The club every female celebrity wants to get into – a book club

One recommendation from an actress or pop star can create a bestseller, while the film rights may give them a nice little earner.

Oprah Winfrey, who kicked off the celebrity book club trend, with one of her 2007 selections, Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth.

It was no real surprise that Dakota Johnson was hesitant to talk about Madame Web on a recent press tour 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, may 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. Singer Dua Lipa, model Kaia Gerber and drag queen RuPaul are among the latest to share their literary favourites with fans.

Of course, they are all following in the footsteps of Oprah Winfrey who, in 1996, introduced a new segment to her US chat show: Oprah’s Book Club. Across 15 years, Winfrey recommended 70 books and together they sold more than 55 million copies.

Britain’s slightly less glamorous Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan introduced their own book club on their Channel 4 chat show in 2004. Richard & Judy drew in 2.5 million viewers and their literary picks, including Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, sold an average of 250,000 copies.

Oprah’s book club has been rather more muted of late and Richard and Judy now have an exclusive partnership with WH Smith. But while we rarely turn to TV for recommendations on what to read, we are still swayed by star power, usually on social media.

Dakota Johnson is among a growing band of celebrities to start a book club. Picture: AFP

Reese Witherspoon’s book club, for instance, is now a $US900m ($1.39bn) business and the model for new celebrity book clubs. The Legally Blonde actor 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 12 million 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 $US144.3m at the box office.

It’s a handy little profit engine: Witherspoon picks out books pre-publication, buys up the film rights, turns them into bestsellers via her club and then adapts them for the big screen. Then she sold Hello Sunshine for $US900m, 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 $US35 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, there was immediate controversy: the “inclusive” platform’s diverse offerings happened to include Mein Kampf.

RuPaul Charles’ book club launched at the same time as his online bookshop, Allstora.

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: “el scorchio in london todayyyyyy + 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 Lipa’s public love affair with literature. In May last year she launched a monthly book club with Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart, as her first pick. Her most recent choice is Crying in H Mart, by Michelle Zauner, another Picador book. It received a 53 per cent increase 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 ($144m), 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, sharing the stage with the new Queen, Camilla.

The Sunday Times