INSTAGRAM IS THE NEW BOOK CLUB

Colour-coded shelfies and celeb endorsements have transformed books into hot social-media property

And it’s being spearheaded by A-list celebrities.

The second bestselling book on Amazon in 2017 was Milk And Honey, a collection of poetry by 25-year-old Canadian Rupi Kaur. That’s right, poetry. You know, that stuff you probably last read during your Year 12 exams. To put it into context, Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies – a book that dominated conversation due to the award-winning HBO miniseries it spawned – was all the way down at number 53 on the same list. Even more jaw-dropping, in 2016, Milk And Honey outsold the next bestselling book of poetry (The Odyssey by Homer) tenfold.

Rupi Kaur, in case you don’t know, is a poet for the Instagram age. And we mean that quite literally – she posts poems so brief, they fit neatly into Insta squares, meaning that not only can her 2.3 million followers read her work instantly, they can also regram her poetry to their own followers (for example, “But what is stronger/than the human heart/ Which shatters over and over/and lives” had more than 260,000 double-taps at time of press). What’s most amazing about Kaur, though, is that she’s become famous – and her two books, Milk And Honey and the more recent The Sun And Her Flowers, have become bestsellers – through Instagram itself. Before that, she was self-published. Now, she’s a bona-fide phenomenon.

Welcome to the new book club: Instagram. Its unofficial – yet clear – leader is Reese Witherspoon, whose second post ever was a shot of J Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements. Around the same time she posted the pic (along with the caption, “I love this book! Has anyone else read?”), it was announced that the film rights had been snapped up and she’d been enlisted as a producer. Though she may not have realised it at the time, it was the start of the #Rwbookclub hashtag, which, in turn, was the beginning of the account @Reesesbookclubxhellosunshine, which – we’re getting there – is now where 390,000 followers get book suggestions from the Oscar winner herself.

There was a time when a book recommendation from Oprah cemented its status as a bestseller – but now, those endorsements happen in beautifully shot flat-lays, or stacks of artfully colour-coded editions, with hashtags like #shelfie, #bookstagram and #amreading. Celebs like Witherspoon can send a book rocketing up the bestseller list with a single post, and authors like Kaur can cultivate a following previously unknown to all but the most successful authors. To wit, when Witherspoon posted a pic of Jessica Knoll’s debut novel Luckiest Girl Alive, the book quickly climbed into Amazon’s top 100 bestsellers – despite not actually being published yet. Witherspoon had already secured the film rights, and soon after Luckiest Girl Alive was published, the book became a New York Times bestseller and had found its way into Amazon’s top 10.

It seems that if anything can save the book industry, it’s social media. After all, what is prettier than a book nestled in a tangle of sheets, resting next to a pot of tea or propped up on smug holiday toes? And what better way to tap into the psyche of a celeb than by sneaking a look at what they’re reading? Instagram posts from the likes of Emma Watson (who runs a feminist-themed book club, Our Shared Shelf, on Goodreads), Emma Roberts (one half of the online

book club Belletrist) and Sarah Jessica Parker (honorary chair of the American Library Association’s Book Club Central) can transform a book from a littleknown debut to a blockbuster in a matter of days. What’s more, these ticks of approval from female celebs usually champion women writers. In fact, Witherspoon has made an entirely new career out of advocating for female writers – her films Wild and Gone Girl were based on novels written by women, and her book club selects works solely written by women.

The power of Instagram isn’t lost on the book industry, with publishers now clambering to make covers stand out in your feed. “Judging a book by its cover is inevitable in any scenario,” says Allen & Unwin publisher Kelly Fagan, “but since Instagram, we’ve seen a resurgence of typographic dominated covers, letting the title, style of font and colour speak for the content. These types of covers are often more creative: they employ metaphor instead of relying on images to convey a message.” Ironically, she says, this marks a return to a more traditional style of cover design. Allen & Unwin recently published the first book by Insta-famous artist Mari Andrew, whose 749,000 followers regram the hell out of her quirky self-help-themed illustrations.

But perhaps the greatest indication that Instagram has become the new destination for book lovers is that Oprah has brought her famed book club back. One of her latest picks? The very Instagrammable Behold The Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue.