Ever feel nostalgic for those mail-order clubs from decades ago, when you’d receive a monthly browsing catalog and have to decline the main club selection or it would be automatically shipped to you? Such clubs largely disappeared from the retail landscape as the internet—and Amazon—grew in importance, although you can still find some (the Military Book Club, for instance) serving niche audiences.
Well, you may have noticed subscription clubs are enjoying a resurgence—ever heard of the Dollar Shave Club or Birchbox? Part of the trend is related to convenience and cost savings, but some services appeal to the customer’s desire for a personalized curation service. And that’s exactly what the relaunch of Book of the Month Club (BOMC) is betting on.
After coming under new ownership a few years ago, BOMC was relaunched in 2015 as a monthly hardcover subscription service. Customers pay for a one-month ($16.99), three-month ($44.97), or full-year ($143.88) membership, then choose which book they want to receive each month based on three to five selections curated by a panel of well-known judges.
When we heard that Maris Kreizman, formerly of Kickstarter, was selected to be the editorial director of BOMC, we asked her a few questions about the new direction—noting that the target demographic for BOMC appears to be women interested in upmarket and literary fiction. She said, “Our members are mostly smart, culturally savvy women in their twenties and thirties. That said, there are many members of all backgrounds and ages, including men. We welcome anyone who loves reading and is looking to discover great new books. We feature all sorts of authors, and in particular try to focus on debut and emerging writers that we love and think our members will too.”
Bottom line: BOMC focuses strictly on offering hardcover print books; when we asked Kreizman about the absence of an ebook offering, she said, “From a technology perspective we could launch a proprietary ebook offering relatively quickly, but haven’t found particularly strong consumer demand for that format among the Book of the Month audience so far.” We anticipate BOMC becoming a coveted way for traditional publishers to gain visibility with an audience of female millennials, and we look forward to seeing if it expands beyond that. (If millennials are your audience, too, we recommend you sign up for BOMC’s affiliate program!) For more background on BOMC and its new direction, see this January 2016 article in Publishers Weekly.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
