In this episode of the My First Million podcast, Sam Parr recounts how he founded a local book club called The Anti‑MBA after moving to San Francisco with no network. He leveraged cold‑email outreach to grow an email list of about 5,000 and held weekly in‑person meetings of around 30 participants, often inviting experts to discuss a monthly book. Parr reflects on the historical success of the Book of the Month Club, noting its evolution from a 1930s venture to a modern subscription service with roughly 100,000 paying members generating $10‑15 million in annual revenue. He contrasts this with platforms like Goodreads (100 million users) and Wattpad (a romance‑focused, women‑centric content hub). Parr explores the economics of book rights, citing Tim Ferriss’s comment on low book margins, and proposes a subscription‑based model inspired by Vinyl Me Please: a paid Facebook group delivering curated books and expert commentary, potentially focusing on high‑liquidity romance titles. He also mentions buying rights to out‑of‑print works as a growth lever. Throughout, the conversation blends personal anecdotes, market observations, and speculative business ideas about modernizing book clubs.
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We were going to talk— I was going to talk about this a few weeks ago. Okay. So when I moved to San Francisco, I started a book club called The Anti-MBA, and I did it because I didn't go to an elite Ivy League school, but I was always envious of those people because when I moved here, I didn't know a single soul. And I felt— I always like stereotyped people as like tall, beautiful white teeth with Patagonias, and they had like lovely networks.
That's what you saw all around.
Yeah, just like these, like, rich white people who— that's how I was like, right? That's how I imagined it. And it kind of was that. And I was always envious of that. So what I did was I created a book club meeting where we would meet every week and we would read one book a month, and I would convince an expert.
How did you convince people to join this? Where did you throw it up on your blog?
I'm just a cold email guy. I just learned how to cold email people. And I did it online. So each week we would have 30 people show up and I probably had an email list of 5,000 people who would—
So this was not in person. This was all online.
30 people in person. See Eva. Yeah. All a lot of my best friends I met this way. 30 people. My friend had an office and he let me use it and we would just meet up and I would, and I would read a week ahead of time and just make notes and lead discussion. And sometimes we would have an expert.
—Okay.
—And then I would send show notes or meeting notes to the list. And people loved it. I made close to no money off of it, or I don't think I made any money off it. I just did it for fun. And it was very successful. And a lot of people said that we should make it a thing. I think it's a stupid— I thought it was a stupid idea. But book clubs are actually kind of interesting. So, there's this business called Book of the Month Club. It was started in— I believe it was started in the 1930s. At this point, it's owned by— it was owned by Bertelsmann, which is a large publisher, a multibillion-dollar publisher. And then recently, a private individual bought it for single-digit millions of dollars. And in the '40s, '50s, and '60s, this was massive. I mean, it was millions of people paid for it. So it was quite a large business, hundreds of millions of dollars, probably in the '60s and '70s. It's gone away once Amazon came around. A guy bought it a couple of years ago. And it's quite large still. And what they do is scroll down a little bit.
This is 90 million users.
What the hell? No, that's Goodreads.
Oh, that's Goodreads.
And so Book of the Month Club now has 100,000 active paying customers. Wow. Which means they're in the revenue range of 10 to 15 million a year in recurring revenue. And they— the founder said in an interview he wants his goals to grow 5x a year for 5x a year.
Nice.
For the next year, not consistently. I don't know if that's— I think that's bogus. But Book of the Month is kind of an interesting thing. I suspect— I've always thought that it would not work. Now my opinion has changed. So Goodreads has 100 million users. There's this thing called the Wattpad. Have you heard of Wattpad? I've heard of it. Yeah. Wattpad. A lot of people don't know about it. Wattpad, it's owned by a guy in Canada and they have 400 employees. It's a multiple hundred million dollar a year business, I believe. They— it's a book club for— it's not a book club, it's more—
you write on it, you, you write original stories on it.
Yeah, but it's— their category is romance, middle, middle America romance novels. So if you're, uh, a 40-year-old woman, you probably have heard of Wattpad.
You're saying that's the most popular category? Or—
yeah, but that's pretty much all they do. Oh really? Okay. It's basically for women who— it's like men do video porn, romance novels is woman porn. I mean, that's basically what it is. Um, and so huge business. And now I'm quite bullish now on these book clubs. Yeah. Reese Witherspoon has a book club. My wife uses it. My sister, so many people. Have you heard of this?
No, I haven't heard of that one.
Sunshine, some fucking thing.
But Oprah had hers, but hers wasn't on paid membership. But this is really smart. Like what you're describing, I'm like, oh, this is good. And I think you gotta have, um, probably not gotta have, but it's advantageous here to have a brand like Reese Witherspoon or whoever, Jennifer Aniston or Gwyneth Paltrow or whoever, or like the Hustle could do a book club, you could do a book club. Like, I think that you have to have a, a bit of cachet to organize people around to get the energy going, that initial energy you need.
So here's one angle. You buy the rights to the book, which is expensive. Yeah. Why would you do that? Well, because I think the margins in books are quite small. I've talked to Tim Ferriss about this. He told me that he earns Um, I, he didn't say that. He didn't tell me this, but he told me, I mean, I think that he does about $1 million a month in revenue off his podcast. And he told me that he, this is what he did tell me. He has made 10 times more money off the podcast than all of his books combined. Right. So I, I don't think people get paid a lot of money for books. So the margins are just—
so it might be a cheap asset you're saying?
Yeah, I think it's quite cheap. Um, so I would wanna, my goal would be to buy the rights to the book and make it popular. You know who, um, Have you heard of, um, there's this company that owns, uh, the company that owns Proactiv. It's called, uh, um, I know what you're talking about.
It's the skincare.
It's a direct marketing company. They, the guy who owns it, it's a quite large business. He got his start because he bought the rights to Think and Grow Rich. Oh, really? And he helped to make it popular again. Oh, wow. Through infomercials. So that's what I would do is I would want to buy the rights to all the books. And there's another company called MentorBox that does this, and Tai Lopez is one of the owners, so it's incredibly scammy. I mean, like, you sign up for like $20 and then it rolls into like a $400 a month thing. It's like fucking stupid. But book clubs are super interesting to me.
So would you do this, like, if you were gonna do this now, how would you attack it? What would you do? So you'd buy the rights of the— you'd buy the rights of which books?
No, if I wanted to bootstrap it, no, you can't. How would you do it? So what I would do is I would look at what Vinyl Me Please— Vinyl Me Please is my friend's business. It's a, uh, probably a couple million bucks a month subscription thing. So what you do is you give them $50 a month and they send you a vinyl once a month. Right. And so I would do that, but for a particular type of category. So what I would do is I would create a Facebook group and I would say it's $30 or $50 a month and we're going to read one book a month. I'm going to get one expert to come and talk about the book, uh, each week or each month. We're going to do it in a Facebook group and I'm going to send you notes about the whole book.
And what, uh, category do you think you'd choose? Would you do the romance novel? Or would you do business or would you do self-help?
Well, just because I have such a network in business that I could just crush it right off the bat. Yeah, but romance novels, I know this from experience because I've invested in these types of things. Romance novels have the, have the highest liquidity, as in people consume them the most.
Right. So I would like voracious readers, 5, 5 times the number of books read.
Romance category is probably one of the most— it's probably the most popular category on Kindle. Yeah, I bet you it is. So, okay, me personally, I would start here, but if I even slightly was interested in romance novels, I would—
and I like what this guy did, uh, buying the rights to the Book of the Month Club from, you know, some— a popular asset that's sort of decayed over the last 30 years, and, uh, see if you can revitalize it on the cheap. I think these are interesting businesses.
There's so many books that I love that are written in the '60s and '70s, and you try to buy them on Amazon and they're hundreds of dollars because they've just been forgotten and they don't reprint them, right? Um, I just tried to buy a book the other day for that, that someone mentioned on Twitter, and it was $900. What book? It was— so I just tweeted about Agora, that's the scammy, um, company, um, uh, which we can talk about if we want, but the— it was all about copywriting. It was $900.
