(Cross-posted at
Planting Liberally)
We are currently experiencing one of the most exciting and positive developments of the past few years in the liberal movement: the development of a liberal book-writing class, culled from blogging giants including kos and Jerome Armstrong, David Sirota and Glenn Greenwald.
I'd like to discuss, in some detail, how we can fan the flames of this wonderful development, and push the development of a cottage industry of liberal book publishing.
Today I will highlight some of the many benefits we can accrue from a liberal book club; tomorrow I will discuss how such a book club can be built, for any entrepreneurs who might be willing to get the venture off the ground. I am, incidentally, aware of the Progressive Book Club, a well-intended but (as far as I know) failed effort to do just what I am describing. Although the Progressive Book Club appears to be dead, I think that a liberal book club is a project whose time has come and then some.
Follow me over the flip for much more!
First, what is a liberal book club? It is a business which makes it easy for liberals to buy liberal books. Similar to CD clubs like BMG, a liberal book club allows liberals to purchase "book of the month" subscriptions, or to make one-off purchases of liberal books at a discount. Sometimes there are special offers which allow purchasers to get a discount or to donate part of the proceeds of the sales to a group they like, e.g. their local DFA group.
What makes a liberal book? That is a question intentionally left open to interpretation. A liberal book could focus on policy issues, as Hostile Takeover did; or it could focus on movement building, as Crashing the Gate did; it could focus on defining liberalism in a broader sense, or attacking conservatism as an ideology, as too few books do. Ideally, a liberal book would be written by an author and published by a publisher both of whom are committed to liberalism, although that requirement need not be enforced strictly. At first, an "I'll know it when I see it" definition will probably suffice.
How does the liberal movement benefit from a liberal book club? In many, many ways:
- Delivering our ideas - The liberal book club makes it easier to deliver liberal ideas to the outside world. While blogs have a high barrier to entry (due to the cost of getting Internet acess, the cost of learning how to use a computer, the effort involved in finding and reading a blog, etc.), books have very low barriers to entry. Book clubs lower the barrier even further by lowering the cost of the book and making it easy to find liberal books. A book club helps us deliver the ideas of the liberal movement to liberals who may not have time, money, or expertise to read blogs.
- Boosting sales numbers - Book clubs help boost sales numbers for liberal books, making it more likely that liberal books will be reviewed in newspapers, magazines etc.; picked up by mass-media book stores; discussed on news shows; etc. In turn, this effect means that non-liberals, including moderates and conservatives, are more likely to pick up liberal books and are more likely to read and think about liberal ideas.
- Making money and employing liberals - By boosting sales numbers, book clubs can help liberal authors and liberal publishers make more money, and can make money for the book club itself. Ignoring other factors (such as bulk sales, etc.), a book sale which goes through a liberal book club will make more money for liberals than a book sale which goes through a company like Barnes and Noble. The more we are able to draw money into explicitly liberal organizations like a liberal book club, the more we will be able to provide good-paying jobs to liberals; that will make it possible for us to reward students and young professionals who are effective leaders, organizers, and thinkers within the liberal movement, so that they don't get siphoned off to the corporate world.
- Partnership arrangements - A liberal book club can readily build long-lasting partnerships with liberal grassroots organizations, notably the liberal blogosphere, Democracy for America, Drinking Liberally, and other groups. To the book club, such arrangements can make it easy to readily boost sales number for a chosen liberal book. To the grassroots group, such arrangements can mean a way to build membership, a way to deliver book discounts to members, or a way to garner revenue from book sales (depending on the nature of the partnership). These partnerships can also make it easy to organize book tours, such as the current Crashing the Gate book tour.
- Community building - A natural appendage to a liberal book club is a liberal reading group. Some grassroots groups have already sprouted their own ad hoc reading groups. Reading groups are great, because they help spread ideas and inform group members and they help build community around liberal ideas. In some cases, reading groups can turn into centers for action and even the development of local think tanks. Where reading groups focus on books written by bloggers, they can help push up hits for the liberal blogosphere, generating higher advertising revenue.
- Encouraging activism - Liberal books can be a great way to get a group of people informed and excited about an issue. It's only natural to add "action items" at the end of liberal books, as several book authors have already done (see, e.g., "The Left Hand of G-d".) Currently, books that foment activism do so on a more-or-less ad hoc basis, usually including an Appendix with suggested actions, and occasionally linking to a book-specific web site, e.g. http://www.whatliberalmedia.com/. It's great to see this development, but a book club could help organize book-related action items for its members, and could help authors find the best way to make their books effective at getting the reader to take action.
For example, the book club could have an "action center" which lists action items for each book it has featured. By tracking the number of hits at the action center for each book, the club could evaluate the effectiveness of each book from the point of view of inciting action. Moreover, the club could support e-Activism tools including letter-writing campaigns, donation campaigns, etc., which any book could deploy on its own action center.
- Balancing the Traditional Media - Liberal authors are good candidates for becoming members of the punditocracy to balance the Ann Coulters, Tucker Carlsons, Chris Matthews, and Paul Begalas of the world. And book buyers are a natural constituency of consumers who could pester traditional media outlets to pick liberal authors as pundits, thereby balancing the score in TV talk shows and op-ed pages. The book club could be a great nexus for organizing that kind of activism.
- Electioneering - Books have a special place in election campaigns these days, as nearly every presidential candidate (and many non-candidate nationally known political figures) have his or her own ghost-written autobiography. By boosting sales for such autobiographies, book clubs can have an impact on the presidential race. While such impacts will normally be quite small, who can forget the impact of the Swift Boat Veterans book in 2004?
These are the main advantages of a liberal book club, as I see them. Tomorrow, I intend to focus on how such a book club could be put together. To be clear, I think that a liberal book club would be a fantastic entrepreneurial opportunity for an adventuresome liberal (which unfortunately doesn't describe me all that well), and I'd be all too happy to see someone take my ideas and run with them, copying them into a business plan or venture capital proposal if that's necessary. If you're interested in working on such an idea, by all means steal these thoughts, and let me know if you could use some help or ideas. All of this applies as much to today's post as it does to tomorrow's.