How Book Clubs Went Indie: The Success of Emily Books, The Nervous Breakdown & More

Sept 13, 2012 The Daily Beast

Small, intimate but far-reaching online-based book clubs have been popping up everywhere, and their success shows the benefits—and drawbacks—of a changing publishing landscape. Maura Kelly reports.

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When Emily Books, an e-bookstore, chose Glory Goes and Get Some last December for the third installment of its monthly e-book club, 27-year-old Sara Renberg’s initial reaction was to balk. The book is a semiautobiographical story collection about a young woman born into an elite Upper East Side world, and tales of the overprivileged turn Renberg off—even tales in which the protagonist ends up in rehab for heroin abuse, as she does in Glory Goes and Gets Some. But Renberg, a computer programmer who writes poetry, had been deeply impressed by the first two titles that Emily Books had chosen: Inferno, a novel by poet Eileen Myles, and No More Nice Girls, an essay collection by rock critic Ellen Willis. “I thought, ‘You know what? I should just trust these people.’”

Now, Glory Goes and Gets Some is among her favorite books. “I feel like every month I have a new favorite,” she says.

Emily Gould, the former coeditor of Gawker, started Emily Books—which sends subscribers an ebook monthly, for $160 a year or $14 a month—because she discovered that her favorite way to find out about a great read is through an endorsement from a “trusted friend,” as she puts it. “And I kind of wanted to virtually be that [friend] for a bunch of people.” Gould and her business partner, Ruth Curry, began their enterprise to help give new life to forgotten titles. “We wanted to come in there on our white steed and rescue those books,” Gould says.

Their gallantry has largely succeeded. Glory Goes and Gets Some had fallen out of print after being published in 2001. “The author told us we had sold more copies of her book in a month than her publisher had in the last 10 years,” Gould says.

Powell's bookstore in Portland, Oregon. (Don Ryan / AP Photo)

Full story at The Daily Beast