With The Reader Lounge, Penguin Random House gives underrepresented audiences a virtual home
Readers across the country can grab a seat and make themselves comfortable. In October, Penguin Random House launched The Reader Lounge, a research community for book lovers.
Olivia Oudinot, senior manager of community research at the company, describes the community as a “cozy, bookish lounge,” but it’s not a brickand-mortar space. The publishing house has created a virtual space for readers to share their opinions, answer questions, and enter sweepstakes.
After an initial welcome email from PRH, those who join the group receive surveys with questions about what genres they gravitate toward, how much they usually read, how they like to read, and other personal reading habits and preferences.
The Reader Lounge surveys sometimes tackle “hot topics” as well, according to Grant Griglak, senior director of consumer insights at the company.
“We’ve asked them questions around current events in ways that have been so fascinating to track over the past couple years, with the pandemic and elections and how they’re feeling about things,” said Griglak. “It’s just great to hear how readers are responding. And importantly, what that means for their reading preferences and behaviors.”
Reading trends often move with the times, said Griglak, especially during “huge, macro global events” like the COVID-19 pandemic, when “consumers have seismic shifts to romance and fantasy.” In a 2021 survey tracking reading habits pre- and post-pandemic, 17.5 percent of 5,117 participants reported reading more romance novels during the pandemic, and 8.2 percent said they were reading more fantasy. Many readers were picking up books to get lost in them, turning pages faster and more often to escape their pandemic realities.
“There have been moments where we’ve wanted to touch down on learning more about social justice and wanting to hear from some of the leading voices, want to be inspired by Amanda Gorman,” said Griglak. “But then we kind of come back to these moments where it’s like, ‘Hey, I just want to unwind with something fun,’ or ‘I want to be taken away because the world is a really stressful place.’”
Survey responses are not shared with the public in any way, and the findings and statistics gathered by the community research team are used for strategy within the publishing, marketing, sales, and publicity departments of the publishing house.
With data from prior reader segmentation studies, Penguin Random House has already identified “six core personas for adults, five for teens,” said Griglak. While The Reader Lounge has no direct connection to editorial teams, the collected information helps the publisher stay ”close to the reader,” enabling it to “target” its books so that they have a better chance of reaching “a reader who’d be super excited to learn more about it or read that category.”
With explanatory grid posts on Instagram and TikTok videos beckoning those who “love books” and “have a lot of opinions,” The Reader Lounge has also entered those Bookstagram and BookTok spaces where so many readers and self-proclaimed literary critics reside.
“We chose to focus on social media because we wanted to promote The Reader Lounge to younger audiences and multicultural audiences,” said Oudinot. “We know that historically, in past research, both audiences are underrepresented.”
Social media can be a significant driver of reading habits. Forty-eight percent of American respondents in a 2023 survey said the short-form, bookrelated content of BookTok has influenced them to read more. The same kind of content can be seen on Instagram, with entire accounts dedicated to aesthetically pleasing images of books and bookstores, and captions and comments used by readers to write book reviews, give recommendations, and share what’s next on their to-beread lists.
A large goal of The Reader Lounge is to hear from diverse perspectives, said Oudinot, so reaching those readers on a free, accessible space like Bookstagram or BookTok is ideal.
And Griglak believes that digital literary spaces have “democratized access to books.”
“It’s really great to see so much nuanced conversation around what people like,” he said. “There aren’t only these gatekeepers who are saying, ‘this is the Best Book of the Year and why,’ but also someone saying, ‘I’m just so obsessed with the paranormal romance friends-to-lovers trope. And if that’s your thing, you will love this book.’”