Word: oprah
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...That infidelity-and-impeachment hiccup might seem to be a handicap - but only to someone who has never watched daytime TV. From Oprah to Rosie, America likes its talk-show hosts flawed and challenged. Personal woes? You got 'em. Troubled childhood? Check. Weight problem? You'll have fries with that! And the daytime-talk audience, heavily female and black, is the closest thing to your natural power base outside Chappaqua. You were already, in Toni Morrison's words, "America's first black President." Isn't America ready for its first black female ex-President...
...books on her show "when I feel they merit my heartfelt recommendation." There will be a last episode of sorts, devoted to Sula, a 1973 novel by Morrison, whose Nobel Prize probably means less in sales terms than the fact that she is the only author to have had Oprah anoint her books four times...
...there more to it? An Oprah producer recently admitted that the book-club shows garner lower ratings than regular shows. A former Oprah associate says Oprah is a serial sharer. Having shared her emotional life, her diet and her reading list, she is done with the book thing. "I think she just got bored," says an insider. "Tired of the cycle." Some think her feelings were genuinely injured when Jonathan Franzen, the best-selling author of The Corrections, put his hands in his pockets and shifted around in his loafers after being chosen as an Oprah author. Franzen wondered...
Well, publishers and booksellers still have hungry mouths to feed. In the book industry, where profits are narrow, Oprah's endorsement of any title meant a minimum of 500,000 additional sales, says Jim Milliot, the business editor at Publishers Weekly. For the publisher, that translates to at least an additional $5 million in revenue. Among ambitious writers she produced an Oprah effect. They knew that editors were always happy to be offered stories they knew Oprah liked, the ones centered on family drama or personal struggle by characters who are scarred but who endure. Oprah, with her largely female...
...mostly giving up the book club now, maybe it's just part of her larger slow-motion retirement. Last month Oprah's company Harpo announced she would leave her show after the 2005-06 season. She has played with the idea of quitting before, but wrapping up her book club may be her way of saying, Look, I can quit while I'm ahead. The cities of Chicago and New York launched book projects that attempted, as she did, to mobilize whole populations to read the same novel during the same month. Whole populations shrugged. What mere government has Oprah...