You sell a popular or interesting book at a slight discount for the duration of the book club run. (Maybe a discount just for members who paid an up-front fee?) You do a weekly discussion group, one per chapter of the book. Run multiple books per week, catering to different crowds (e.g. ultra technical vs old sci-fi). Set up some reasonable video and audio equipment, experiment with the format, and try to capture the "sitting around with a group of smart people" feel.
While the club is running, make those videos available online with a discussion forum (also experiment here -- with one topic per chapter, or posts grouped by smart tags or something). After the club has run, you sell a "book club" package for every book you've done this for. Sell it at a reasonably higher price with a DVD of the discussion sessions and an archive of the forum session. In a year, you'll end up with a hopefully rabid community and a reputation, as well as a growing catalogue of copyrighted material which makes your products unique and justifies a higher price.
The core idea here has come up repeatedly: membership in a community is important. Having a place to go feel like a hacker or just a smart person and meet other smart people is wonderful. You should sell that; the books are just an excuse. Heck, you could even just try running a paid-membership library.
edit: reading back over my message, some different themes also stuck out: minimum products, iterating, and pivoting. The ideas I proposed are really a loose collection of possibly money-generating schemes built around community and creating value. You can quickly start doing any (or all) of these, then iterating and pivoting as necessary. This is the common small business pattern: start a few small projects, see what's drawing people and money, then regularly optimize according to your senses of what you need most at the moment.
You sell a popular or interesting book at a slight discount for the duration of the book club run. (Maybe a discount just for members who paid an up-front fee?) You do a weekly discussion group, one per chapter of the book. Run multiple books per week, catering to different crowds (e.g. ultra technical vs old sci-fi). Set up some reasonable video and audio equipment, experiment with the format, and try to capture the "sitting around with a group of smart people" feel.
While the club is running, make those videos available online with a discussion forum (also experiment here -- with one topic per chapter, or posts grouped by smart tags or something). After the club has run, you sell a "book club" package for every book you've done this for. Sell it at a reasonably higher price with a DVD of the discussion sessions and an archive of the forum session. In a year, you'll end up with a hopefully rabid community and a reputation, as well as a growing catalogue of copyrighted material which makes your products unique and justifies a higher price.
The core idea here has come up repeatedly: membership in a community is important. Having a place to go feel like a hacker or just a smart person and meet other smart people is wonderful. You should sell that; the books are just an excuse. Heck, you could even just try running a paid-membership library.
edit: reading back over my message, some different themes also stuck out: minimum products, iterating, and pivoting. The ideas I proposed are really a loose collection of possibly money-generating schemes built around community and creating value. You can quickly start doing any (or all) of these, then iterating and pivoting as necessary. This is the common small business pattern: start a few small projects, see what's drawing people and money, then regularly optimize according to your senses of what you need most at the moment.