iVillage Daily Blabber: Authors Want Oprah’s Book Club Back
American authors are begging for Oprah to help them out with her book club. A group of novelists wrote an open letter to Oprah Winfrey begging her to return to selecting new novels for her book club. She had recently been picking historical classics instead. When she stopped featuring contemporary work in 2002, sales slacked for those authors. The group of 158 authors, called Word of Mouth, said, ‘Book Club members stopped buying new fiction, and this changed the face of American publishing.’ Some of Oprah’s picks since she started the club in 1996 have sold more than 1 million copies. Lately she’s been picking the likes of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. The Word of Mouth backers include A.M. Homes, Amy Tan, Jane Smiley and Junot Diaz. “
I have been really nasty about Oprah and her book club. I find it troubling that millions of Americans choose books simply because Oprah says so. Then I got even more annoyed when she started choosing the “old stuff”. If she’s going to choose books then how about use her status to help new, unrecognized, non-mainstream writers? Why wouldn’t she do this? Wouldn’t you do this if you were Oprah?