What Makes the Book of the Month a Favorite Among Millennials?

In the Manhattan offices of Book of the Month, editorial director Brianna Goodman is seated on a bar stool. For the Virtual Book Tour podcast, which she cohosts with Jerrod MacFarlane, an editorial associate, six rows of chairs are filled with a live audience made up mostly of the club’s employees and a reporter. The podcast features a monthly discussion with various authors.

Between them sits Kaliane Bradley, the debut author from Britain and Cambodia, whose novel “The Ministry of Time” is on the bestseller list. Before its release in May, the book caught the attention of the BBC, which enlisted Alice Birch of “Normal People” and “Dead Ringers” fame to adapt the time-traveling romance into a six-hour series.

“This book has so much to love in it,” Goodman begins effusively, by way of an introduction. “It’s a mix of time travel, of rom-com, of this really interesting exploration of time and history and the ways that language changes over time. It also has my favorite thing that happens in books, which is a dry sense of humor….It’s one of those books where I’m sitting by myself snorting quietly as I’m reading, so thank you.”

Queries from the audience covered several topics, beginning with the origins of Bradley’s novel, initiated as a sequence of blog entries on a site for Arctic exploration enthusiasts during the lockdown period of COVID-19. They also delved into the parallels between the narrator’s biography and Bradley’s personal history—her mother is Khmer and migrated to London during the Cambodian Civil War. Additionally, the protagonist’s stance on 21st-century gadgets was discussed; notably, Lieutenant Graham Gore, who met his end on Sir John Franklin’s disastrous Arctic venture, is portrayed as liking Spotify yet detesting smartphones and the TV series “East Enders.”

This engaging Q&A aims to encourage listeners to buy the book. Meanwhile, the Virtual Book Tour, started in 2022, reflects the natural progression of the discussions held by BOTM’s editorial team when selecting the five to seven titles that cut the official Book of the Month selections each month.

After the Q&A session, the scene quickly changes; chairs are folded away, lights are dismantled, and employees start to serve “Ministry of Time”-inspired cocktails—sloe gin with lemon juice and club soda, garnished with mint and a blue cherry. In the book, this concoction traces back to Lt. Gore who forages berries from a prunus spinosa to make the Victorian-era favorite, sloe gin. Bradley then retreats to a banquette, signing a pile of books for the keen employees gathered around.

“I really only expected five to 15 people to read this book, and the idea that these amazing people have got behind it is really quite extraordinary,” says Bradley, in typical British understatement. “Just seeing the culture here, it blew my mind.”

Substandard Website and Absence of Insight

On Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show,” Anne Hathaway’s inquiry to the audience about who had read “The Idea of You,” Robinne Lee’s novel that her newest hit film was adapted from, met with total silence, creating a viral moment. This silence seemed to confirm the stereotype that smartphones have spawned a generation that struggles with attention deficits and avoids reading. Fallon’s tongue-in-cheek remark, “We don’t read,” suggested Hathaway might find more literary fans at Stephen Colbert’s “Late Night.”

“The Idea of You” didn’t receive the nod as a Book of the Month selection, in contrast to Casey McQuiston’s 2019 LGBTQ romance “Red, White and Royal Blue”—which not only got picked but also inspired a blockbuster film in 2023. The publishing industry remains a lucrative global enterprise, with the U.S. contributing slightly over $9 billion annually to this multibillion-dollar market, selling around 700 million units, as per Statista. Even with the expansion of audiobooks and digital reading platforms, traditional print books, particularly hardcovers, continue to lead in popularity, generating $3.2 billion annually.

Book of the Month, established in 1926 as a mail-order reading club and a critical force in book selection, has had a long-standing impact on the publishing industry. It was the original platform for launching books like Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” and Nelson DeMille’s “By the Rivers of Babylon.” However, the growth of Amazon and major discount retailers led to the decline of independent bookstores and lessened the influence of book clubs as promotional channels for new books. By the 1990s, the club entered a phase of detrimental mergers and acquisitions. When John Lippman, a former music publishing executive and Lehman Brothers vice president, acquired a controlling interest in 2012, the club was essentially on its last legs.

“They had a crappy website, they weren’t good at e-commerce [and] they just weren’t about anything,” says Lippman, who is now BOTM’s chief executive officer. “There was no point of view; they were just drifting.”

The digital transformation disrupted the book industry, creating a competitive promotional field and enhancing the role of algorithmic e-commerce, which added hurdles for classic general interest book clubs. Oprah Winfrey’s 1996 book club debut, powered by her celebrity and daily talk show, quickly became a pivotal promotional tool. The endorsement of Oprah’s Book Club became a top prize for publishers. To compete, the Book of the Month Club revived its celebrity novelist panel. Nevertheless, its broad range of book selections did not succeed in building a dedicated following, causing subscriptions to decline.

“Supporting new authors, helping them break through, that was actually the thing I was most interested in,” Lippman says. “It sounded like fun and that’s what was missing. It was like, ‘Who used to do that in the book business?’ Oh, us, like 90 years ago. Why don’t we just do that thing again and also be good at e-commerce?”

Under Lippman’s leadership in 2015, Book of the Month was reintroduced, shedding “club” from its name and centering on new fiction offerings. For a monthly subscription of $15.99, members pick from five to seven hardcovers, with the ability to add more books at $10.99 apiece. This strategy quickly bore fruit, with BOTM turning profitable by the next year and achieving $10 million in revenue by the end of 2017. Today, the company’s annual revenues surpass $50 million, per industry sources.

According to Lippman, more than 80 percent of BOTM subscribers are from the Gen-Z and Millennial women demographics. “We didn’t specifically reinvent it for younger women, but that’s who came to us,” he says. “Women read most [of] the fiction in America, and if you’re promoting up-and-coming authors, you tend to attract younger audiences.”

With more than 350,000 monthly subscribers and roughly 2 million followers on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, BOTM has a substantial reach. Yet, the company operates with a lean team of about 50 employees, all stationed in New York.

Goodman, who is 31, perfectly fits the demographic of BOTM’s ideal subscriber. She serves as the chief selector for the organization’s monthly book selections, covering genres from thrillers and literary fiction to historical fiction, fantasy, sci-fi, and short stories. Before joining the company, she was already a fan and subscriber of Book of the Month. Her career progression within the company has been swift; she joined as an editorial assistant in 2018, shortly after graduating from Fordham University where she studied literature and creative writing. Earlier, as a classically trained ballet dancer, she moved to New York in 2011 to dance at the Joffrey Ballet School and lived with six roommates in a single-bathroom apartment in the West Village.

“We were all dancers,” she says. “There was a lot of tension.”

Her daily routine involved extensive dancing at Joffrey, coupled with evening classes at Fordham. Additionally, she was trying out for professional dance troupes and occasionally babysat to supplement her income.

“At a certain point I just couldn’t make the financials work,” she adds. “I also had many other interests. And I just hit a point where my life was so disciplined and so contained in this very narrow way, and I just like wanted it to open up more.”

BOTM provided the gateway I was looking for, “At the time it was a pretty small company so there was a ton of opportunity,” she says. “I was just excited to learn every single aspect of the editorial team’s work.”

Goodman averages about five books a week. She oversees a six-person team that reads incoming submissions, but she commits to reading every book recommended by BOTM in its entirety.

“If I’m reading a book, and I can tell that it’s something really special and really different, my heart literally starts racing,” she says, holding her hand to her heart to highlight the sensation.

From a collection of 500, she now owns around 250 books, a decision driven by her recent shift to a smaller apartment. Her days are filled with professional engagements with agents, authors, and publishers, limiting her reading to weekends and early mornings before work. She’s an early riser, usually awake by 6 a.m. Her apartment is filled with books placed on her coffee table and living room corners. She often gives books away to friends who visit. When queried about having books on her nightstand, she responds with a laugh, “They are actually in the bed with me. I sleep on the right side of the bed and books sleep on the left side of the bed. I know I shouldn’t do that. They are hardback books.”

“It’s really important for me to tap into that mindset that I had when I was hired, of being a member and rushing to open the app on the first of the month to see what the new books are. It can be so easy for people who do this job to start to feel like everything feels the same, ‘I’m so overwhelmed that I’m sick of reading.’ But it’s so important for me to never feel that way and remember that this might be the one book that a member reads this month.”

“If I didn’t love books,” she says. “I couldn’t do this job.”