How to Create a Book Club Kit for Your Readers

by Audry Fryer

Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, a book club kit download is a great way to provide extra content and fun experiences for your readers. And it can be an innovative marketing tool to help you reach a new audience and create a loyal fanbase. 

Unlike a physical book kit, a download is easy to put together through any word processing program. Once you create the document, you can quickly deliver it to your readers. Also, you can update your download at any time to edit or add more content. 

For my book, Until Next Sunday, I offer a book club kit as a free PDF download for signing up for my newsletter. My welcome email has a link to download the kit. I love sharing fun ideas and fascinating facts about my book. Even if the reader isn’t in a book club, the kit is a great way to enhance the reader’s experience.

What Should a Book Club Kit Download Include?

Your book club kit download should contain exciting and interactive content unique to your book. You’ll want to showcase to your readers and book clubs why they should be excited about reading and celebrating your book. 

My book club kit download for Until Next Sunday includes a welcome letter from me plus a playlist, recipes, content about locations featured in the book, and custom discussion questions I created based on the story.

11 Ideas to Include in Your Book Club Kit

While you may not want to incorporate all 11 ideas in your book club kit download, choosing around five components is helpful. It’s easy and fun to create a download your readers and book clubs can enjoy.

Welcome Letter

A note from the author sets the tone for your book club kit. Don’t skip this opportunity to connect with your readers. In your letter, share a background story of how the book came to be, a personal story about your journey as an author, or any other behind-the-scenes tidbit. 

Also, explain what you’ve included in the kit to entice your reader to enjoy the full download. You can add a table of contents as a quick reference and visual. And finally, thank your reader for choosing to interact with your book further. 

Author Bio

Help your readers get to know you better. You can insert your official author bio. Or, even better, you can share background about yourself that readers won’t find anywhere else. Rather than a dull information dump, add a personal trivia section or a list of fun facts about you.

Interview or Author Q&A

Share fascinating content about you as the author and your book by including interviews posted on other platforms. Or add a section of frequently asked questions and their corresponding answers.

Discussion Questions

Book clubs love having ready-to-go discussion questions. Aside from eating, drinking, and socializing, the point of the book club is to talk about the book. In your kit, provide questions that directly relate to your book. Make sure you provide a variety of questions. Plus, offer topics that will spark lively conversations. If you need inspiration, check out my post on 77 Book Club Discussion Questions (For Any Book). 

Extra Content about the Book

You can provide exclusive content in your book club kit. Readers and book clubs enjoy having access to items not available to everyone. 

Get creative! There are so many opportunities to offer new and exciting pieces. For example, you could share a brief prequel or an unpublished epilogue to your book. You could feature a side story about a favorite character. Or you could reveal what happened to the characters or real-life people in your story after the book ends. 

Featured Locations

Often settings involve real-life locations. Readers tend to be curious about where the story took place. Offer insights or interesting facts about the areas featured in your book. Or provide information about traveling to the locations in your book. You can include maps, photos, or other images to help the reader feel like they’re there.

Playlist

I love the idea of putting together a soundtrack to accompany your book. The songs you choose can enhance the theme and vibe of your story. Book clubs can then play the songs in the background as they meet. 

For my book club kit, I created a list of songs with a romantic/Italian theme that matched a corresponding Spotify playlist.  Readers can either look up the songs on their music platform or access the more extended playlist I created on Spotify.

Recipes

Recipes for food or drinks can be a big hit with book clubs and individual readers. Choose recipes that relate to a food or drink featured in your story. Even if your book doesn’t mention food or beverages, you can still add a recipe that compliments your book’s theme. 

In the Until Next Sunday book club kit download, I shared a family recipe for gnocchi that had been passed down from generation to generation. Also, I added a signature cocktail recipe for making Bellinis. While Bellinis weren’t directly mentioned in the book, they fit with the Italian theme. In the kit, I share a link for a video on Tik Tok I created on how to make Bellinis.

Activities

Does your book lend itself to a real-world activity or craft? If so, add instructions or information on how to make your book come to life. For example, Until Next Sunday features writing love letters. Although it’s not in the kit I offer, I could have provided a tutorial on the art of letter writing. What unique activity would your readers enjoy?

Images 

Images are essential to your book club kit. They add interest and color to your download. Make sure you insert the cover of your book, your author photo, and any pictures to enhance your content. If you include a recipe, make sure you have images to accompany it. Or, if you discuss a featured location, add a picture of the place. Plus, you can add interesting photos of yourself or related historical photos.

Call-to-Action

Finally, make sure you add at least one call to action.Take advantage of this opportunity in which you have your readers’ attention. Since you’re marketing to book clubs, it’s a fantastic idea to make yourself accessible by offering to join a book club zoom. 

Also, you can add social media links to entice your readers to share your book or the recipes/activities. Ask for book reviews and provide links to where you’d like the reviews posted. Add a form for signing up for your email list. Or, provide links for purchasing your other books. And finally, you can work with other authors to cross-promote their books by providing other book recommendations your readers may enjoy.

Final Thoughts for Creating a Book Club Kit Download

Hopefully, I’ve inspired you to create a book club kit download for your book. It’s an excellent marketing tool. And, it’s so fun to offer extra content to your readers in book clubs or even to your individual readers. 

Audry Fryer is an author and professional freelance writer from Pennsylvania. Formerly a teacher, Audry wrote her first novel while her toddler son and twin babies napped. As her children have grown into teenagers, she has expanded her writing career. Audry lives with her family and two pugs in a quiet corner of Southeastern PA. To learn more about Audry, please visit her website at www.audryfryer.com.

Madi Sinha On At Least Your Have Your Health & Unregulated Wellness Industries

Dr. Maya Rao built her career as a gynecologist to serve, educate, and empower women. In addition to her demanding job, she juggles care for her three small children and copes with the trauma of a mistake buried deep in her professional past. One day, the stress becomes too much for Maya to handle – and Maya is forced to walk away from her job at the hospital.

Despondent and scrambling for a new opportunity, Maya is thrilled when a fellow mom at her daughter’s school approaches her with an offer. Amelia DeGilles, well-to-do entrepreneur and socialite, has founded Eunoia Women’s Health: a concierge wellness clinic that specializes in house calls for its elite clientele in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Amelia has been searching for a gynecologist to make her business complete – it’s the perfect remedy for both women.

No vitamin infusion or healing crystal is too expensive for Eunoia’s patients, and despite her years of medical training and expertise, Maya finds herself catering to every whim with flashy, unproven treatments – odd birthing ceremonies and curative mind journeys included. As Maya forms a friendship with the beautiful, successful Amelia, she may be overlooking the scandalous secrets at the heart of the very organization she’s been working for – and putting at risk the lives of the women she so desperately aims to help.

Tell us about At Least You Have Your Health!

A gynecologist takes a job with a chic wellness company, making house calls for its clientele of wealthy women. As she’s drawn into their world of privilege, she finds herself grappling with her own ambition while racing to uncover the truth behind a deadly secret.

What prompted you to write this book?

The pandemic. I wrote this book in 2020, and it was my way of processing everything that was happening in my life and in the world at large. As a doctor, there was of course the challenge of being in the medical field during the worst global health crisis in a century. As a parent, I also lived with the daily stress of having two young children—one of whom was in kindergarten—at home doing virtual school while also worrying if I would bring the virus home to them. At the same time, Me Too and Black Lives Matter were sharpening our collective discourse on issues of gender and race. I’d understood, in my bones, what being a model minority was about because it was my lived reality as an Indian American, but I’d never heard the term “racial triangulation” until 2020. As a writer, it was a revelation to have words to express something I’d always felt was true but never knew how to articulate. And while all of that was happening, the pandemic was laying bare the injustices of not only race, but its counterpart, class. We saw the virus decimate the lower classes while Town & Country reported on all the wealthy New Yorkers who were fleeing to the Hamptons to ride out the pandemic in their beach-front mansions while trying to optimize their immune systems with ashwagandha and vitamin infusions. I wanted to write about all of it—motherhood and feminism and race and class and healthcare—because I wanted to make sense of it all in my own mind.

What are some of your current and future projects that you can share with us?

 I’m currently working on my third book, but I can’t say much about it yet. That’s not because I’m being secretive, but because I invent the story as I go along. I’m never really sure what the book is about until I’ve finished it. So far all I have is that it’s a story about two sisters who don’t really get along.

What do you hope for readers to be thinking when they read your novel?

I hope At Least You Have Your Health! starts people thinking about, among other things, the dangers of an unregulated wellness industry, the failings of modern medicine (because, honestly, if we were doing a better job as doctors communicating with and caring for patients, people wouldn’t feel the need to look to the wellness industry for answers), and health equity and access to healthcare. I hope it makes the case that South Asians unequivocally deserve a seat at the table when we’re talking about race in America. For my fellow South Asian Americans, I hope it gets us talking about white adjacency and racial triangulation. And of course, I hope people also enjoy the ride. It’s a fun story about some outrageous characters. I hope readers will laugh along the way too.

What are you currently reading?  

We Were Never Here, by Andrea Bartz. I’m late to the party on this one. It’s such a well-plotted, well-written thriller and I’m loving it so far.

Where can readers find you?
My website is madisinha.com. I’m on IG and Twitter at @madisinha

Abbi Waxman on Inspiration -- And Tying It Down

Inspiration is a funny thing. It can come to us like a lightning bolt, through the lyrics of a song, or in the fog of a dream. Ask any writer where their stories come from and you’ll get a myriad of answers, and in that vein I created the WHAT (What the Hell Are you Thinking?) interview. Always including in the WHAT is one random question to really dig down into the interviewees mind, and probably supply some illumination into my own as well.

 Today’s guest is Abbi Waxman, author of Adult Assembly Required.

Ideas for our books can come from just about anywhere, and sometimes even we can’t pinpoint exactly how or why. Did you have a specific origin point for your book?

Usually I start with a character and then I mess with them. In this case I daydreamed the opening set up and went from there. That makes it sound like a smooth process, it wasn’t. I wrote the set up and then blundered from chapter to chapter trying to make it work.

Once the original concept existed, how did you build a plot around it?

In fits and starts and many backtracks and mistakes. Plot is not my strength, so it takes me a while to work them out and then I change them all the time. I’m a pantser.

Have you ever had the plot firmly in place, only to find it changing as the story moved from your mind to paper?

Are you kidding? I have only the vaguest idea or feeling when I start, and occasionally I’ll glimpse a plot through the fog and swim in that direction for a while… but it’s really a clusterfuck from start to end.

Do story ideas come to you often, or is fresh material hard to come by?

Ideas come to me all the time, until I sit down to write, at which point they evaporate.

How do you choose which story to write next, if you’ve got more than one percolating?

I’ll write the one that’s bitching the loudest. 

I have 6 cats and a Dalmatian (seriously, check my Instagram feed) and I usually have at least one or two snuggling with me when I write. Do you have a writing buddy, or do you find it distracting? 

I write all over the place, so it depends where I am. I also have a lot of pets, so if I’m at home there’s usually an editorial team of cats and dogs. I’m very easily distracted, unless I’m in the zone, in which case I can’t hear a thing.