(Photo by Dia Dipasupil/WireImage)

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Long-time TV star Valerie Bertinelli is launching a book club venture, And Now We’re Reading, as she beefs up her Valerie’s Place subscription-media destination, which features new and library episodes of her cooking shows, other programming, podcasts, publishing, social media and more.

The new club will host its first online book club gathering April 24, the day after Bertinelli’s 66th birthday, with an expected cadence of six books a year. It builds on Bertinelli’s own history as a hardcore reader, including 30 years in a monthly book group with long-time friends. The new interactive book club will be available to paid subscribers of Valerie’s Place.

“I want to have a real conversation with people, Bertinelli said. ”Some of the best conversations I have had (in book groups) came when we’re not really crazy about" the book or perhaps just its title character.

The first book for And Now We’re Reading will be Bertinelli’s own just-published memoir Getting Naked, which is also the name of her podcast. Buyers of the book received a free one-month subscription to Valerie’s Place as well, and likely contributed to the 32,000 copies Bertinelli said were sold in the book’s second week of release.

For the bookclub, an online gathering will be held every six weeks, with interactive participants chosen by lottery from the site’s top-end subscribers.

Other likely books for the club include Heart the Lover from Lily King, Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing series, and Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, she said.

Valerie’s Place launched a few weeks ago, as Bertinelli moved beyond 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 had been doing “little Instagram videos,” building a substantial following there (1.6 million followers @WolfiesMom), with perhaps another 3.5 million followers across other sites, but, “I don’t like working for an algorithm. I don’t like working for billionaires who don’t care.”

Her long run as an actress and reality-show star, and that hefty social presence, caught the eye of long-time reality-TV producer Billy Cooper (Pit Bulls & Parolees), whose Visible Things tech company now specializes in direct-to-fan websites.

In constructing Valerie’s Place, the pair licensed 172 episodes and 14 seasons of Valerie’s Home Cooking from the Food Network, where the show ran from 2015 to 2023. Now Bertinelli is regularly taping multiple episodes of two new cooking-related shows, Now Val’s Cooking ("It’s what they call a stand & stir," Bertinelli said) and Reheated, a conversation with her cooking producer.

Licensing the Food Network shows is an unusual move. As Cooper said, “there are no residuals in reality TV,” i.e., back episodes of many shows seldom have an ongoing life.

“Once the streaming wars hit, amazing content was put in the dustbin and was being left behind," Cooper said. "With our subscriber base, Val is able to make a back end on a show she made five years ago.”

Valerie’s Place provides a viable home and audience for those older cooking shows, and for the show’s nearly 600 recipes, whose rights Bertinelli owns and helped develop in many cases with Sophie Clark. Bertinelli already has published three cookbooks, most recently two years ago.

“We’re trying to create a destination where subscribers have multiple places to go, multiple things to do,” Cooper said. The architecture of the website is partly inspired by Bertinelli’s own Studio City, Calif., home, which is now used as a backdrop for some of her programming.

But Bertinelli also plans live streams, podcasts, new kinds of programs and more. Valerie’s Place is thus a media destination for Bertinelli’s fans that’s less at the mercy of social-media algorithmic vagaries, and gives her a more direct relationship with the fans she’s built up since her time as a child actress starring on hit TV show One Day at a Time.

"I’d never even thought about doing something like this," Bertinelli said. "I also respect people who know their jobs better than I know it. ‘Okay, just tell me where to go.’"

Bertinelli did not disclose initial subscriber numbers, but a spokesperson said a quarter of total users have already signed up one of the service’s four paid tiers. Nearly half those subscribers have chosen one of the two highest pricing tiers, $10 or $25 a month. The cheapest tier is $2 per month.

Bertinelli is also continuing to pitch shows to more traditional outlets, but acknowledged “I just don’t what that looks like anymore. I’ve been doing this for 50-plus years. It has changed exponentially since I was doing television movies."