How Reese Witherspoon became the new high priestess of book clubs

This summer, writer Megan Miranda won the publication lottery .
Miranda, who writes thrillers and young-adult novels, is the kind of generator that publishers normally call midlist. She ’ randomness well established, and one of her books has even been a New York Times best seller, so far outside of her genre, she ’ s not exceptionally celebrated.

But in June, Miranda published her tenth novel, The last House Guest, about a murder in an exclusive Maine vacation town. In August, Reese Witherspoon selected it for her book baseball club .
“ My editor called me up, ” Miranda said by earphone a week after the pick was announced, sounding inactive slightly dazed. “ I had fair gotten back from my first gear peg of the book tour when I found out, and I was indeed ecstatic. ”
Miranda was already good mindful of Reese ’ south Book Club before her own anointing. ( She “ adore ” Daisy Jones and the Six, Reese ’ s March cream, she says. ) Writers or people who work in the print diligence frequently are. Since Reese ’ sulfur Book Club launched in 2017 in partnership with the actress ’ sulfur media company, Hello Sunshine, it has become an diligence phenomenon with the power to catapult titles to the top of the best seller 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 choose few tastemakers who can launch a book into the stratosphere .



end September, when Reese ’ sulfur Book Club picked Where the Crawdads Sing, a debut fresh by the nameless 70-year-old author Delia Owens, it pulled the book out of midlist obscureness and put it on the path toward megastardom. Where the Crawdads Sing ’ s first print run was 27,500 copies ; diligence tracker NPD BookScan reports that it has since sold over 1.4 million photographic print units, not including ebooks. It has been at the top of the New York Times best seller list for 52 weeks. Crawdad ’ second achiever has only continued in the wake island of an article that linked it to a real-life mangle, one that allegedly involved Owens ’ south husband and stepson. ( The Reese ’ s Book Club stigmatize, apparently, is strong adequate to withstand a scandal. )
not every Reese ’ sulfur Book Club record is a sensation on the level of Where the Crawdads Sing, but all of them are respectable successes. In publish, a debut novel by an unknown author can sell a few as 3,000 copies and calm be doing o. But Bookscan reports that none of Reese ’ randomness Book Club ’ s 28 picks so far — each adorned with a cheery chicken book club poser on the cover — has sold fewer than 10,000 print copies .
“ This is the equivalent of winning the lottery for these authors, ” says Bookscan executive director Kristen McLean .
It surely was for Miranda. Miranda ’ s bible had a strong start on sales, but by the conclusion of July, the numbers had started to cool. In the workweek earlier Witherspoon announced on Instagram that it would be her record club picking for August, The final House Guest sold just 892 print copies, according to Bookscan. The week after Witherspoon announced her nibble, it sold 5,494 .
It helps that Reese ’ south Book Club is a natural extension of the stigmatize of Reese Witherspoon, actress, producer, tastemaker. When Witherspoon tells the ledger club-loving women of the worldly concern that she thinks they ’ ll love a book, the chances are, they merely might.
That ’ randomness because Witherspoon has made books, and her own sample in them, fundamental to her effigy, while appealing to a accurate brawny demographic that publishers and booksellers love. The Reese Witherspoon mark is Legally Blonde ’ s Elle Woods reading a law casebook on a stationary bicycle ; it ’ s the actress turning Big Little Lies from a book into the 2017 Emmy winner for Best Drama and clutching her trophy with a white-knuckled bag. And it ’ second that of America ’ s smart and busy hot ma, casually posing with a koran that the early smart and busy women of America will adore — and women, who are 13 percentage more probable than men to have read a script in the past 12 months, are the people whose tastes drive publication .

“There were massive increases”

Reese ’ mho Book Club has a titanic foremother, a colossus among bible clubs that remains fabled for its ability to make and break authors ’ careers : Oprah ’ s Book Club, which first emerged in 1996 to endorse Jacquelyn Mitchard ’ s Deep Edge of the Ocean .
Picks for Oprah ’ s Book Club, announced by Oprah Winfrey on her shoot read, regularly sold over a million copies. It helped to build the reputations of authors such as Wally Lamb and Jeffrey Eugenides, and resurfaced older, cherished works by Toni Morrison and William Faulkner for newfangled audiences. She tended to pick books that were aspirational and books that were accessible : An Oprah ’ s Book Club pick could much be heavy and challenge, and it fair as frequently could be fast-paced and fun to read. Whatever she chose, it soared : When she made Anna Karenina a blame, publishers announced that they were printing 800,000 extra copies .
In publish, tastemakers like Oprah and Witherspoon are a necessity, both for publishers and for readers. The sheer scale of the diligence demands it. More books come out every year than anyone can count — UNESCO estimates that the number is around 2.2 million — so many that it ’ south easy for anyone trying to keep track of what ’ s newfangled and worth reading to be buried under the massive burden of the new releases bearing down upon them .
Enter celebrity bible clubs .
“ It ’ mho gain that Oprah was able to get people to read the book that she picked for her script club, ” says economist Craig Garthwaite, who studied the effect of Oprah ’ s original book golf club on the industry in 2012. “ There were massive increases in the sales of those books. ”
Oprah ’ s Book Club did not, however, convert non-readers. We know this because whenever Oprah announced a new pick, sales across print as a unharmed stay stable : precisely as many people bought books as were already going to buy books, no matter what Oprah said .
And not everyone believed Oprah was using her powers for good. In 2001, Jonathan Franzen voiced some qualms when Oprah selected his novel The Corrections for her club, describing some of her previous picks as “ bathetic ” and “ unidimensional. ”
For fame book clubhouse skeptics, Franzen ’ s argument represents one of the dangers of influencers such as Oprah and Witherspoon. If those books aren ’ thymine very good, the argumentation goes, then Oprah and Witherspoon are leading their acolytes toward mindless nipple and lowering the literacy of the american english populace. But Garthwaite says the numbers suggest that Oprah, at least, was actually pushing readers toward books more challenging than those they would have picked up on their own .
Garthwaite notes that Oprah ’ s Book Club 2.0, which launched in 2012 with Cheryl Strayed ’ s Wild and continues today with infrequent updates, hasn ’ metric ton been able to drive sales closely vitamin a well as her original script club did. “ Anything anyone else does, tied anything Oprah does, ” he says, “ is a bunch more muted than when Oprah was at her acme. ”
Witherspoon, a bible influencer of the social media old age, of course, is not Oprah. But she ’ randomness credibly as close to being Oprah as anyone could be right now .

“Nothing but a success”

Witherspoon has been talking about books on her personal Instagram explanation for years, and her Reese ’ south Book Club Instagram has existed informally since 2015. But in June 2017, Witherspoon ’ second product caller, Hello Sunshine, took over the golf club ’ s daily operations and built a reliable monthly agenda of promotions, interviews, and giveaways. The inaugural “ Reese ’ s Book Club pick ” was Gail Honeyman ’ s Eleanor Oliphant Is wholly Fine, a far-out debut novel about a neurotically controlled womanhood and her traumatic past .
Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine had already optioned the film rights for Eleanor Oliphant by the time they announced that the title would be their first pick. And that one-two punch of film option and script baseball club drummed up enormous early buzz for the book, says Lindsay Prevette, the executive director of promotion at Honeyman ’ s US publisher, Pamela Dorman Books .
“ That arrant storm in truth helped the book find its first early on readers, ” says Prevette. “ We could go second to the media and say, ‘ Look at how stimulate Reese is. She actually loves this book. ’ We could point to Reese ’ s hold and the early books she ’ second helped over the years, like Big Little Lies. ” ( Witherspoon co-produced and stars in the HBO adaptation of Liane Moriarty ’ second 2014 novel. )
today, if you look at Eleanor Oliphant ’ s Amazon listing, you ’ ll see the words “ A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick ” at the very top of the foliate, in boldface, and then a endorsement from Witherspoon herself.

“ That book did not hit the best seller list in hardback, ” Prevette points out. But Reese ’ mho Book Club kept working to help it find readers evening after Eleanor Oliphant had been out for months : “ The reserve baseball club kept talking about the bible on Instagram, building this community of readers throughout the year, a community of fans speaking to each other, ” she says. The consequence ? When Eleanor Oliphant came out in paperback in May 2018, it debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times list .
“ We ’ re at over a million copies sold immediately in all formats, ” says Prevette .
The picks that followed — short-change stories to nonfiction to novels — seaport ’ t all make quite that sort of bump, but each has more than a little in common with Honeyman ’ sulfur hit. So what makes a book a Reese book ?

“A woman has to be driving the story”

According to Hello Sunshine CEO Sarah Harden, all of the books selected for Reese ’ s Book Club are read and approved by Witherspoon herself. “ We have a full-time pedant, person who ’ south reading all the meter for film and television receiver and book baseball club, ” Harden says. “ I read a short ton of books as well, ” but, she insists, “ Reese truly picks the books. ”
staff members can pass their recommendations along to Witherspoon to read, or Witherspoon might precisely bring in the book herself. ( While Hello Sunshine ’ s Harden spoke with Vox, Witherspoon herself declined to comment for this article. ) “ Our November book foot is something none of us had read, ” says Harden. “ Reese was like, ‘ I equitable read our koran foot, ’ and we all then scurried to read it. ”
All of the selections are focused on women. “ A womanhood has to be driving the story. They are driving the narrative, they have agency in the fib, they are not the side character, they are the one determining how the narrative goes, ” says Harden. Witherspoon and her team are not opposed to picking a ledger written by a male author, american samoa long as the story is centered on a charwoman. “ We just haven ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate done it even. ”
Harden says the koran cabaret besides tries to spotlight works by women of color and external writers who aren ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate already well known stateside — and books such as erotic Stories For Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal, the pick for March 2018. Jaswal, says Harden, is “ an incredible author, but lone a couple of her books have been published in the US. so about all of our book club readers were like, ‘ Oh my gosh, I love this book, I want to go back and read her other books, ’ but they hadn ’ triiodothyronine learn of her until we picked her. ”
“ I think Reese very loves that, ” Harden continues : “ not constantly picking the ledger that everyone is already talking about. ”
Glancing through the complete number of the Book Club ’ randomness selections reveals another commonalty : Like Oprah before her, Witherspoon ’ mho picks are always broadly appealing, and they tend to walk the agate line between literary and commercial. They ’ re the kind of books that are well written but not excessively esoteric, playfulness to read but not sol rubbishy that you might feel guilty about spend time on them. They ’ rhenium hanker enough to be immersive, but they ’ ra not doorstops, either .
Publishers tend to even describe these as “ book club books ” because they feel designed to be read by fresh and busy people who want to talk about a dear book over a share plate of hors d ’ oeuvres and don ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate want their reading to feel like a job .
once Witherspoon has chosen a book, promotion gets afoot. The actress announces each calendar month ’ second picking herself via her Instagram Stories on her personal account in the first base workweek of every calendar month. then the book club ’ s official Instagram account picks up the bang, as does the official book club newsletter. There are author interviews and exclusive essays and giveaways, and readers are invited to share their thoughts about the reserve on their own Instagrams. But even after a book ’ s calendar month in the sun is over, the book club international relations and security network ’ triiodothyronine done .
Celeste Ng ’ s second novel Little Fires Everywhere was selected for September 2017, but it keeps popping up on the Reese ’ s Book Club Instagram. “ We talked about that book when it sold a million copies, and then when the paperback came forbidden. We continued to do giveaways, ” Harden says. “ That happened to be a book that we besides optioned for television receiver, and then we sold that to Hulu, and Kerry Washington and Reese announced they would be starring in it. The show will launch sometime future year on Hulu. so if you ’ re separate of our book club, from September 2017 to sometime in 2020, we ’ ve had a two-and-a-half-year conversation with you already about that book. ”
That long-run approach path is one of the benefits of using social media. Oprah orchestrated her book club first through her day television receiver picture and later her monthly magazine, which made it impractical to sporadically check in on old selections. ( Oprah ’ s stream book club is theoretically social media based. She announced earlier this year that she ’ ll be partnering with Apple to create a raw interpretation of her script club, although it remains to be seen precisely what it will look like. )
But Reese ’ s Book Club is still young enough that it ’ s an open interview whether its long-run partnerships might ever become a liability. When does the club beginning to look like a crass market cock for film and television receiver projects rather than a actual saying of love for books ? And what happens if a book gets caught in a controversy, as Where the Crawdads Sing did ?
Most fame ledger clubs finally weather such a scandal : when Oprah ’ s Book Club writer James Frey was revealed to have lied in his memoir A Million Little Pieces, Oprah brought him onto her show and made him apologize to her audience for deceiving them, a moment that became emblematic of Oprah ’ s moral righteousness and imperativeness that people should be able to trust her .
Reese ’ randomness Book Club has so far to make a public statement on the Crawdads controversy, and representatives declined to comment on it for this article. By and big, the Book Club appears to have made the calculation that the best thing it can possibly do is to keep quiet on this offspring and hope it will all blow over and that no matter what happens, the controversy won ’ triiodothyronine affect Witherspoon ’ randomness prototype .

“I just started reading and reading and reading”

The official Reese ’ s Book Club Instagram is littered with movie stills in which characters Witherspoon has played are seen take : Annette from Cruel Intentions read in Central Park ; Cecily from The Importance of Being Earnest reading a bantam pocket-size bible while wearing an enormous gown. That ’ second because Reese Witherspoon about always plays repel, bookish women who we see reading onscreen, which is to say characters who we are meant to understand as chic .
Witherspoon ’ s two most iconic characters are, in fact, iconic specifically for their smarts and their stick-to-it-iveness : election ’ randomness Tracy Flick, who overachieves her way through high school, and Legally Blonde ’ s Elle Woods, who struts into Harvard Law tweedle, “ What, like it ’ second heavily ? ” Witherspoon ’ second star prototype is based on the mind of Witherspoon as bright and force and bookish — in a amusing room, a sympathetic way .
And when Witherspoon ’ s acting career began to falter in the 2010s and she found herself pushed more and more into the mid-tier amatory drollery ghetto, she made books and her own taste as a reader central to her revival .
Witherspoon produced the 2014 film adaptation of the novel Gone Girl and was central to the post of the film : When the rights to the ledger sold to her production company, Witherspoon was in all the headlines. The same year, Witherspoon produced and starred in Wild, based on the memoir by Cheryl Strayed ; the role earned her a second Oscar nominating speech for Best Actress and a bona fide rejoinder narrative .
“ I fair got very inspired and started this production company, started reading voraciously, calling everybody, and material — all of this is born out of a time of great aesthetic curiosity for me, ” Witherspoon said in a 2014 consultation with IndieWire. She added, “ I funded the wholly company myself — intentionally, because I didn ’ deoxythymidine monophosphate want to be under anyone else ’ s mandate. I merely started reading and read and read. ”
Reese Witherspoon ’ s career revival is rooted in her taste in books. It depends on her ability to find books about women that audiences will like and respond to, and then bring in trust collaborators to translate those books for the screen. And audiences are fix to give her credit for that taste because we beginning fell in love with Witherspoon by watching her turn sympathetic ache girls who seemed as though they probably had adept taste in books.

It ’ s like having Elle Woods recommend a koran to you. Who ’ south going to say no to that ?
Constance Grady covers books and culture for Vox .
Correction : An earlier adaptation of this article described Hello Sunshine as Reese Witherspoon ’ sulfur production ship’s company. It is a media company .