The Power of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club

Ever check out the Amazon Top Sellers? One thing you will notice comes up over and over again is the name Oprah Winfrey, actually what you'll see is Oprah's Book Club.

Confession: I really don't pay much attention to Oprah Winfrey. But that doesn't mean I'm culturally deaf and blind. The woman has an absolutely massive multimedia empire and a recommendation from her can directly translate to unimagined success for a designer, entertainer, author, actor, or politician (well, maybe... that remains to be seen).

What does this have to do with an article about webinars? I'll tell you. Oprah is hosting a 10-week webinar series and it is shaping up to be the most significant single event our industry has ever seen.

Oprah's latest book club selection is "A New Earth" by Eckhart Tolle. From March 3 through May 5, Oprah and Eckhart will host a live interactive webcast every Monday night to discuss the book and its concepts.

Yesterday's press release said that in the two weeks since announcing the webinar series, they have received more than 250,000 registrations. I decided to sign up as well and found that first I had to register as a member of Oprah's book club, respond to an email confirmation link, and then register for the event itself. So much for "Extra clicks act as barriers to registration!" To be fair, I assume that most registrants were already members of the book club, in which case registration for the webcast is quick and easy, with no additional signup questions or required surveys.

I'm still trying to find out which technology provider is supplying the services for the event. There are all kinds of interesting questions about planning and staffing to handle a webinar of this size. I saw that the pre-event installation instructions load a media player from Move Networks, which handles TV episode rebroadcasts for quite a few networks. They may be handling the entire series end-to-end or they may just be supplying the underlying video stream mechanism.

Now, why should you thank Oprah for this little exercise in cross-media promotion? The answer can be found in a blog entry I saw on someone's personal journal when I started rooting around for more information on the event. Kelly starts off her article with the following paragraph:

As I was watching the Oprah show this afternoon, I learned about a concept I had never heard of: the webinar. According to Webopedia.com, a webinar is a presentation, lecture, workshop or seminar that is transmitted over the Internet. What makes Webinars different from webcasts are their interactive elements. Webinars allow participants to give, receive and discuss information, while webcasts are one-way transmissions of data without interaction between the presenter and the audience.

And she ends with:

I might have to sign up for this webinar just to see what it’s like!

Do you have any idea how powerful and important that statement is? In the course of a few months, Oprah is about to raise awareness of webcasting and web conferencing as a viable communications and collaboration medium in a way that the combined forces of WebEx, Placeware, Microsoft, and Citrix couldn't do with years of marketing and PR.

We have all been "early adopters" so far, trying to impress a new and unfamiliar communications process on our prospective viewing audiences. And now Oprah is telling those audiences that this is a good and trustworthy way to get information. This is a tipping-point made clear.

Of course I'm assuming a few things. The first is that the event will truly be an interactive "webinar" rather than a glorified YouTube streaming video. I love the fact that neophyte Kelly grabbed the difference in the concepts. I'm not really sure how interactive you can get with audiences of more than 100,000 people, but I'd sure like to see them make use of the unique capabilities inherent in the technology. The second assumption is that they will provide a quality experience, unmarred by technical problems that turn people away.

Oh, and for all the Lake Superior State University types complaining about me using the word webinar, you'll have to take it up with Oprah and her viewers now. That's a battle I wouldn't want to fight. I'll leave the final word to a commenter on Kelly's blog:

A Webinar seems like a much better way to go than Blackboard for distance education. Thanks for blogging about this new medium!

The medium may not be new to regular readers of this blog, but the rest of the world is getting ready to join us.

Whenever Oprah Winfrey comes out with a new book club selection, we at the public library know it within twenty seconds. This is no exaggeration. The Oprah books are, of course, favored almost exclusively by women. Middle-aged white women comprise the largest group of fiction readers. I expect them to be reading the kind of stuff she recommends, even without her recommendation. What happens when Oprah selects is that the huge number of them who are currently reading Danielle Steel or Sue Grafton or Nora Roberts are alerted to another woman-type fiction book and all crowd over to the lee rail of that particular literary ship to get sight of something they might otherwise have passed over, since the Oprah books are typically not mere entertainment, but entertainment salted with cracker-barrel philosophy that helps them feel, well, whatever it is that Oprahites need to feel.

Her audience (as I can see it from where I sit) is interesting in that she seems to range considerably outside this group of typical fiction readers to younger women, non-whites, and the less-educated. If mere literacy is a societal value, then Oprah certainly encourages it, and deserves every bit of lionessization that American Library Association types can lavish on her.

Mere literacy has no value in itself. It is worthy only as the servant of virtue. The virtues of Oprahism, however, appear to be subordinate to, and ordered by, the prime virtue of self-realization and self-actualization rather than that of finding the self by losing it in sacrificial service to others, subject to the will of God. Its heroes tend to be Prometheans injured by, and in defiance of, the Traditional Moral Order (let us all weep for them a bit), lap-christs for the entertainment of silly women. Oprahism, to be sure, is chock-full of "virtues," but the order in which they are placed relative to one another in the scheme of the whole makes the phenomenon a veil of evil.

Reading the title of this post gives me goosebumps. Why? Because I am an author and I can''t imagine anything more exciting than hearing back from Oprah after I've sent her 4 novels over the past 4 years. Having Oprah Winfrey say, "Whale Song is my book club pick for May" epitomizes a leap in success. It's certainly the dream of almost every author I know. And yes, for me, it's still a dream only--for now.

But for another Canadian author it's a dream come true. Vancouver-based author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle must feel like he's riding a wave. His book A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose is Oprah's 61st choice for her book club read. Oprah is responsible for Tolle's earlier rise in fame as she launched his 2005 book The Power of Now, skyrocketing it to a million-copy bestseller. The divine Ms. Winfrey is going to be co-hosting an online workshop with Tolle.

Canadian authors have been in the news lately. Andrew Davidson, a writer from Pinawa, Manitoba, created a stir in the book industry recently for obtaining a US $1.5 million deal with Doubleday, as a first-time novelist. The only other recorded case of an unpublished author receiving this kind of advance is Anthony Hyde from Ottawa; his novel The Red Fox went for a reported US $1 million. Davidson has gone on to secure international rights and more advances. His novel The Gargoyle is set to be released on August 5th, 2008. Who knows? Maybe Oprah will take that one too.

Meanwhile, I will continue writing, promoting and praying that one day Oprah gets a chance to read Whale Song. And I hope that her book club members will take a chance on another Canadian author and read it too.

It’s well known that when Oprah Winfrey endorses something, sales go up. It’s also a known fact that when Oprah Winfrey adds a book to her book club, sales for that book increase by a million copies. On Friday, Oprah Winfrey put her seal of approval on Suze Orman’s book, Women & Money.

On Friday’s telecast of The Oprah Winfrey show, Oprah told her viewers that Suze Orman’s Women & Money, which was published a year ago, would be available for free download from Oprah’s website for 33 hours. During that time, 1.1 million copies were downloaded in English and another 19,000 copies were downloaded in Spanish. At the same time, Women and Money sat in 6th place on Amazon.

Suze Orman is very famous in her own right, and she certainly didn’t need Oprah Winfrey to promote her book in order to sell copies. However, Suze Orman was quoted in a statement released by Oprah Winfrey on Saturday saying, “I believe Women & Money is the most important book I’ve ever written,” Orman said in a statement released Saturday by Winfrey. “So this was not about getting people to buy the book, but getting them to read it, and that was the intention behind this offer.”

Sounds like this book is a must read not just for women in business but for all women. Have you read Women & Money yet? If so, leave a comment and let Women On Business’ readers know what you thought of it.