Oprah Winfrey revives her book club this Monday with Wild (2175 hits)
By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY
Borders may be gone, but the Queen has returned.
As publishing prepares for its annual convention, BookExpo America, which opens Tuesday in Manhattan, Oprah Winfrey announced she will revive her fabled book club. Oprah's Book Club 2.0 will launch Monday, this time with digital elements such as enhanced eBooks and social media outreach on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The first book chosen is Cheryl Strayed's Wild. The best-selling memoir describes the author's 1,100-mile hike up the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Oregon as the 26-year-old struggled with her mother's death and a failed marriage.
In her video announcement of the relaunch, Winfrey raved about the book, calling it "stimulating, thought-provoking, soul-enhancing."
At 12 p.m. Monday, a special eBook version of Wild will be released that will include a reader's guide and Oprah's notes on her favorite passages. Print books will carry the traditional Oprah sticker.
The question, of course, is whether Winfrey still has the magic to move books. With her syndicated show, which she ended last May after 25 years, Winfrey averaged about 5 million to 6 million viewers when it ended last year and up to 12 million at its peak.
The result: an astonishing ability to sell books. Fordham University marketing professor Al Greco estimates that sales of "Oprah editions" of the 70 titles in her original book club total about 55 million copies.
Toni Morrison, who had four novels chosen, says she got a bigger sales boost from Winfrey than from winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.
On her own cable network, Winfrey has only a fraction of the audience. Her current cable audience ranges from a few hundred thousand to about 1 million, depending on the guest.
Strayed and Wild will be featured in the July issue of O magazine (on stands June 8) as well as OWN's "Super Soul Sunday," Oprah Radio and Oprah.com
"My first thought watching the video is that this is a woman who really misses talking about books with an audience of readers," says Carol Fitzgerald, founder of BookReporter.com. "As for impact … it will be interesting to see. The syndicated show had a pre-engaged group of readers who were tuned in for a specific experience with Oprah each day. While the interaction proposed here is multidimensional, it's also a lot more fragmented."
