey has updated the club with digital and social media elements. The e-book versions, for instance, will include margin notes from Winfrey threaded throughout favorite passages.
"This is a book club for the way people live and read today," Sheri Salata, the president of OWN, said in a statement. "In addition to the traditional way, we also access books on smartphones, e-readers and tablets and we talk to our friends about them through social media. Oprah's Book Club 2.0 takes the Oprah.com online community, readers of O Magazine and OWN viewers and connects them through their shared love of great books."
In the new version of the club Winfrey will solicit questions from readers on Facebook and Twitter, using the hashtag#oprahsbookclub, and answer the questions online.
In 2002 Winfrey temporarily suspended her club, restarting it a year later with classics like John Steinbeck's "East of Eden." The last titles she chose, in 2010, were "A Tale of Two Cities" and "Great Expectations."
Her greatest influence came in plucking new books from the pile of releases and featuring the authors for long interviews on her show, often lifting a formerly little-known author like Jacquelyn Mitchard or Anita Shreve to household-name status. When Winfrey halted her daytime show last year, book publicists mourned the loss of what was easily the most desirable platform for promoting an author.
In theory, Winfrey now has more room than ever to promote a book club, with a 24-hour cable network bearing her name. On OWN, she hosts a weekly show called "Oprah's Next Chapter" that is broadcast Sunday nights. But it draws between half a million and 2 million viewers in a typical week, a relatively paltry number compared with the 6 to 8 million viewers for her weekday broadcast talk show that ended in 2011.
Winfrey previously tried to connect OWN with her old show by announcing a "documentary club" for the channel, but it hasn't received the same kind of attention as her book club.
Stray! ed's boo k, while unsentimental at its core, is the type of story of resilience and self-invention that Winfrey has championed.
Confronted with a life that was falling apart Strayed's mother had died of cancer, her marriage to a kindhearted man had broken up she set off for California on a treacherous solo hike of months through the desert and mountains.
On the New York Times nonfiction extended best-seller list of June 10, "Wild" is No. 22. It made its debut at No. 7 in April.
Once it is stamped with the familiar seal bearing the Oprah name, the book is almost certain to begin climbing best-seller lists again.
"When it comes to a book, there is no better recommendation engine than a nod from Oprah," said Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, part of Random House.
"I'm utterly thrilled and delighted," said Cathy Langer, the lead buyer for the Tattered Cover, a bookstore in Denver. "The wonderful thing that Oprah did is she gets readers really excited and into the bookstores. And coming into a bookstore and reading one book leads to reading other books."