Word: oprahization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ever. When Mitchard finally returned the call, she learned that her just published first novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, had been chosen as the initial recommendation of Oprah's Book Club, a new once-a-month feature on America's most popular syndicated talk show. Mitchard had no idea what this news meant: "I was so surprised that it really was Oprah, because there is not much of a tradition of writers on talk shows. Even as a writer I wouldn't want to hear myself talk about fiction for an hour...
Here is what the news meant: Mitchard's novel, an account of the sudden disappearance of a three-year-old child, sold about 100,000 copies before Oprah recommended it to her 15 million to 20 million daily viewers. Now The Deep End of the Ocean has become entrenched at the top of the New York Times fiction best-seller list, ahead of works by Sue Grafton, Danielle Steel, Mary Higgins Clark, Scott Turow and Stephen King. As she watched her novel sweep past such household names, Mitchard says, "I felt I was having an out-of-body experience...
...getting the right author in front of an appropriate niche audience: this one on Today or Good Morning America, that one, God and the producer Don Hewitt willing, on 60 Minutes. And maybe public TV's Charlie Rose would give a few minutes to the stray novelist. But now Oprah had altered the equation by pushing a first novel to her massive viewership...
...thoughts that Oprah's Book Club might simply be a novelty or a fluke vanished a month later, when the second recommendation was announced: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, a phantasmagoric account of a black man's search for his identity and past, first published in 1977. Bingo! Bonanza time all over again. The current paperback publisher, which released 360,000 copies of Song of Solomon between 1987 and Oprah's selection last month, immediately churned out 730,000 more. On the day that Morrison appeared on air with Oprah, Barnes & Noble sold 16,070 copies of Song...
...Oprah's third selection, announced last week, is Jane Hamilton's 1989 novel, The Book of Ruth, a stark, hardscrabble account of the life of a farm woman. The book has sold 8,000 copies in hardback and an additional 85,000 in paper, but the publishers are gearing up for what they hope is the inevitable demand: Houghton Mifflin has printed 50,000 new hardcovers, and Doubleday, which controls paperback rights, has ordered a new press...