who watches daytime TV?

Many writers dream of having their books chosen for a book club attached to a daytime TV show. Jenna Bush Hager has a book club that’s connected to the TODAY show. Good Morning America has its own book club, with a monthly pick, and they also invite guests like Zibby Owens to come on air and give book recs. Apparently Joy Behar launched a “banned book club” on The View.

What I find worth mentioning is that almost every single woman novelist I know is dying to be chosen for one of these book clubs, and yet I don’t know a single woman who watches daytime television.

Literally, who is the audience for these shows? (If it’s you, I want to hear from you in the comments!) And why are we trying to get in front of that audience, if we don’t even know who they are?

I’m friends with women who are between 22 and 72 years old. I know women with babies; I know women with school-age kids; I know women with grown children. I know women who don’t have children. I know women who work full-time outside the home, women who work part-time, and women who don’t work. I cannot think of one person I know who watches TV during the day.

During the day, every single woman I know is… on her phone? Her personal TV device?

Earlier this year,

Jane Friedman

linked to a Wattpad reader survey in her Hot Sheet newsletter (I recommend).

This survey found that:

• 72% of Gen Z and 68% of Millennials look for book suggestions from BookTok and BookTube

• Only 26% of millennials turn to celebrity book clubs for recs (for Gen Z, it’s even less: 18%…and boomers show the LEAST INTEREST at 6%)

Why are we entertaining fantasies about the celebrity book clubs that could Change the Course of Our Writing Careers Forever—when these celebrity book clubs aren’t where readers are going for book recommendations?

(In case you missed it, I recently gave an overview of BookTok on Sarah’s Bookshelves podcast)

Emily Gould wrote a couple weeks ago about the trend in new celebrity book clubs. Here’s what an agent told her about how well these translate into sales for authors:

It used to be that things like Oprah’s or Reese’s book club, Book of the Month, or being a Good Morning America pick would be an instant rocket to success, but their effect seems to have been diluted in a really oversaturated market.

My takeaway from this? We have to accept the fact that it’s no longer 1994.

It’s not only an “oversaturated” market—I would say it’s a market entirely segmented and organized into niche “fandoms.” Who knows: I might hear from longtime, diehard TODAY watchers in my comment section (a niche fandom!)

I wish authors would stop wishing for that magic bullet (like an Oprah book club sticker on their hardcover) and really get curious about who their specific audience is, where they’re spending time and attention, and then actually connect with them.

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Yesterday I spoke at the Westport Writers Workshop Pitch & Publish conference about my client Sarah Vogel’s long road to publishing her memoir The Farmer’s Lawyer, the four stages of competence, Stephen Marche’s pamphlet on writing and failure, and Ira Glass’s advice on what to do about the gap between your good taste and the quality of your own work.

Thank you to Julie Sarkissian and Liz Matthews for giving me the opportunity to be this year’s keynote speaker, trusting me to do a good job, and for all your hard work organizing such a professional event. I know how thankless and time-intensive it is to put on a fabulous conference! :)

Great to meet many of you in person yesterday—and good luck on your Substack journeys! :)