Sales of Emma Watson's first book club title soar

Sales of Gloria Steinem's My Life on the Road have peaked after it was selected as the first read for Emma Watson's new feminist book club. 

Publisher Oneworld said it ran out of stock within a week of Watson's announcement naming American feminist Steinem's book, My Life on the Road, to be her first book club choice, as retailers such as Amazon rushed to restock it. Oneworld reprinted 3,000 copies, with another printing of 3,000 rushed through before the end of the month.

The book club - called Our Shared Shelf,  hosted by Goodreads and owned by Amazon - accumulated 30,000 members within its first few days after launching on 7th January. It now has 100,000 members.

Despite publishing the title in October, a third of the book's sales have come following the book club announcement, according to Nielsen BookScan TCM. In the week that ended immediately after Watson's announcement, sales jumped 109% in volume for that week and saw 415 copies sold the following week. Altogether 2,470 copies have now sold to take £30,511 in total, £10,704 of which have been taken after the book club announcement.

Steinem is about to embark on a five-city tour of the UK starting on 22nd February, which will see her in conversation with Watson in a 950-seater event organised by the How To Academy at the Emmanuel Centre in a sold-out London event on 24th February.

Juliet Mabey, publisher for Oneworld, said: "We only heard the day before in The Bookseller about the club, and we immediately went to look at the site. We decided to suggest a couple of our books, because we just published Ann-Marie Slaughter's book, Unfinished Business, about work–life balance and men–women equality - and Gloria's autobiography. I simply composed a tweet to Emma Watson saying 'oh if you're looking for books...', because she was saying 'everyone suggest books'... I then saw a tweet under it saying she'd picked Life on the Road. It was quite a shock!

"We were really excited because we knew the kind of profile somebody like Emma Watson has, with her huge Twitter following and really incredibly deep fan base - it extends male, female, young, old, and not just for her work as an actress but her work with charities and NGOs... We knew that kind of attention for the book would be huge. It's transformative really."

Steinem has been a champion for women's rights since the 1960s, and, with other "second-wave" feminists, has been an activist for reproductive freedom and wage disparity between the sexes. After working at the New York magazine, Steinem co-founded Ms. magazine, a publication dedicated to women’s rights concerns. In 2005, she also co-founded the Women's Media Center to promote women's visibility positively within the media. 

Mabey added: "[The book club] has created this very diverse interactive group of people, and I think it's particularly exciting there are young people talking about feminism. That's one of the great things Emma will bring to the conversation - she's a young person and she says it's ok, and even important, to be a feminist. For a good part of my life 'feminist' was a bit of a dirty word. There's no question [it is opening up the book to a much younger audience]. Initially when we bought it, a lot of people knew the name Gloria Steinem but they didn't know her and her life and what she'd achieved in her 60 odd years of activism, and her key achievements in equal pay. I think for young people today it will be a huge education. It's fantastic."

Steinem's UK tour also includes talks at the Bath Literary Festival, the Oxford Union, Manchester Literature Festival, with Rachel Cooke, and Cambridge Book Festival, with Everyday Sexism (S&S) author Laura Bates.

Further promotion includes lunchtime events, with an event with pro-choice organisation Voice for Choice at University College London, and a talk in Cambridge University for "Women of the World", as well as book signings in London bookshops. She will also be undertaking newspaper and radio interviews and recording a programme for BBC Breakfast and the BBC's "Desert Island Discs".

Picture: Wikipedia