Author's Goal: 1,000 Book Clubs

-- Publishers Weekly, 10/26/2006

If you're an author, having your publisher insert a reading group guide into the back of your paperback is a nice way to reach out to book clubs. But for novelist John Shors, that wasn't enough. When Shors's novel Beneath a Marble Sky came out in paperback from New American Library in June, it carried a note from the author, offering to talk to any book club that contacted him via e-mail. Since then, Shors has met with (or teleconferenced with) a club almost every night, and hopes to talk with 1,000 clubs by next June.

Shors has even been contacted by other authors interested in creating a similar program. "There's a demand within the writing community to provide this kind of service," he said, noting that many authors want to reach out to book clubs, but don't know how, since there is no central database of clubs. "The fact that I've been able to connect with so many readers has excited a lot of authors for the potential they may have," Shors said. Even some small publishing houses have been in touch with him to learn about the program.

Shors's first-person account of how his program works—and the benefits it has brought him—will appear on the "Soapbox" page of Monday's issue of PW.