Book of the Month Club Subscription
Book of the Month Club is a subscription book service that’s been around since 1926, but has recently been popping up all over my social media.
At first I scoffed when an ad of theirs (on Facebook) claimed to deliver all of summer’s reading needs and had a picture of a woman with four books. Four. For a summer. Bitch, please.
More investigation piqued my interest. At the first of every month BOTM reveals their five curated picks for the month. September’s were: The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo by Amy Schumer ( A | BN | K | G | AB ), The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena, Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue, All at Sea by Decca Aitkenhead, and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.
Memberships work like this: you select your 1 month, 3 month or 12 month membership. Depending on which plan you choose, the price ranges from $16.99 to $11.99. At the first of each month you choose which book you want shipped to you. You can add additional books from that month or previous months for $9.99 each. All books are hardcover. You can also skip a month if none of the selections appeal to you.
And sometimes there’s swag! I joined in August and got a really nice tote bag (seriously high quality–I’ve been using it as a laptop bag for work) and a wine coozie.
Amanda and I have both been members since August and here are our thoughts:
Elyse: At first I didn’t really understand the appeal of BOTM Club since the prices weren’t that different from Amazon. Then I realized it was about finding books you might not otherwise hear about. I skimmed the previous selections and found a book from every month I was interested in like Dark Matter by Maris Kreizman or Missing, Presumed by Susie Steiner.
Amanda: Like Elyse, it took me a while to pull the trigger on a BOTM subscription. Did I really need another book on my TBR? What if I didn’t like the choices? But I would lurk on the site every month to see what the judges picked, and there’d always be one title that captured my interest.
After stumbling across a discount on a 3-month subscription, plus the option to skip a month if nothing strikes my fancy, it seemed like a pretty low-risk thing to try. I also love hardcovers, but I rarely buy them. They tend to be expensive and as a primarily-romance reader, it’s a rarity a book will come out in hardcover.
My August book was All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood. I hadn’t heard about it before, but the judge who picked it for the month described it as a “Beauty & the Beast noir fairytale set in the meth-riddled backwoods of the Midwest.” Hello!
Elyse: I do buy a lot of hardcovers because I read a fair amount of suspense. So if you’re looking at $11.99 per book for BOTM club, that’s less than a hardcover from Amazon (usually) and about what I’d pay for a Kindle edition of a hardcover release.
I liked that the judge’s picks seemed quirky and that there was always some genre fiction in there like Sleeping Giants or The Woman in Cabin 10 ( A | BN | K | G ).
Amanda: If you don’t want to pick a book (they typically have a good selection of fiction vs nonfiction), you can just be completely surprised. When you sign up, you fill out a very brief questionnaire and if you don’t skip the month or choose a book specifically, they’ll send you one of the five titles based on the questionnaire you filled out.
I’d like to see it be a bit more in-depth since it basically asks you what genres you like to read or what to read more of, and it picks based off that. And the fiction is definitely more in the lit fic camp, though, like Elyse said, there is usually at least one genre fiction title. Looking back at previous months, I’d say they’re usually mystery or sci fi. Not a whole lot of romance, of course!
But because the judges rotate, there tends to be a nice variety.
Elyse: Yes, I’d definitely like it if they included something more in the romance genre. I know that can be tough when sticking to just hardcover, but show our genre some love BOTM!
I’ve been really pleased with my membership. It makes financial sense for me and the quality of the selections is good. I also like that they have an early ship option. I got my September books on the 7th, even with the holiday. For me it’s not perfect, but a solid B+.
Amanda: Elyse usually gets her book before I do and admittedly, I’m a little jealous, but I love comparing our picks each month. The quality and varied selection are the high points, for me, when it comes to this subscription and it’s not terribly taxing on the wallet.
But I echo Elyse’s comments about throwing in some romance (which I get may be hard to do because the BOTM club is all about hardcovers). B+ all the way.
If you’re interested in trying out BOTM use code 30TOTE at checkout to get 30% off 3 months and a free tote bag!
So my TBR digital pile is up to almost 500 right now (Amazon loves me) and I had zero interest in a book of the month club…until I read this post of course. Sometimes I just get tired of romance after romance (gasp!) and I grab something outside the genre as a palate cleanser and (almost) always like what I read. I belong to a monthly makeup sample box club that I was thinking of stopping. This sounds like a perfect replacement.
I belonged as a guest for a short time through an affiliation with a blogger for whom I write product reviews. I found the guest curators to be an interesting mix. The book I enjoyed the most during my short time reviewing was one which Whoopi Goldberg recommended: The Magician’s Lie. Wonderful tale.
They didn’t have any romance reads, so I wouldn’t have continued the program on my own.
I was a member to one of these clubs years ago. The scifi one, I believe. Are these real hardcovers or the slightly smaller version with a different or no ISBN? I could never trade those or resell them if I didn’t like the book so I quit my subscription way back when.
PS That book? “All the Ugly and Wonderful Things by Bryn Greenwood” It is heart-wrenching, grueling and I am so glad I read it.
I’m not sure if they still do it this way – I suspect they do – but in the past the BOMC hardcovers were not the same as publisher hardcovers. They published their own “book club editions.” In fact, the plot of John Dunning’s “Booked to Die” hinges on BOMC titles. 🙂
Anyway, whether or not a book is released by its real publisher in hardcover probably is irrelevant to whether it is released by BOMC. Reader demand is what will get more romances.
There used to be a romance book club, a mystery book club, and a science fiction book club that all did the same thing – I have some cool Star Trek hardcovers from Science Fiction Book Club that were never released in hardcover by the real publisher.
Book Club Editions are not the same as the publisher edition. They are printed on cheaper paper and do not hold resell value. As a used book dealer, I cringe whenever someone brings me in a box of BCE books.
This brings back memories. Back in the Dark Ages I was a member of a number of book clubss (BOTM (which I would have sworn I called BOMC), Literary Guild, Science Fiction BC, etc). It was a great way to get exposure to a variety of books when your only bookstore was the tiny Walden Books at the mall. The hardbacks were cheaper than the bookstore versions, and they definitely had more generic bindings. I’m kinda heartened to see that they’re still around.
Some of the book club editions can actually be worth a little money – like with those early Star Treks, it’s the only way to have a hardcover edition with a dust jacket. But for the vast majority of titles, no.
If they did ebooks, I’d be in.
Hi ladies, maybe I can answer some of the quality questions! To me, it feels like a real hardcover and I’m not disappointed by the quality. However, I’m not sure how it compares to the heft or quality of the hardcover from the bookstore.
The jackets do have the BOTMC logo on the front and spine. Plus an I <3 BOTM symbol on the back with what month the book was selected from (i.e. August 2016), which I think is kind of cool, so you can keep track of you collection.
I'm not sure about the ISBNs. There is one on my copy of All the Ugly and Wonderful Things and typing the ISBN into the Amazon search does bring up the book.
You people are evil. Promo code? Free tote? Good review from the Bitchery? Of course I signed up. Between this and my new Lularoe addiction I’m going to be counting pennies.
When they sent me The Witches, it was the real deal, not the BOTM edition. A couple were BOTM editions, and some were the real deal. My copy of The Witches is a first edition (doesn’t say which printing), but it does have an ISBN. I gave my other books away, but I kept this one. I think they all had book jackets.
Like Susan, I used to belong to the Literary Guild, but as a younger person, I was notoriously bad about sending back mail, and ended up getting books I didn’t want. Now that I am an older, more responsible member of the book buying society, I am very interested in this BOTM club!
Maris Kreizman? Blake Crouch. Idk & Idc but that looks wrong to me.
It’s Dark Matter by Blake Crouch 🙂 Maris is the Judge who picked the book
They’ve chosen great books but then print them on poor quality paper with poor quality binding. They’re a lot cheaper than those you buy at the bookstore but I’m not sure that these inferior editions are worth even the reduced price.