The club every celebrity wants to get into
One recommendation from an actor or pop star can create a bestselling book, while the film rights may give them a nice little earner. By Laura Hackett.
It was no real surprise that Dakota Johnson was hesitant to talk about Madame Web on the press tour last month for the box office-bombing superhero film. “It was definitely an experience for me to make that movie,’’ she said, not so delicately, before moving on to her other new venture: A book club.
The Fifty Shades of Grey star, who lives in California with her partner, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, might seem an unlikely figure to front a book club, but she is just one of a growing number of celebrities turning to more literary pursuits – and finding the move profitable.
The singer Dua Lipa, model Kaia Gerber and drag queen RuPaul are among the latest to share their literary favourites with fans.
Of course, all are following in the footsteps of Oprah Winfrey, who, in 1996, introduced a new segment to her US chat show: Oprah’s Book Club. Over 15 years, she recommended 70 books and together they sold more than 55 million copies.
While we rarely turn to TV for recommendations on what to read, we are still swayed by star power, usually on social media. Reese Witherspoon’s book club, for instance, is now a US$900m business and the model for new celebrity book clubs.
The Legally Blonde actress launched her club in 2017, in partnership with her media company, Hello Sunshine. With almost three million subscribers to the club’s Instagram, Witherspoon can mint a bestseller overnight.
When she chose Where the Crawdads
Sing, by Delia Owens, the debut novel had a print run of 27,500 copies. It has since sold more than 12m copies globally.
Witherspoon made no profits from those sales, but she did make a handsome sum when Hello Sunshine bought the movie rights. She produced the adaptation, starring Daisy Edgar Jones, which took $144.3m at the box office.
It’s a handy little profit engine: Witherspoon picks out books prepublication, buys the film rights, turns them into bestsellers via her club and then adapts them for the big screen. Then she sold Hello Sunshine for $900m, while keeping her seat on the board.
No wonder Johnson wants to do the same thing. Her new book club, TeaTime, is an offshoot of TeaTime Pictures, her production company. “Our book club is literary fiction,’’ she has said, seeking to distinguish herself from Witherspoon. “It’s not beach-reads. It’s not silly.’’
RuPaul’s new book club, launched last month at the same time as his online bookshop Allstora, is an even more transparent profit venture: Subscribers pay $35 a month to get a fresh title every month – the first was The House of Hidden Meanings, RuPaul’s own memoir.
Allstora’s intention, according to the Drag Race host, was to “focus on uplifting the voices of under-represented groups, including LGBTQ+ people, women and communities of colour’’. Unfortunately, it immediately became bogged down in controversy: The ‘inclusive’’ platform’s diverse offerings included Mein Kampf.
Dua Lipa’s interest stretches back further. In May 2020, she posted a picture of herself in a bikini, enjoying the hot spell during the first lockdown. To pass the time, she’d picked up a book: ‘‘Started a brilliant new book called ‘a little life’ – not just a sun shield’’, she wrote.
Ravi Mirchandani, the book’s publisher at Picador, was delighted. “We saw the most fantastic spike in sales for A Little Life [by Hanya Yanagihara],’’ he says. “If you look at our graphs, you can literally see the month where she read it.’’
It was the beginning of Dua Lipa’s public love affair with literature. Last May, she launched a monthly book club. Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart, was her first pick.
Her latest choice is Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner. It saw a 53% lift in sales the week after she promoted it, according to Nielsen BookScan. “As a British publisher, Dua Lipa is the main game in town when it comes to celebrity book clubs,’’ Mirchandani says.
But the singer, who has a net worth of £75m, does not seem to be making any real money from her book club. Instead, she appears to be using it as part of a broader rebrand from pop star to cultural influencer.
In 2022, she even gave a speech at the Booker prize ceremony.
I must admit, I approve of many of Dua Lipa’s picks. But a word of warning from someone who’s been there: A Little Life is definitely not beach-read material.