ABSTRACT
Previous editions of this book have devoted a lengthy chapter to this area of licensing, and book club rights are still listed in many head contracts between authors and publishers. However, this area of activity has changed significantly over the last 15 years and nowadays the term ‘book club’ is more commonly used to describe a group of friends meeting regularly to discuss books they have read. In the United Kingdom the impact of competing channels of supply is now very apparent: the ability of the retail trade (booksellers and also supermarkets such as Tesco and Asda) to offer discounts following the demise of the Net Book Agreement in 1997, sales to direct marketing companies such as The Book People (TBP) who sell to companies and individuals without a membership requirement, and in particular the rise in popularity of online booksellers such as Amazon offering books at a discount have all played a part in diluting what was once the book clubs’ USP – the convenience of mail order and the ability to offer books at less than the retail price. Despite these changes in the United Kingdom, sales and licences to book clubs are still of some importance to publishers in the United States, Europe and Latin America, hence the retention of this chapter. The main demand from the clubs has usually been for popular fiction and
non-fiction, as well as for reference books such as dictionaries and encyclopaedias; in the late 1990s UK clubs launched more specialist and upmarket clubs, but these no longer exist. The United States has long had clubs providing professional reading in areas such as architecture, engineering, nursing and psychiatry; the equivalents have never existed in the United Kingdom.
Book clubs were established primarily as mail order operations; they normally recruited the majority of their members through advertisements in the daily, weekly and monthly press, although the clubs run in a number of countries by the German publishing giant Bertelsmann traditionally recruited through door-to-door sales representatives.
