Selling Intimacy

Celebrity book clubs and the business of community

Opening up a window into an intimate part of your or other people’s lives is a power move. Many of us grew up binge-watching reality TV about people’s homes, careers, and relationships. Then came the blogs and the iconic online publications, reporting from the bathroom floors and closets of the most powerful women in New York and LA. Then came the YouTube vlogs, Instagram…I don’t have to explain this to you. The point is — intimacy has never gone out of style. When one platform lost our trust, another one rose in its place, offering an even closer look into one’s life.

After The Cut’s story about every female celebrity starting a book club, I fell down a “famous people reading” rabbit hole. Sharing the books you read with others can be an intimate invitation into your brain — what you are drawn to, what you think about, and the life experiences that shaped those interests and thoughts. Even a book chosen based solemnly on aesthetics or its cultural context is still a choice that says something about its owner, or at the very least, communicates what they asked their book stylist for.

What I find fascinating about celebrity book clubs is what’s being thrown around as just a little side thing they do and a place for connection and community around favorite titles are actually robust editorial platforms and production houses. Dua Lipa isn’t just chatting about The Guest with Emma Cline, she is building a media empire. Reese Witherspoon and Emma Roberts are turning books in movies, and Dakota Johnson and Kaia Gerber are hoping to do the same. And don’t even get me started on Oprah. There is a stark difference between Dua Lipa, the founder of a global editorial platform SERVICE95, and Dua Lipa, the book club host who just loves to read. It’s hard to imagine the CEO of Warner Brothers, or even A24 or Neon, hosting a book club, but it makes sense for Reese Witherspoon. Famous rich men don’t position themselves as your friend the same way famous rich women do. Is it because they don’t want to or don’t have to?

Commercializing connection and community is tricky and weird. That’s the reason why private clubs, like Soho House, don’t work — the very core idea of exclusivity and close-knit relationships behind these ventures is at odds with their business model. The reality is that celebrity book clubs no longer drive crazy book sales, and they definitely don’t create a real place to gather and discuss the books they recommend. The only way you can really engage with others is in the comment section below the author interviews on YouTube and IG posts. But as a concept, a celebrity book club will always be alluring. It’s fun to riff about the type of outfit you’d wear to a celebrity book club meeting or what your favorite celebrity’s book club picks could be (I loved

Book Notes

and

bookbinch

curations for Sydney Sweeney’s and Ayo Edebiri’s imaginary book clubs). And personally, I may or may not have added a couple of books to my Goodreads while browsing through celebrity book club lists.

“What I would wear to your celebrity book club” via @mthemixedupriles on IG

A community for readers that I find very interesting is Seen Library. From what I could find, it looks like they host book drives, curated book exchanges and pop-up book sales, and curate books for brand events. Each book is wrapped to conceal its cover and has a Seen Library card that describes its key themes that popup shoppers and event guest use to make their pick — but this part isn’t new, you’ve probably seen your local book store play around with the “don’t judge the book by its cover” bit too. What is different about Seen Library to me is that even though its events and curation business is growing, its founder

jordan santos

really means it when she says she is committed to keeping community and human touch at its core. Every book exchange and event she’s hosted is accompanied by an intimate facilitated discussion. In February, Seen Library released the first curated sets of wrapped books with instructions on book giving that people outside of their current event hubs in LA, NY, Paris, and London can purchase to host their own book gatherings with friends, family and partners. I tried to poke holes in the book sets experiment but I think it works really well — it’s a lovely party-starter that carries Jordan’s magic touch in curation outside of LA and NY, pulls new people into the Seen Library universe, and preserves the playful mystery of the original book exchanges and events.

Seen Library’s popup, book sets, and book exchange via @seenlibrary on IG

A little mystery is good. In a sense, Marc Jacobs is another celebrity book club host, although there is no editorial company or IG profile behind it. One day in October 2022, he just started posting pictures of himself reading books with the caption “reading hour” and a sentence worth of a book review or no review at all. To this day, some of my favorite fashion writers, editors, designers, and artists are in his “reading hour” comments, sharing their reviews and stories about the books he is reading. Sharon Stone wrote under the photo of Marc reading In Cold Blood by Truman Capote: “Greatest book. Took myself to a five star dinner for the last three chapters” just a week ago. There is something about these pictures that evokes more emotions in me than Dua Lipa posing with her latest bookclub pick.

via @themarcjacobs on IG

I think what bothers me the most about celebrity book clubs is that they are practically the poster child for the type of businesses that lean way too heavy on “community” as a buzz word when all they are really doing is building a consumer base for their products — future productions and movies in this case. In a sense, private membership clubs, like Soho House are at least more honest. They starts with en earnest desire to build community and invest a ton of money into it until the rapid growth gear kicks in and dilutes the quality of the community they set out to curate.

Same dishonesty lies in a celebrity book club attempt to sell intimacy. I’d die to know what Marc Jacobs thinks about In Cold Blood as much as I’d love to read Sophia Coppola’s notes in the margins of Elvis and Me and a peek into Ethan Hawke’s home library — all of which I will probably never get to do. And honestly — I like it that way. While intimacy is comforting, mystery is magnetic. Or at the very least, more honest than the type of intimacy we are being sold.

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IN THE MARGINS:

I’ve got a couple more books and community bits that didn’t quite fit in the main story but are interesting nonetheless:

• Library Science’s reoccurring series of “night stand stacks” of famous authors. Reminds me of Into The Gloss’s Top Shelf. I tired thinking of something intimate people haven’t shared yet — we’ve done closest, bathroom cabinets, bags, search history…maybe fridges? glove compartments? There isn’t much we haven’t seen.

From left to right — Kaia Gerber’s, Alex Auder’s, and Raven Leilani’s nightstand stacks.

• HURS piece on brands and community. What puzzles me the most about brands that say they are prioritizing community is that most of them stick pretty strictly only to those “community” efforts that directly covert into sales. I feel like it defeats the whole point of community and pushes people away. Also, it really stresses out their marketing teams. Why would they try doing anything remotely creative and different if they can’t be sure of the results it could drive yet? I understand why businesses do it, but I still think it helps to be a little more lax and patient about the whole community thing. As a customer, it feels more and more like everyone is just looking to get a piece of you, so anything genuine feels refreshing. I like buying things but I don’t like being sold to! This quote from Jordan Santos where she compares her work for commercial brands and her reader community Seen Library stood out to me:

“Working for both brands on community building but also creating a community of my own where brand/sales aren’t at the forefront, I definitely see the difference in the types of conversations and connections being made and while I understand a brand’s need to sell product, I think it also does a disservice to its community when the end goal is commerce.”

• “Books as an accessory” isn’t a novel concept but it’s still entertaining. I love that SSENSE got the “book stylist” Karah Preiss to curate books based on your favorite it girls for their IG shortly after the NYT story about her.

via @starterpacksofnyc and @SSENSE on IG

• From what I know about the relationship between the author and the publishers, the publishers don’t contribute much to promoting books anymore. I heard that it’s pretty much the author’s responsibility to build a following and drive sales. Well, it looks like some publishers are trying to differentiate themselves by being a little more helpful with the whole social media thing. I saw this brilliant @subwayhands post sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf pubishing which puts their recent books into the hands of some NYC characters. As mentioned earlier, books can be an accessory and a piece in the personal brand puzzle, and it looks like publishers are taking note of it.

via @subwayshands on IG

• Speaking of publishers and book marketing, I came across this fascinating story about the invention of the beach read. There was a point in time when marketers convinced people that the only way to propose is with a diamond ring and created a whole genre of literature, and now the brightest minds of our generation are hard at work trying to invent the new "type of girl.” Maybe we’ve got to zoom out and go much broader on the trend spotting. Anyways, here is a quick summary:

“Around the turn of the nineteenth century, urbanization and industrialization gave summertime a new radiance—it offered a chance to escape the sweaty, overcrowded city and reconnect with nature. The steamship and the railroad made vacation getaways more accessible. Periodicals and newspapers began running features on resort towns and advertised summer activities and goods: cruises, camping gear, mineral springs. In short, bolstered by the era’s print culture, a new market of pleasure-seeking Americans emerged.

To accommodate them, the publishing industry got to work shaping a correspondingly alluring discourse around summer reading. Trade publications compiled lists of the best books for summer; publishing houses developed vacation reading series and flogged “summer” editions of popular backlist titles. Literature itself began to reflect, with an appealing self-consciousness, the image of the genteel reader escaping into her paperback.

Reading had long been aspirational as a tool of intellectual betterment; now it also suggested the rituals of a moneyed élite.”