Book-of-the-Month Club Takes Steps to Get Out of Trouble
By EDWARD WYATT

The Book-of-the-Month Club, a publishing tastemaker for generations of Americans that has seen its membership plunge in recent years, has begun an overhaul that includes the elimination of the panel of literary judges that each month choose the club's prestigious main selection.

The popularity of Internet booksellers and the ubiquity of heavily discounted hardcover books at warehouse clubs and mass-market retailers have combined to make the Book-of-the-Month Club - and other general-interest book clubs - far less important in the selling of books in the United States. Though they are still very popular in Europe, the only American book clubs that have shown much growth in recent years are specialized clubs with niche subjects like history or medicine or ones that focus on groups like gay readers or African-Americans.

Still the best-known mail-order reading club and the model for dozens of imitators, the Book-of-the-Month Club first dropped its panel of judges in 1994 in an attempt to attract a wider audience. In 2001, seeking to restore some prestige, it revived the panel when the German publisher Bertelsmann merged its book clubs with those of Time Warner to form Bookspan, the jointly owned company that includes the Book-of-the-Month Club. Since then, however, membership has fallen by almost half, to roughly 400,000, club executives said this week. As recently as 1988, the Book-of-the-Month Club boasted more than 1.5 million members.

And where literary lions like Wilfred Sheed, Mordechai Richler and J. Anthony Lukas once set the country's reading agenda, choosing the club's monthly main selection over lunch and brandy in Midtown Manhattan and discovering writers like J. D. Salinger, that role has been largely usurped by Oprah Winfrey and the book recommendations of morning news programs, leaving general book clubs as little more than relics of a bygone era.

The most recent panel - Bill Bryson, Nelson DeMille, Annie Proulx and Anna Quindlen, who are paid $50,000 each annually - has made some selections that turned into blockbuster hits, including "The Lovely Bones," by Alice Sebold. But the club's membership has continued to dwindle, falling by one estimate as low as 350,000 in 2003.

"In an era when not every community had a bookstore, the book clubs played the great social role of selecting books that would be of interest to the wider public," said Michael V. Carlisle, a partner at InkWell Management, a New York literary agency.

In the past, the two biggest clubs, Book-of-the-Month and the Literary Guild, often bid against each other for the right to offer new titles to their members, generating hundreds of millions of dollars for the publisher and author. Now both clubs are owned by Bookspan, which also operates more than two dozen specialized clubs focusing on subjects like history, cooking, nursing and Christian-oriented books. Less competition and declining memberships in the general clubs have meant much lower fees for publishers for the rights to offer new books.

"We've been playing with different formulas for quite a while now," said Seth Radwell, president of the marketing and editorial group at Bookspan. "We've always prided ourselves in picking good books across different genres. Now we're starting with a new mode that gives the consumer much more choice."

To address the fall-off in membership, the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was founded in 1926 by a former advertising executive, Harry Scherman, is taking several steps, he said. Club members will still receive 17 mailings a year, each with a monthly selection that they can accept or reject, but those books will be chosen by the club's staff based on a member's previous purchases and expressed interests, much like the recommendations of Amazon.com.

And while new members will still get to choose five books for $1, with an obligation to buy four more, the club is hoping to rebuild its ranks with a new program, Smart Reader Rewards, that was introduced last week. Smart Reader further tailors offerings to members within five subject categories - mystery and suspense; history and biography; fiction; nonfiction and current affairs; or home and health - letting members choose in which category they want to receive their monthly main selections.

Another new feature, Booksearch Plus, allows members to shop for books outside the regular club offerings, making the club more like other Internet book retailers. And like Amazon, Barnes & Noble.com and other online retailers, the club will waive shipping charges on purchases of $25 or more.

Mr. Radwell said that under the new system, a single main selection for all readers no longer makes sense. In a test program the new format has added members at a higher rate than with the old formula, he said, adding that membership could climb above 500,000 in the next year. Bookspan's largest club, the Doubleday Book Club, which focuses on mass-market fiction, has 1.2 million members, and two others, the Literary Guild and Crossings, a Christian-religion oriented book club, have close to a million members each.

Some publishers see at least the possibility of a silver lining in the changes. Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic Inc., said publishers are always looking for a seal of approval for their new books.

"I was very pleased when I heard about this new program," Mr. Entrekin said. "There are so many books being published, anything to help the reader to discriminate is beneficial. And with more categories, there is more of a chance to be selected."

Ms. Quindlen, who has been a judge for the last four years, said she hoped the dissolution of the panel would not cause first novels and undiscovered writers to be passed over in favor of more popular authors.

"A lot of the things that I had the opportunity to look at I think might have been overlooked otherwise," Ms. Quindlen said. In addition to the "The Lovely Bones," Ms. Quindlen's recent selections for the club have included "The Dogs of Babel" by Carolyn Parkhurst (Little, Brown) and a nonfiction book, "Random Family" (Scribner), by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, both of which unexpectedly became best sellers.

"I'd hate to see them veer too much toward the predictable best sellers," she said. "That's sort of cheap and easy."

Source: New York Times