How One Book Club Turned a Self-Published Memoir Into a Regional Bestseller

On the third Thursday of every month, fourteen people gather around Beverly Kowalski's dining room table in Alton, Illinois, with a pound cake, a pot of decaf and whatever book they have agreed to argue about. In June the book was a paperback with a photograph of a johnboat on the cover. By September it had sold more than 9,000 copies.

The book is What the River Kept, a memoir by Delia Montrose, who grew up six blocks from Kowalski's house. In it, Montrose retraces the route her late father took down the Mississippi as a young man, a trip he talked about for the rest of his life and never wrote down. She published it herself on May 12. She printed 300 copies.

"I thought I'd sell them to cousins," Montrose said. "I honestly budgeted for giving most of them away."

A club with one rule

The Third Thursday Readers have met since 2009. They have one rule, according to Kowalski, a retired insurance adjuster who founded the group. Everyone has to finish the book, or say out loud why they didn't.

Luz Ortega, a retired middle school science teacher, found Montrose's memoir on a folding table at a Saturday farmers market, where the author was selling copies out of a plastic tub.

"I read it in two nights and then I called Bev," Ortega said. "I told her we're doing this one in June and I don't care what's on the list."

The club bought fourteen copies. Then members bought more for siblings, pastors and a nephew stationed in Alaska. Harold Denning, a retired towboat pilot who spent 34 years on the river, bought eleven.

"Delia got the river right," Denning said. "People write about it like a postcard. She wrote about it like somebody who's been cold on it at night. She knows it'll hurt you, and she loves it anyway, and so did her dad."

Word of mouth, printed

By early July the first run was gone. Montrose, who still works full time as a bookkeeper for a grain cooperative, ordered 1,000 more from a printer in St. Louis. Then 3,000. The fourth printing, 5,000 copies, arrived in August.

The club did practical things. Kowalski wrote a letter to the local paper. Ortega left copies in every little free library between Alton and Grafton. Denning mailed one to each of the captains he still trades Christmas cards with. The group invited Montrose to their July meeting, and then members started inviting her to their other clubs.

"By August I was going to three book clubs a week," Montrose said. "Somebody's sister in Quincy. A church group in Cape Girardeau. A retired nurses' circle in Hannibal. Every one of them had heard about it from the Third Thursday people."

Marion Pryce, who runs Lock and Dam Books, a small shop in Grafton, said she has reordered the memoir nine times. "It's the only book I've ever sold where people come in already knowing the author's middle name," she said.

Asking permission first

Before any of it, Montrose made a phone call. Her father's surviving brother, her uncle Walt, appears throughout the book, including in scenes that do not flatter him. She read him those pages over the phone.

"I told him if he said no, I'd cut them," she said. "He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, 'That's how it happened. Leave it.'"

Walt Montrose, now 81, has since attended two book club meetings. He brings his own copy, which is full of penciled corrections to the names of sandbars.

"I wasn't trying to write a book about the river. I was trying to write down my father before I forgot how he talked."

Small numbers, large reach

Nine thousand copies would be a quiet number for a major publisher. For a memoir with no marketing budget and no distributor, sold almost entirely within a few hours' drive of one Illinois river town, it is remarkable. Two literary agents have contacted Montrose since August. She has not decided whether to call them back.

"I keep thinking about the first 300," she said. "I know where most of them went. I could probably name who has them. I don't want to lose that feeling that I know who's reading."

The Third Thursday Readers have moved on. In September they read a mystery. Nobody liked it much, Kowalski said, and Denning did not finish it. He explained why, out loud, as the rule requires.

What the River Kept by Delia Montrose (independently published, 248 pages, $17.99) is out now.