(Photo by Dia Dipasupil/WireImage)
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Longtime TV star Valerie Bertinelli is launching a book club venture, and now we are readingBecause she’s expanding her Valerie’s Place subscription-media destination, including new and library episodes of her cooking show, other programming, podcasts, publications, social media, and more.
The new club will host its first online book club gathering on April 24, the day after Bertinelli’s 66th birthday, with an expected cadence of six books per year. It is based on Bertinelli’s own history as a fanatical reader, including 30 years of monthly book groups with longtime friends. The new interactive book club will be available to paid customers of Valerie’s Place.
“I want to have real conversations with people,” Bertinelli said. (In book groups) Some of my best conversations have happened when we weren’t actually crazy about the book or maybe just its title character.
first book for and now we are reading Bertinelli’s own recently published memoir will to be nakedWhich is also the name of his podcast. Buyers of the book also received a free one-month subscription to Valerie’s Place, and Bertinelli said that contributed to sales of 32,000 copies in the book’s second week of release.
For the bookclub, an online gathering will be held every six weeks, with interactive participants selected by lottery from among the site’s top-end subscribers.
Other possible books for the club include heart lover From the Fourth Wing series by Lily King, Rebecca Yaros, and Theo of Golden By Alan Levy, he said.
Valerie’s Place launched a few weeks ago, as Bertinelli looks ahead to a difficult 2022, when her long-running cooking show on the Food Network ended, and so did her second marriage to producer and entrepreneur Tom Vitale after 11 years.
Bertinelli said in an interview that she was doing “little Instagram videos”, which led to a large following there (1.6 million followers @WolfiesMom), maybe 3.5 million followers on other sites, but, “I don’t like working for an algorithm. I don’t like working for billionaires who don’t care.”
Her long tenure as an actress and reality-show star and her heavy social presence caught the attention of longtime reality-TV producer Billy Cooper (pit bulls and parolees), whose Visible Things tech company now specializes in direct-to-fan websites.
In creating Valerie’s Place, the pair licensed 172 episodes and 14 seasons. Valerie’s Home Cooking From Food Network, where the show ran from 2015 to 2023. Now Bertinelli is regularly taping several episodes of two new cooking-related shows, Now Val is cooking (“It’s what they call stand and stir,” Bertinelli said) and reheatA conversation with the creator of her cooking.
Licensing a Food Network show is an unusual move. As Cooper said, “There are no vestiges in reality TV,” that is, the past episodes of many shows rarely have any ongoing life.
“Once the streaming wars started, amazing content got thrown in the trash and left behind,” Cooper said. “With our customer base, Val has been able to build the back end of the show he created five years ago.”
Valerie’s Place provides a viable home and audience for those old cooking shows and about 600 recipes from the show, which Bertinelli owns the rights to and has helped develop, in many cases with Sophie Clarke. Bertinelli has already published three cookbooks, the most recent two years ago.
“We’re trying to create a destination where customers have multiple places to go, multiple things to do,” Cooper said. The website’s architecture is partly inspired by Bertinelli’s own Studio City, California, home, which is now used as a backdrop for some of his programming.
But Bertinelli is planning live streams, podcasts, new types of programs, and more. Valerie’s Place is thus a media destination for Bertinelli’s fans that is less at the mercy of social-media algorithm vagaries, and offers her a more direct connection with the fans she has built up from her time as a child actress starring in hit TV shows. One day at a time.
“I never even thought about doing something like this,” Bertinelli said. “I also respect people who know their job better than me. ‘Okay, just tell me where to go.'”
Bertinelli did not disclose initial subscriber numbers, but a spokeswoman said a quarter of total users had already signed up to one of the service’s four paid tiers. About half of those customers chose one of the two highest pricing tiers, $10 or $25 per month. The cheapest tier is $2 per month.
Bertinelli continues to present shows on more traditional outlets, but admitted that “I don’t look like that anymore. I’ve been doing this for over 50 years. It’s changed exponentially since I’ve been doing television movies.”
