Mother Talk and Word of Mouth

I’m off to Portland and Seattle for Mother Talk events, and I’m looking forward to meeting some writers I’ve only encountered virtually or telephonically thus far, and to speaking with the groups we’ll be meeting over the next five days.

In the meantime, if you haven’t already heard the news, an association of women authors called Word of Mouth has written a letter to Oprah appealing to her to bring back her famous book club. (Full disclosure: I have signed the letter, and I am a brand-new member of Word of Mouth.) The reaction has been interesting to follow. Jennifer Weiner puts the snark in her blog “SnarkSpot” with her surprisingly ungenerous take on the letter campaign (she suggests that instead of waiting for Oprah to save them, these women writers should write “more accesible books”), and MJ Rose counters by pointing out, “There is a correlation between TV exposure time and copies sold. There is a correlation between books being part of the conversation when they get a lot of media time and when they don’t. I don’t think the letter was saying anything more complicated than the club had an impact that is missing in our culture and that’s a good thing to point out and that’s why I, for one, was proud to sign it.”