There’s a photograph from 1926 that I keep pinned above my desk. It shows a group of women seated around a table in a Paris apartment. The light is coming from a tall window on the left. The women are holding books. Several of them are mid-conversation, their faces animated with the particular intensity that comes from arguing about ideas. They were members of Sylvia Beach’s lending library circle, loosely organized, fiercely opinionated, and responsible for championing writers that no mainstream publisher would touch. One of those writers was James Joyce. Without that group of readers, readers who met regularly to discuss and advocate for literature they believed in, Ulysses might never have found its publisher.

I bring this up because book clubs get a bad reputation in the publishing industry, and it drives me a little bit crazy. The stereotype is a group of middle-aged women drinking wine and barely discussing the book. I’ve heard editors, agents, and fellow publishers dismiss book clubs as irrelevant to serious literary culture. This attitude is shortsighted at best. At worst, it’s a misreading of how books actually find their audiences and how the publishing industry’s direction has been shaped by organized groups of readers throughout its history.

Let me start with the most obvious example. Oprah’s Book Club, launched in 1996, didn’t just change publishing. It rearranged the furniture. Before Oprah, literary fiction was a prestige category with modest sales. Serious novels won prizes and sold 10,000 copies. Oprah’s selections routinely sold over a million. More importantly, she chose books that the industry hadn’t expected to become bestsellers. Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon had been in print for nearly twenty years when Oprah selected it. Within weeks, it was the number one bestseller in the country. Wally Lamb, Andre Dubus III, Bernhard Schlink. These were writers the industry respected but hadn’t invested in at scale. Oprah made them into household names, and in doing so, she proved something the industry should have already known: ordinary readers are hungry for literary fiction. They just need someone to invite them in.

The publishing industry’s response to Oprah was revealing. At first, there was snobbery. Literary types dismissed her selections as middlebrow. Jonathan Franzen’s public ambivalence about being chosen for the club in 2001 became a notorious episode in the culture wars between “literary” and “popular” fiction. Looking back, the snobbery was ridiculous. Oprah’s Book Club did more for literary fiction sales in five years than the entire literary awards ecosystem had done in fifty. But the fact that the industry was initially uncomfortable with a non-literary-establishment figure having that much influence tells you something about how the industry thought about readers, and specifically about organized groups of readers. Readers were supposed to be passive. They bought what publishers and critics told them to buy. They weren’t supposed to form their own communities and make their own decisions about what mattered.

But they always had. Long before Oprah, book clubs were shaping what Americans read. The Book-of-the-Month Club, founded in 1926 (the same year as that photograph on my wall, coincidentally), was the first major effort to organize readers at scale. Its model was simple: a panel of judges selected one book per month, and subscribers received it automatically unless they opted out. At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, the Book-of-the-Month Club had over half a million members. That’s half a million guaranteed sales for any book the club selected. Publishers designed their lists around it. Editors acquired books with one eye on the manuscript and the other on whether the Book-of-the-Month Club judges would like it. The club’s preferences shaped what got published, which shaped what got written, which shaped what American literature looked like for decades.

The club had biases, of course. Its judges favored realistic fiction, American and British settings, and traditional narrative structures. Experimental work rarely made the cut. This frustrated writers and critics who wanted American literature to be more adventurous, and their frustration wasn’t wrong. But the Book-of-the-Month Club also did something valuable: it created a national conversation about books. Hundreds of thousands of people were reading the same book at the same time, discussing it with friends and neighbors and colleagues. In an era before television dominated American entertainment, these shared reading experiences were a form of cultural glue. They gave people something to talk about. They made reading feel like participation in something larger than an individual act.

On the other side of the Atlantic, book clubs had an even more explicitly political dimension. The Left Book Club, founded in 1936 by publisher Victor Gollancz, combined reading with political organizing. Members received a monthly selection focused on socialism, anti-fascism, and social justice. The club had 57,000 members at its peak, organized into over 1,500 local discussion groups across Britain. These weren’t just reading groups. They were organizing cells. Members discussed the books, yes, but they also planned political actions, raised money for causes, and built networks that fed into the broader British left. George Orwell published The Road to Wigan Pier through the Left Book Club, and the book’s impact was amplified enormously by the club’s distribution network and discussion infrastructure.

The Left Book Club demonstrates something important about what book clubs can do that individual reading cannot. Individual reading changes individual minds. Book clubs change the social context in which those minds operate. When you read a book alone, your response is private. When you read a book as part of a group, your response becomes social. You articulate your reactions, defend your interpretations, hear perspectives you wouldn’t have considered. The book becomes a site of conversation, and the conversation can lead to action. This is why book clubs have been important to every major social movement in modern history. The abolitionist movement had its reading circles. The suffrage movement had its literary societies. The civil rights movement had its book clubs. Reading together has always been a first step toward acting together.

I want to jump forward to the early 2000s, because something interesting happened to book clubs when the internet arrived. Online book clubs should have been a natural evolution. People could discuss books across geographic boundaries, join multiple clubs simultaneously, and access a wider range of titles than any local group could manage. And online book clubs did emerge, on platforms like Goodreads, LibraryThing, and dozens of smaller forums. But they didn’t replace physical book clubs. Instead, both formats grew. The American Library Association estimated in 2019 that there were over five million active book club members in the United States, and that number has likely grown since. Physical, in-person book clubs are as popular as they’ve been at any point in American history.

Why? I think it’s because the social function of a book club can’t be fully replicated online. An online discussion is convenient, but it lacks the ambient social qualities of sitting in someone’s living room with a glass of wine and a dog trying to sit on your lap while you argue about whether the narrator is reliable. The book is often a pretext for the gathering as much as it’s the purpose. People join book clubs because they want to read more, yes, but also because they want regular, structured social interaction with people who share at least one of their interests. In an era of increasing social isolation, book clubs offer something genuinely valuable: a reason to show up somewhere on a regular basis and talk to people.

For publishers, book clubs have become a significant sales channel. When a book gets picked up by book clubs, even small local ones, the effect is measurable. A single book club of twelve people represents twelve guaranteed sales. Multiply that by thousands of clubs choosing the same book, and you’re talking about real numbers. Publishers have responded by creating “book club editions” with discussion guides in the back, organizing author appearances at book club meetings (virtual appearances have made this much easier), and targeting book club influencers with advance copies. Some publishers have dedicated staff whose job is book club outreach. I know because I’ve hired one.

At ScrollWorks, we’ve had two books become genuine book club hits. Still Waters was the first. We didn’t plan for it. The book was a quiet literary novel that we expected to sell modestly to a core audience of literary fiction readers. But something about it resonated with book clubs. I think it was the themes: family obligation, the cost of secrets, the way the past refuses to stay buried. These are topics that generate discussion. People disagree about the protagonist’s choices. They bring their own family experiences to the conversation. They argue about the ending. A book that generates good arguments is a book that works for book clubs, and word spread from one club to another until we were getting orders in quantities that didn’t match any of our other marketing efforts. Our best-selling month for Still Waters wasn’t the launch month. It was eight months later, when the book club wave was at its peak.

That experience taught me something about how books travel through book club networks. It’s slow. It’s organic. It depends on personal recommendations from club members who belong to multiple clubs, or who recommend books to friends in other cities. It’s almost entirely outside the publisher’s control. We can send advance copies to book club leaders. We can make discussion guides available. We can offer author visits. But we can’t manufacture the word-of-mouth that makes a book a book club phenomenon. That comes from the readers themselves, from their genuine enthusiasm, from their desire to share something they loved with people they trust.

Reese Witherspoon’s book club, which launched in 2017, is the most interesting recent development in this space. Witherspoon built on the Oprah model but adapted it for social media. Her picks are announced on Instagram, discussed across multiple platforms, and branded with recognizable stickers that appear on bookstore shelves. The commercial impact has been enormous. A Reese’s Book Club pick can sell 100,000 additional copies. But what I find more interesting than the sales numbers is the way Witherspoon has influenced what gets published. Her preferences are specific: she favors stories with strong female protagonists, Southern settings, themes of resilience and reinvention. And because publishers know her preferences, they acquire books that fit them. Acquisitions editors have told me openly that they think about “Reese potential” when evaluating manuscripts. That’s a book club shaping the pipeline, not just the sales chart.

Whether that’s good or bad depends on your perspective. I think it’s mostly good, because the books Witherspoon champions tend to be well-written and commercially undervalued. They’re the kinds of books that would have struggled to find a large audience without institutional support. But there’s a risk that the influence becomes too concentrated. When a handful of celebrity book clubs drive a disproportionate share of book sales, publishers start optimizing for those clubs rather than for the broader market. The range of books that get published narrows. Voices that don’t fit the mold get overlooked. I’ve seen this happen, and it concerns me.

The antidote is the grassroots book club, the local group that reads whatever it wants without reference to celebrity picks or bestseller lists. These clubs are where the most adventurous reading happens. I’ve met book club members who’ve read authors I’d never heard of, who’ve discovered books from small presses in other countries, who’ve gone deep into a single genre or a single region’s literature in ways that no commercial book club would ever attempt. These groups are the connective tissue of literary culture. They’re the reason that a book published by a tiny press in, say, New Zealand can end up being discussed in a living room in Portland, Oregon, six months later.

The pandemic changed book clubs, mostly for the better. Zoom book clubs became mainstream out of necessity, and they’ve persisted because they solve real logistical problems. People with young children can attend without finding a babysitter. People with disabilities can participate from home. People in rural areas can join clubs based in cities hundreds of miles away. The hybrid model, where some members attend in person and others join by video, has become common and seems likely to stick around. I know several clubs that have added members in other states because of pandemic-era adaptations. The geographic constraint that used to limit book clubs to a single neighborhood or city has been loosened, and the result is clubs that are more diverse in every sense: geographically, demographically, and in their reading tastes.

There’s one more historical example I want to mention, because it’s close to my heart. In the 1980s, a group of independent bookstore owners in Northern California formed an informal network to share recommendations. They’d read advance copies, discuss them by phone (this was before email was widespread), and agree on which titles to push in their stores. They called themselves the Pacific Rim Booksellers Group, and their recommendations carried weight with publishers because they represented real stores with real customers. When the group collectively got behind a book, it meant prominent display in a dozen stores, hand-selling by knowledgeable staff, and word-of-mouth that radiated outward from the Bay Area to the rest of the West Coast.

This group was, in effect, a book club for booksellers. And its influence was out of proportion to its size. Several books that became major literary successes in the late 1980s and 1990s got their start through this network. The booksellers’ enthusiasm was the spark that lit the fire. Without it, those books might have sold respectably and quietly gone out of print. With it, they found an audience that grew and grew until the rest of the industry noticed.

I think about that group when I think about what book clubs do at their best. They amplify. They take a single reader’s enthusiasm and multiply it through conversation, recommendation, and community. They turn private experiences into shared ones. They create audiences for books that the market alone wouldn’t support. And they do all of this without any formal power, without any institutional authority, without any commercial incentive. They do it because people who love books want to talk about them with other people who love books. That impulse is as old as literature itself, and it’s more powerful than any marketing campaign, any celebrity endorsement, any algorithmic recommendation engine.

The next time someone dismisses book clubs as frivolous, I’ll point them to Sylvia Beach’s lending library. Or the Left Book Club. Or Oprah’s million-copy sellers. Or the quiet, steady work of thousands of local groups that keep books alive long after their publication dates have passed. Book clubs didn’t just change publishing. They are publishing, in the most fundamental sense. They’re the place where books stop being products and start being experiences. And that, more than anything else, is what keeps this industry alive.