What if you held a bookstore event and nobody came? That's what Books Inc. assumed would happen if you booked your typical YA author. But last year, the 10-store Bay Area decided to flaunt the common wisdom by starting an event-based book club called Not Your Mother's Book Club, a series of YA author events supported by a blog where the audience, mostly teenage girls, could continue the experience online.

"We didn't think anyone would come, but it turned into something that's huge," said Jennifer Laughran, the Books Inc. buyer who started NYMBC and its blog. A little over a year and 12 NYMBC meetings later, NYMBC has over 1,000 daily visitors to its blog and 300 people (teens, librarians and authors) posting about it on MySpace.

"Not Your Mother's Book Club became like a household word for YA people," said Laughran, "and not just in my store." Kathleen Caldwell, owner of a Great Good Place for Books in Oakland, Calif., told PW that customers come in her store with lists from the NYMBC blog all the time.

"If more bookstores did this, we'd send more of our teen authors out," said Rhalee Hughes, director of publicity at Penguin Young Readers Group. "We're always looking for good venues for teens."

The key, said Laughran, was to host events that offered something more than an author reading. Since NYMBC started, Books Inc has held a writer's workshop with Rosemary Graham, a panel discussion with David Levithan, Rachel Cohn and E. Lockhart, and an off-site teen "cocktail party" with Sarah Dessen. Books Inc. sold 50 tickets for the Dessen event, which covered the cost of dinner and a copy of Just Listen, her latest novel from Viking. "Everyone got dressed up, and every girl got to talk to Sarah," Laughran said.

Books Inc. held a similar ticketed event on September 21 with Meg Cabot. "Since her book's called How to Be Popular, and there's a makeover in it, we decided to do cute girly stuff," Laughran said. On top of having the chance to speak directly with Cabot, the 60 girls at the event went home with gift bags containing bath and cosmetic items and ARCs of forthcoming books.

Elizabeth Eulberg, director of publicity of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, said the NYMBC event for Stephenie Meyer's Twilight was one of the highlights of the author's tour last year. "Everyone at the event had already read the book, which doesn't happen with first-time authors," she said.

Now Eulberg's a big NYMBC fan. "I can't quantify it with numbers, but with teenage girls they are really big with word-of-mouth. With Stephenie, 25 girls read the book, met the author and then they told their friends about it. And that's great."

The club is so successful that publishers will change plans to include it on their itineraries. "When I ran into Jennifer [Laughran] at BEA," Eulberg said, "she held up a copy of Alisa Valdez-Rodriguez's Haters [which LB is pubbing this month] and said, 'This is going to be huge.' I said she could have her for NYMBC, even though we hadn't planned to include San Francisco on the tour."

This Thursday, Oct. 12, Valdez-Rodriguez will be the first NYMBC author featured at an event in its new home, Books Inc.'s 11th store, which it opened this month in the space vacated by A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books. John Green is the NYMBC's November author.

"I'm lucky because we are doing something that not too many people are doing," Laughran said. "Every author we've wished for so far, we've gotten."