Jennifer Brown

Tonight I'm meeting with a local book club who chose HATE LIST for this month's read. This is the 2nd local book club I've met with. I've also Skyped with three others and chatted with a couple others. I love it! LOOOVE it!

Here's the thing about book clubs that make them so awesome (aside from the obvious, which is that an entire group of people are buying and reading your book): they are discerning readers.

See, it's one thing to get feedback from other writers, or from an agent or editors. When those people give you feedback on what you've written, you'll hear nuts and bolts kinda stuff. The how-to of writing. Such and such character needs motivation. This or that sub-plot is weak or too strong or cliche or gratuitous. This wording is clumsy and that dialogue feels forced, and so on. All great advice, without which you'd be turning out some pretty craptastic work.

But book groups... they look at the whole story. They question everything. They wonder about why you wrote what you wrote and, more importantly, how what you wrote applies to their own lives. What it means to them. They give you the so-what of writing.

Whenever I meet with book groups, the first thing I tell them is that I learn from them, and thus I encourage them to be brutally honest, just as if the author of the book they're discussing wasn't sitting there with them at all. I encourage them to tell me if there are things about the book that they didn't like... to discuss problems they had while reading... to tell me if they flat-out hated the book. One of my favorite book club meetings was one where I actually wasn't invited, but was streamed online. So I got to be a listener-only of this group, which had some very insightful comments about my book.

Some things I've learned from book clubs:

1) If you create a character your reader cares about... they're going to flat-out HATE other characters who are unusually mean toward that character.

2) Many readers are very particular about endings.

3) Readers like a "bad guy" with a little bit of good in him.

4) Readers like to know what inspired a story, especially if the story is dark, emotional, or hard to take.

5) You can NOT pass off a cliche character, action, response, thought, feeling, plot, subplot or pretty much anything else on a discerning reader.

I've learned other HATE LIST-specific things, too, but this is a spoiler-free zone and I can't share them with you.

So I guess my point is this. If you're in a book club, thank you. Even if your book club isn't reading MY book, still... thank you. Because book club-goers are passionate readers and you help keep the written word alive.

But also, if you're in a book club, you should try to reach out to the authors whose books you're reading. You'd be surprised, I'll bet, on how many writers will be willing to participate in a free 30-minute Skype chat or a free 30-minute online chat, or maybe, if they're local, will even agree to meet with your group for a slice of pizza or two.

And if you're an author and you haven't yet reached out to book groups... you really should try it. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how much your writing improves.