Book Publishers Banking On Usual Authors For Best-Sellers

As book publishers enter their big fall season, industry watchers are reserving judgment about a business recently plagued by a 12 percent drop in sales and a frightening rise in the number of unsold books that come bouncing back to publishers from bookstores.

Still, certain books are sure to fly off bookstore shelves. Leading the pack will be Kitty Kelley’s expose of the family so recently hit by tragedy, “The Royals.”

Kelley’s book, which just hit bookstore shelves and for which she received a reported $4.5 million advance, has a first printing of 1 million copies and was already in warehouses last month awaiting shipment when Diana, the princess of Wales, died in a violent car crash in Paris.

The largest first printing of the season is 1.5 million, for Stephen King’s original paperback, “Wizard and Glass.” It’s expected to hit the list the first weekend in November at No. 4.

The largest hardback first printing goes to best-seller list regular Danielle Steel and “The Ghost”; 1.2 million copies of the queen of formula fiction’s latest will land in bookstores on Nov. 5.