By: Patricia Chadwick
Have you ever stumbled upon a product that was so brilliant or so invaluable you wondered why it took so long to invent? That happened to me recently and I thought I’d share the story.
Tara Keiter is a friend with whom I worked on Wall Street more than twenty years ago. As is often the case with office cohorts, we kept in touch through our annual holiday cards, which brought us up to date on the lives of our respective husbands and children. When she and her husband Eric became empty nesters, they moved to central Florida where she could play golf for days on end and could be active in her other favorite past time – reading.
Last summer, she reached out to me after having read my book, Little Sister, and we had more than a few laughs over how I could have kept my past such a secret. But she loved the story and brought it to her book club, which was followed by an invitation to fly to Orlando last month for an evening with her book club members.
Tara has some very special qualities – not only does she epitomize organization, she also laughs easily, and she remembers the most amazing details that matter. For the buffet dinner at the club, she specifically ordered, among other things, tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches, because, as she told me, “You always had them when I came to your house.” And right she was – if only I could still indulge in such “not-quite-healthy” foods.
The evening went swimmingly – no less than 50 people in attendance – with lots of laughs, wonderful repartee and thoughtful questions. The next day was quiet time for Tara and me, and an opportunity to get caught up and that’s when she told me her discovery.
We were discussing her involvement in the book club and then her role as head of it, a couple of years earlier. As she put it, “Being the leader of this large and active book club, I wanted to avoid the ‘Reply-All’ explosion when coordinating via email, or the need to track attendance totals, or fielding requests for such essentials as ‘What’s the next book?’ and ‘When’s the next meeting?’ So, I searched the internet for a tool and discovered Bookclubz.com, a site that offered one place to coordinate my efforts and consolidate all the necessary information. The ease and functionality of this site has even led to a 30% increase in membership in just 15 months!”
This gem of a company is owned and run out of Camden, Maine by a bright and energetic woman, Anna Ford, an alumna of both Georgetown University and Harvard Kennedy School. An avid reader, Anna founded the idea for Bookclubz several years ago. Like Tara, she was leading a large book club, and beginning to drown in reply-all emails.
“I became our club’s de facto leader, scheduling meetings and tracking books through email,” she recalls. “When our club ballooned to twenty members, our email threads got tangled. People were asking, when’s the next meeting? What book do we read next? As the logistics grew complicated, we met less often, attendance went down, our numbers dwindled. Book club was so important to me, I didn’t want to see our club fizzle.”
In 2015, in partnership with a friend-of-a-friend from her book club, Anna built the first version of Bookclubz.com as an organizational tool for her club. Five years later, over 8,000 clubs worldwide are using the site to manage their affairs – send messages, schedule meetings, track RSVPs, share recommendations, allow members to rate books, poll the membership and even keep a digital library of all the books a club has read.
Currently a member of five – that’s right, FIVE – book clubs, each with a different theme, Anna maintains that her involvement with the array of clubs and members is an ongoing source of ideas for new tools and features for Bookclubz, such as a brand new mobile phone app and the opportunity to post pictures.
Importantly, book clubs pay no fee for the use of the online tool. The costs are picked up by publishing houses and booksellers, who are the beneficiaries of the book club industry, which provides a platform for promotion and discovery. Authors, small presses and the big five publishers alike are eager to authentically engage and connect with book clubs. Bookclubz, the genius idea of entrepreneur Anna Ford, may be the perfect solution for your book club. Check it out.
