(Cross-posted at Planting Liberally)
A liberal book club is an important piece of a larger strategy in developing a liberal media ecosystem. As I discussed in yesterday's post (cross-posted at MyDD and DailyKos), a liberal book club would probably take the form of a business similar to the BMG CD club, and would yield many concrete advantages for the liberal movement, including lowering the barrier of entry to the liberal movement, raising more money for liberals, partnerships with grassroots liberal groups, etc. Today, I'd like to focus on how some aspiring liberal entrepreneur could build a liberal book club.
Keeping all that in mind, follow me over the flip for some free ideas about selling books...
Also, some disclaimers - I'll readily admit that I don't know that much about the book business. Most importantly, I'm not sure how to solve the central problem of starting a liberal book club - getting a large supply of cheap books. My guess is that you strike a bargain for bulk purchases with some supplier, or perhaps with the publisher directly. As you may have guessed, this post is not a fully formed perfect business plan, just a rough sketch. If you have suggestions for improvement, I'd love to hear them!
Step 0: Choose a name
May I suggest "Books for Democracy"?
Step 1: Put together a membership model
Before you do anything, you should work out your basic membership model. Here are some possibilities:
- Book a month - Members get a book each month for some lower-than-retail price. The downside to this model is that you will need a mechanism whereby members can decline the book of the month.
- Discount book store - In this model, members use your club just like a normal book store, except that (1) the selection is limited to liberal books and (2) the books are a bit cheaper
- Newsletter - This model doesn't feature any special deals at all; instead, you send out a newsletter (once a month, let's say), notifying members of upcoming books, and offering them a chance to buy the book from your store.
I'm going to assume from now on that you're using both the "Book a month" and "Discount book store" models in some combination. Put together, they provide you with more members and more profits, and they provide the liberal movement with the most benefits. For example, the book a month model is most amenable to developing offline reading groups.
The next thing you need to do is put some numbers on your model. What will the price for the book of the month be? How much will the discount be? Naturally, the answer will depend a lot on the kind of deal you're getting from your supplier.
It's also a good idea to put together some kind of first time member gimmick - it seems to be the industry standard these days. The first time gimmick lets new members get a stack of books at a very cheap rate, and locks them into the club for some fixed period, usually a year. Example gimmicks include: first three months free, three books for a dollar, etc.
If you're thinking you'll need a lawyer, you're most certainly right. Once you have some numbers nailed down, find a good lawyer who can help you draft a "terms and conditions" statement, which members will have to agree to before joining the club. You should probably hang on to that lawyer, since you'll need to draft language for partnership agreements and similar documents as the business grows.
Step 2: Choose some books
You'll need some mechanism to decide which books are available to your members for discounts, and which books get chosen as the book of the month. You'll probably want to put your ear to the ground and talk to several book publishers about which books are coming up. To find good publishers, start with the publishers of books you already like, e.g. Chelsea Green (Crashing the Gate), Crown (Hostile Takeover), Working Assets Publishing (How would a patriot act?). I'd also suggest Common Courage Press (publishers of Frederick Clarkson's "Eternal Hostility") and Beacon Press (a great Unitarian Universalist press, also publishers of the Pentagon papers). It's easy enough to get on the mailing list for these publishers, and a phone call to the publisher's office to explain what you're trying to do might also yield some good tips.
In yesterday's post I suggested some possible criteria for what makes a liberal book: 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.
I imagine that for the first year or so, an "I'll know it when I see it" definition will probably suffice. The Progressive Book Club (an effort at building a liberal book club which for some reason never took off) had an advisory board of well-known liberals who would choose those liberal books, but I don't think that's necessary.
Below, in the feedback section, I'll suggest a way for you to democratize the book selection process.
Step 3: Build a website
The website will be the headquarters for your business and the main entry point for most new members, so make sure it's easy to use. For starters, you'll need the following features:
- Prominently display the book of the month, and keep an archive of past books of the month
- Make it easy for prospective new members to learn what the membership model is and how to join
- Make it easy for existing members to buy other books, besides the book of the month, through an online store. You'll want to set up the store so that (1) a referral program is available to liberal bloggers who encourage readers to buy your books; and (2) customers can dedicate some part of their proceeds to an organization of their choice - perhaps their local DFA group or something similar.
- Make it easy for existing members to find other members in their area - much more on this in the Community section below.
- Be sure to describe your larger vision of how you are helping the liberal movement; make a reference to it in your site's tagline, and expand on that in an "About us"-style page.
- If you've worked out some arrangement for parts of the proceeds of your book sales to go towards some liberal non-profit like the Rock Ridge Institute, then by all means mention that fact as often as possible.
The website will be an evolving mechanism for pulling together the many different programs within your book club, so make sure you have a talented web development team who will stick around for a while to come. (Disclaimer: I work in web development myself.)
Step 4: Marketing
Once you are ready to go live, open your doors and let the public in:
- BlogAds - this may be obvious, but your first stop should certainly be the Liberal Blogs Advertising Network. It's probably the most cost-effective way to build a large membership base.
- Diary posts - Post diaries on some of the main liberal blogs, certainly including DailyKos, BooMan, Political Cortex, and any others you can think of. Encourage feedback and suggestions for how to improve your book club.
- Outreach to grassroots groups - Reach out to liberal grassroots groups, as many as you can. That may entail blog posts at those groups' web sites, emailing the group's leader, etc. A good place to start is the listing of DFA groups at Blog for America; alternatively you can find DFA groups at DFA Link. You can also look at Drinking Liberally groups, Progressive Democrats of America chapters, and United for Peace and Justice groups. You can also think about union locals and liberal religious communities, but (based on my admittedly limited experience) you will probably have a lot less luck, both because those organizations are less likely to have websites with blogs, and because the leaders are more likely to ignore your emails. I'll discuss outreach to grassroots groups more in the "Community" section below.
- Seek free media - My guess is that free media will be the hardest to come by, largely because the Progressive Book Club got a glut of free media when it first got started, but then later tanked. If you do get free media, you're likely to face a lot of questions about how you will avoid a similar fate, so be prepared with an answer. Regardless, you're not gonna get it if you don't seek it. Once you've created some buzz on the blogs, start working your way up the chain, to liberal magazines like the Nation, to Air America Radio, and eventually up to liberal pundits, journalists and authors (yes, there are a couple). Do some research on the Conservative Book Club and help the press tell a story about how your liberal book club will help develop an ascendant liberal movement (as that's the most newsworthy angle on your club.)
Naturally, be prepared to start taking orders as soon as the first ad goes out the door. Ideally, you want members to be able to start buying books as soon as they get to your website.
Step 5: Build Community
This step is the toughest, and perhaps the one least likely to square with your funders (if they don't share your vision.) But I believe it is absolutely essential to making your club a success, both financially and from the point of view of liberal movement building.
There are several ways you can help build community around your book club:
- Foster face to face reading groups - A reading group (or study group) is a reasonably simple concept: a group of like-minded individuals gather every so often, such as once a month, and discuss a chosen book. To help these groups get off the ground, you should (1) let club members find each other; (2) let club members post information about their reading groups on your website; (3) provide supplementary materials for your book-of-the-month, like discussion questions; (4) make it easy to keep the group going, by sending the group leader(s) a reminder about upcoming meetings, tips about how to keep the group going, etc.
- Help blogs and grassroots groups start their own reading groups - Many blogs and grassroots groups have already hit upon the idea of starting a face to face reading group. If possible, you should seek out such groups and ask them if they would like support from your book club in keeping these reading groups going, whether by providing their members with book discounts, or by providing the groups with technological tools to allow communication within the group.
- Encourage your members to join local grassroots groups - As grassroots groups and blogs partner with you, you should make sure that they get several benefits from such a partnership. Referral programs for blogs and groups which send business your way is an obvious first step. You should also work to make sure that your members know if there are blogs or grassroots groups in their area who are supporting the book club, whether by linking to the relevant groups on your website, sending emails to members about groups in their area, or through other means.
- Recommendations - Allow your members to recommend books to their friends, whether those individuals are members or not. Make it possible for members to receive credits for successful referrals.
Step 6: Solicit Feedback
It's important to make sure that your book club is run as democratcally as possible, and that members have a chance to sound off as often as possible. Here are some ways to solicit feedback:
- Seek suggestions for the upcoming book of the month, or suggestions for books to include in the online store which are not yet there.
- Allow members to review and rate any book on your site, similar to Amazon ratings. Allow members to post to a blog on your website. You may want to make the blogs book-specific, so that each book has its own blog which members can comment on over time (not too sure how that would work, but it's worth thinking about.)
- Display the top-rated and most frequently purchased books in a side bar on your web site.
- Allow your members to suggest other partners for your efforts. Encourage your members to contact you if they can help with pursuing those partnerships.
Step 7: Help publishers, authors and policy makers
When your book club has reached a certain level of maturity (after a few years, probably) you will reach the point where you can be a major help to publishers, authors and policy makers. For example, your book club (or some related spin off) can help publishers and authors quickly put together websites and book tours for the books they're selling. Your partnerships with local grassroots groups will serve you particularly well with book tours. Currently the CTG book tour is creating these partnerships from scratch in an ad hoc manner. A longstanding network of book-friendly grassroots groups will make future book tours much more easy to organize.
When you have reached a critical mass of leaders in the liberal movement, your book club will be able to start pushing ideas into the public debate, by featuring books about those ideas. For example, if policy makers want to focus on efforts to raise the minimum wage, you can offer to make books like "Nickel and Dimed" the book of the month at the right time. Such arrangements are, of course, subject to your relationship to your customers. They deserve to receive the highest-quality books possible, and their book club shouldn't be run by a series of crony-ist backroom deals. You'll need to provide considerable transparency into how the book of the month is chosen, and what your partnerships with policy makers mean to your customers. It's only fair to let people know what they're buying.
Finally, you can think about how your website can help authors turn their books into action. Your book club should help book readers take action on the things they're learning, both by soliciting suggested action items for each book from the book author, and by encouraging book readers to share their ideas for action with one another. At some point, you may need to deploy advanced e-activism tools, like letter-writing tools, donation tools, petition-signing tools, etc. To ancitipate what your "action center" will look like, you may want to visit the existing action centers for books that have already been published.
Step 8: Diversify
Books are not the only media where liberal voices are becoming ascendant. Liberal movies are also finding warm receptions from large audiences. Everything that I've discussed here can apply equally well to selling DVDs and videos of liberal movies, and you should consider expanding your business to include this medium as well. Note that a liberal movie club, Iron Weed Films, has already started, and you may be better off forming a partnership with them then striking out on your own.
Conclusion
There are dozens of ways you could make the book club take off from here. With the spate of liberal books and movies in publication these days, and the near-certain expansion of this industry in 2008, liberal book buying is starting to become a major industry. An entrepreneurial liberal with enough time and courage on his or her hands can both strike it rich and do a lot of good for the liberal movement. If you're interested, I'd encourage you to sit down with a couple of friends, put together a business plan, and start making some calls to book publishers. You'll be in for a wild ride.