The dismantling of Oprah Winfrey's first book club in 2002 was reminiscent of the breakup of AT&T into many regional service providers in 1984. What had once been a dominant force disappeared, leaving smaller entities to carve out their own niches. Among the dozens of media-driven book clubs that now offer specialized book selections to smaller audiences is the Satellite Sisters Radio Book Club. It's run under the auspices of The Satellite Sisters program, which began as a one-hour show on public radio and moved to ABC Radio in a three-hour format last September.
The call-in show, which features the five Dolan sisters chatting on various topics, currently airs on 90 stations nationally and claims about one million listeners. "We're not Oprah, but we know we have a wide audience," said co-host Liz Dolan, who also co-authored Satellite Sisters' UnCommon Senses (Riverhead, 2001).
Unlike Winfrey's club, the sisters' focuses exclusively on nonfiction about women, though they eschew "self-help books and novels with pink covers," according to Liz Dolan. For July, the club chose The Match: Althea Gibson & Angela Buxton (HarperCollins/Amistad, June), while the June selection was Sally Bedell Smith's Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House (Random House, May).
In addition to on-air promotion, each book is plugged on www.satellitesisters.com, where listeners can click through to Amazon, as well as in the show's weekly e-mail newsletter, Sisterlogue, which goes out to nearly 10,000 subscribers.
As with all post-Oprah book clubs, it can be difficult to determine how much of an effect the Satellite Sisters Radio Book Club has on book sales, in part because books like Cokie Roberts's Founding Mothers (Morrow, Apr.), which was selected in May, receive plenty of other media attention.
Still, publishers are glad to have another venue. "It's hard to parse the data," said Sabrina Farber, sales and marketing director for Bloomsbury, which published the October 2003 pick, The Stuff of Life by Karen Karbo. "But with so many media outlets moving away from books and scaling back coverage, just having a new book club in and of itself is a great thing."
