Reach Out and Touch an Author

Booksellers Help Reading Groups Connect With Authors via Speakerphone

Speakerphone conversations with authors are taking root as a new dimension for book clubs and booksellers. According to authors Donna Woolfolk Cross (Pope Joan) and Julia Older (The Island Queen) and booksellers Kiez Shultz (Prince & Pauper Bookshop in Rapid City, South Dakota) and Ruth Blake (Dickens-Reed Bookstore in Mount Dora, Florida), this kind of tele-networking is fruitful for everyone involved.

"I've been doing this now for about five years," Cross told BTW and added that she is pretty sure she jump-started the trend of direct author-to-book club conference calls.

Cross credits reading book groups and independent booksellers ("I love independents!") with the cumulative momentum of Pope Joan. "It was going to have a shelf life between lettuce and yogurt," she said of her book. "Nothing [was] going to wake up my publisher to smell the roses."

Cross spent seven years researching and writing her novel, which tells the story of a ninth-century woman who once presided over the papal throne. After Pope Joan was published in 1996, the title ended up as the number-one bestseller in Germany for three years and sold very well in France. As Cross noted, "Even now John Grisham is eating my dust!"

The novel was translated into 18 languages, has a movie sale, and is in its 12th printing, totaling 140,000 copies, all accomplished, Cross contends, with minimal support from her publisher.

She schedules two to four speakerphone conferences a week. Last month, for example, she spoke to reading clubs associated with independent bookstores, church groups, and library gatherings in California, Wisconsin, New York, Kentucky, and elsewhere.

Cross created a Pope Joan Web site, where she encourages reading groups to get in touch with her online so she can answer questions and discuss the novel with the club members as a group.

When she does talk by speakerphone, she sets a date and time, makes sure beforehand that the connection is going to work, and dials the group at the appointed time. "While we're chatting," she said, "I'm sitting in my pajamas and drinking a glass of wine. No makeup, no hairdo, nothing. It's so easy."

Some groups prefer to have one person relay questions, some prepare a script of questions, but Cross noted that "I say, let's keep this a conversation."

What doesn't Cross like about these calls? "Nothing. It's perfect for me. I'm a writer, one of the most solitary occupations on earth, alone in that room with a computer screen accusing you. And, yet, I'm a very social person. So, for me, I enjoy them. I find reading groups the most fun, interesting, entertaining, witty people on earth. We end up laughing and having a lot of fun."

Cross talked with a reading club associated with Prince & Pauper Bookshop, said general manager Shultz. "One of the members contacted her and said, 'We're reading your book, and I wonder if we could ask you some questions.'"

For these speakerphone chats with authors, Shultz sets up the phone in a large conference room of the sales floor. (Two book groups of about 10 members each meet once a month at the 5,000-square-foot store).

Shultz said she believed that "independent bookstores are going to have to find new niches" and explained that "we're really trying to provide customers with something that is a little different. Author discussions and phone interviews just add that extra personal contact and makes us more customer-oriented."

For club members, she added, speakerphone discussions "connect them so much more with the book. If you can hear the author tell you what motivated a section of that book -- like for Pope Joan -- what led her to write about that event of history, why she found this interesting, that's what book groups are out for, an extra little bit that isn't on the back cover of the book or can't be done researching the author's history."

Rapid City has 15 reading book groups, Shultz said, and Prince & Pauper registers the members so they can get discounts for the books they read and discuss. "Once the book group started reading Pope Joan," she said, "it just took off. We do get spiraling sales of group books."

Ruth Blake, owner of Dickens-Reed Bookstore, hosts "Tuesday Voices," a 25-member book group nearly as old as the 10-year-old store itself.

The group selected Julia Older's The Island Queen because, Blake recalled, a group member had taken home Donna Paz's booklet Reading Group Choices that had Older's book listed with study questions. The group member came from the New England area and, Blake remembered, "She said, 'Gee, this looks really great. None of us knew anything about Celia Thaxter or the book. So we decided to choose it.'"

The Island Queen is a biographical novel about Celia Thaxter (who lived from 1835 to 1894), one of the most popular writers of her time. She was an intimate friend of John Greenleaf Whittier and host to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Childe Hassam, and many other luminaries who summered at Thaxter's salon on the Isles of Shoals off the Maine and New Hampshire coasts.

Blake began arranging for the conference call three months ahead of the scheduled book group meeting date. "We started the meeting at seven o'clock at night and had Julia call at 7:30," Blake said. "That way, the people came in and talked about what kinds of things they wanted to ask her."

As with most speakerphone chats, the discussion about the book lasted about 30 minutes. However, in this case, the call extended another 15 minutes. "While Julia was speaking," Blake said, "I thought, Well, she has the prettiest voice, and I knew she was a poet, also, and I had some of her poetry books in the store. So I said, 'Would you mind reading some of your poetry?'

"It was good for me, too, because I sold all her poetry books that I had!"

Blake added, "They loved it! I have had so much feedback. They were just thrilled. They all said it made a huge difference to the understanding of the book and filled out a lot of things they wanted to know. I still have people come in and say, 'I heard your book group talked to the author -- how come I didn't know about this?' Of course, it was in our newsletter. So I suspect we're going to have more people at our next meeting."

Author Julia Older finds the difference between in-person bookstore readings and book club discussions via speakerphones significant. First of all, club members come "all prepared, they've all read the book. I told them as much as I could. They wanted to know what happened to Celia's husband, Levi, when he died, where he was buried, information I hadn't included in the novel."

Older is used to seeing people's faces at readings, she said, but she added, "I'm also a musician, and, so, I do like to hear the different voices of people asking me questions. Instead of eye contact, this is voice contact."

Speakerphone calls are "very appealing," Older said. For example, "I don't schedule readings from the end of November to mid-March because of snow cancellations. A reading can take a day of travel plus preparation time, but for the Dickens-Reed call, for instance, I took my shower, washed my hair, and sat down in a comfortable desk chair with a glass of water. It was relaxing and enjoyable. With conference calls, you could have the flu and still be there with the club members and keep your commitment" from your home.

Also, she added, speakerphone calls "free me up for my writing."

Since Celia Thaxter was a poet, Older said, "I was going to start my call with one of her poems but decided that I'd just let them ask questions about The Island Queen. All of a sudden toward the end, Ruth said, 'Oh, yes, we want to know if you'd read us some of your own poetry.' I didn't have my books there so I ran upstairs to get them. I was quite surprised and delighted."

Older mentioned that she could hear male and female voices in the background and "it seemed such a lively group. They seemed to be avid readers. Ruth was excellent. She gave everyone a chance."

As for speakerphone calls from Blake's bookseller point of view: "Tremendously good for the store." -- Steve Sherman