Fallon, Witherspoon, Sarah Jessica Parker boost book sales

Recommendations from favourite screen stars can be a key factor for readers spoilt for choice.

Actress Reese Witherspoon with two novels she selected for her book club, Something In The Water, by Catherine Steadman and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, by Gail Honeyman. Witherspoon is one of several celebrities who have book clubs. Picture: AP

Jimmy Fallon remembers when everyone was reading Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.

“If we had people over or went on vacation poolside, people had that book wrinkled and curled up,” he says “I read it with my wife and we read every chapter together and we’d be like, ‘(Gasps) This is great!’ It was the world’s smallest book club.”

Fallon has now expanded his book club of two to include his huge TV audience. In June, he launched Tonight Show Summer Reads. He presented five book options on his show and told to vote for their favourite. After a surprising 140,000 votes, the winner was Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi. “Any way to engage the audience and to do stuff with them is always more fun,” says Fallon.

Amazon editor Chris Schluep says: “When a celebrity decides to get behind a book, we generally see a lift in sales … Children of Blood and Bone has been selling well this year. But the week after Jimmy Fallon selected it as the first Tonight Show book club selection, it sold nearly three times the number of print, Kindle and Audible books that it had sold in the previous week at Amazon.”

Fallon isn’t the only celebrity to follow in Oprah Winfrey’s footsteps with a book club. Reese Witherspoon has made such a success of her monthly literary picks that publishers are putting Reese stickers on her selections. “It’s fantastic and we have a great experience,” says Witherspoon, who has bought the film and television rights to many of her picks. One of her selections, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, is being turned into a series on Hulu starring Witherspoon.

Fully booked: Jimmy Fallon, Emma Roberts, Reese Witherspoon and Sarah Jessica Parker

Nerve star Emma Roberts has a pet project she calls Belletrist. A website and social media for Belletrist celebrate all things books. Each month they feature a new book to read and even an independent bookshop to check out.

“Belletrist is my baby,” says Roberts, who runs the site with her partner, Karah Preiss. She wants to create a community for Belletrist followers to share thoughts and ideas about what they read.

Sarah Jessica Parker has partnered with the American Library Association to share her own suggestions. The goal, she says, is to get people not only to read but to support their local libraries. When Parker was approached by publishing house Hogarth to start her own imprint, her respect for writing initially made her think it wasn’t a good idea: “I didn’t think I had the experience and had too much respect for people who’ve been in publishing for a long time.”

But Parker then thought it could be a way to help champion less commercial literary fiction. The first novel printed by SJP for Hogarth, A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza, is bestseller.

Parker says she also enjoys posting about books on social media. Books are the “one thing I can talk about on Instagram that’s not controversial”, she says. “Everybody wants to talk about their favourite books or their feelings about books and share title recommendations. I mean, it’s a huge exchange of information and enthusiasm.”

Parker stresses her goal first and foremost is to help the author. “I’m in it really for the genuinely purest of intentions — to introduce new authors to readers.”

AP