Inside Reese Witherspoon’s literary empire

“You’d be shocked how many books have women chained in basements,” said Reese Witherspoon. “I know this happens in the world. I don’t want to read a book about it.”

She also doesn’t want to read an academic treatise or a 700-page novel about a tree.

Sitting in her Nashville office, occasionally diving into a box of takeout nachos, Witherspoon talked about what she likes to read — and what she looks for in a Reese’s Book Club selection, which she referred to as in the third person concisely.

“He needs to be optimistic,” Witherspoon said. “It needs to be shareable. You close this book and say, ‘Do I know exactly who I want to give it to?’.”

But most of all, she wants books by women, with women who save themselves at the center of the action. “Because that’s what women do,” she said. “No one is coming to save us.”

Witherspoon, 48, has been a presence in the book world for a decade. His adaptations of novels such as “Big Little Lies”, “Little Fires Everywhere” and “The Last Thing He Told Me” are cornerstones of the binge-watching canon. Your book club picks often make the bestseller list for weeks, months or, in the case of “A Place Far From Here,” years. In 2023, printed sales of the club’s selections surpassed those of Oprah’s Book Club (Oprah Winfrey’s book club) and Read with Jenna (by presenter Jenna Bush Hager), according to Circana Bookscan, totaling 2.3 million copies sold.

So how did a college dropout actress (okay, Stanford) become one of the most influential people in an industry known for being intractable and slightly old-fashioned?

It all started with Witherspoon’s frustration with the film industry’s scant representation of women on screen — especially experienced, strong, intelligent, courageous, mysterious, complicated and, yes, dangerous women. “When I was about 34, I stopped reading interesting scripts,” she said.

Witherspoon had already made a name for herself with “Election,” “Legally Blonde” and “Johnny & June.” But in 2010, Hollywood was changing: Streaming services were gaining traction. DVDs were following VHS tapes into the land of forgotten technology.

“When there’s a big economic shift in the media business, it’s not superhero movies or independent films that we lose,” Witherspoon said. “It’s the middle, which is generally where women live. The family drama. The romantic comedy. So I decided to finance a company to make these types of films.”

In 2012, she founded the production company Pacific Standard with Bruna Papandrea. Her first projects were film adaptations of books: “Gone Girl” and “Livre”, which premiered in theaters in 2014.

Raised in Nashville, Witherspoon knew the value of a library card. She got the taste early, she said, from her grandmother, Dorothea Draper Witherspoon, who taught first grade and devoured Danielle Steel novels in a “big, cozy armchair” while sipping iced tea from a glass “with a little paper towel wrapped around it.” around”.

This attention to detail is a kind of smoke signal: Witherspoon is a person of her words. When she was in high school, Witherspoon would stay after class to pester her English teacher — Margaret Renkl, now a columnist who often writes for the New York Times — about books that weren’t part of the curriculum. When Witherspoon moved to Los Angeles, books helped her prepare for the “chaos” of filmmaking; “The Making of the African Queen” by Katharine Hepburn was one of her favorites.

So it made sense that as soon as Witherspoon joined Instagram, she started sharing book recommendations. The authors were delighted, and readers bought in proportion. In 2017, Witherspoon made it official: Reese’s Book Club became part of her new company, Hello Sunshine.

The timing was opportune, according to Pamela Dorman, senior vice president and publisher of Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, which edited the club’s first pick, “Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.” “The book world needed something to help drive sales in a new way,” she said.

Reese’s book club was that something: “Eleanor Oliphant” spent 85 weeks on the paperback bestseller list. The club’s second choice, “A Rede Alice”, spent almost four months on the weekly bestseller lists and two months on the audio list. The third, “The Lying Game”, spent 18 weeks on the weekly lists.

“There’s nothing better than getting that call,” added Dorman, who has now edited two more Reese’s book club selections.

Kiley Reid’s debut novel, “Such a Fun Age,” received approval in January 2020. She said, “When I was on the book tour, I had a lot of women saying to me, ‘I hadn’t read a book in four years, but I trust Reese’.” Four years later, on tour with her second novel, “Come and Get It,” Reid met women who were reading 100 books a year.

Witherspoon found a sweet spot between literary and commercial fiction, with a few scattered collections of essays and memoirs. She has become the literary equivalent of a model in form — a reliable indicator for readers looking for intelligent, discussion-worthy content without Marcel Proust. She wanted to help narrow down the options for busy readers, saying, “Get book club out of your grandmother’s living room and onto the internet.”

She added: “The unexpected part of all of this was the economic impact on these authors’ lives.”

A writer has become the first person in her family to own a home. “She sent me a picture of the key,” Witherspoon said. “I started to cry.”

Witherspoon considers a handful of books each month. Publisher submissions are selected by a small group that includes Sarah Harden, CEO of Hello Sunshine; Gretchen Schreiber, book manager (her original title was “bookworm”); and Jon Baker, whose team at Baker Literary Scouting searches the market for promising manuscripts.

Not only is Witherspoon focused on women’s stories — “the Bechdel test writ large,” Baker said — but also, “Nothing makes her happier than putting something out into the world that you might not otherwise see.”

When transgender rights were in the spotlight in 2018, the club chose “The Way They Are,” Laurie Frankel’s novel about a family dealing with related issues in the microcosm of their own home. “We track the long-term impact of our book club choices, and this one, without fail, continues to sell,” Baker said.

Witherspoon’s early readers seek a balance of voices, backgrounds, and experiences. They also pay attention to the calendar. “Everyone knows that December and May are the busiest months for women,” Harden said, referring to the holiday rush and the end of the school year. “You don’t want to read a literary jumble then. What do you want to read in the summer vacation? What do you want to read in January?”

The group occasionally chooses a book that isn’t brand new, like the club’s April book, 2019’s “The Most Fun We Ever Had.” When Claire Lombardo learned that her nearly 5-year-old novel had been chosen, she thought there was a mistake; after all, her new book, “Same As it Ever Was”, will be released next month. “It’s incredible,” Lombardo said. “It wasn’t something I was expecting.”

Sales of “The Most Fun We Ever Had” increased by 10,000% after the announcement, according to Doubleday. In the first two weeks, 27,000 copies were sold. The rights to adapt the book were purchased by Hello Sunshine.

Witherspoon chose not to delve into some topics: competition with other high-profile book clubs (“we try not to pick the same books”); the only author who refused to be part of hers (“I have a lot of respect for her clarity”); and the 2025 book to which she has already claimed the rights (“you can’t believe Edith Wharton or Graham Greene didn’t write it”).

But she was eager to clarify two things. Her team doesn’t get the rights to every book—”That’s just the way it goes,” she said—and, Reese’s Book Club doesn’t profit from sales of her picks. Earnings come from brand collaborations and affiliate income.

This is true of all celebrity book clubs. A recommendation from one of them is a free publicity boost, but it can be argued that Reese’s Book Club does a little more for its books and authors than most. Not only does it promote each book, from hardcover to paperback, but it also supports authors in the subsequent phases of their careers.

The chosen authors tend to remain connected to each other through social networks, exchanging praise and advice. They are also invited to participate in Hello Sunshine events and Lit Up, a mentoring program for underrepresented writers. Participants receive editing and mentoring from Reese’s Book Club authors, plus a marketing commitment from the club when their manuscripts are sent to agents and publishers.

“I describe the publication and where we are in terms of being on a river,” Schreiber said. “We’re downstream; we’re looking at what they’re choosing. Lit Up gave us the ability to look upstream and say, ‘We’d like to make a change here.'”

The first novel incubated by Lit Up, “Time and Time Again” by Chatham Greenfield, will be released by Bloomsbury YA in July. Five other fellows announced sales of their books.

As Reese’s Book Club approaches a milestone — the 100th pick, to be announced in September — it continues to adapt to changes in the market. Print sales of the club’s selections peaked at 5 million in 2020 and have been declining since, according to Circana Bookscan. In 2021, Candle Media, a media company backed by Blackstone, purchased Hello Sunshine for US$900 million (R$4.7 billion). Witherspoon is a board member at Candle Media. She is currently co-producing a “Legally Blonde” prequel series for Amazon Prime Video.

This month, Reese’s Book Club will unveil an exclusive audio partnership with Apple, allowing readers to find all their picks in one place in the Apple Books app. “I want people to stop saying, ‘I didn’t really read it; I just listened,'” Witherspoon said. “Stop it. If you heard it, you read it. There’s no right way to absorb a book.”

She feels that Hollywood has changed over the years: “Consumers are more discerning in wanting to hear stories generated by a woman.”

Even looking to the future, Witherspoon remembers her grandmother, the one who set her on this path. “Someone came up to me at the gym the other day and said” —here she put on a soft Southern drawl— “‘I’m going to tell you something I bet you haven’t heard today’. And he said, ‘Your grandmother taught me how to read.'”

Another smoke signal and a reminder of what remains.