Oprah Wields Power As A Book Promoter

Oprah is running the world!

Well, maybe not the whole world, but the best-seller list is certainly her domain.

As anyone who’s even thought of entering a bookstore this month knows, Oprah has a new book out. Actually, Oprah’s trainer, Bob Greene, has a new book out, but Oprah wrote the introduction and shares coauthor status. Plus, just so you don’t miss it, she’s on the book’s cover. With a boost like that - plus national magazine cover stories - “Make the Connection” immediately shot to the top of the nonfiction and how-to best-seller lists across the country, just as “In the Kitchen With Rosie” did a couple years ago. (One thing for Oprah, she does take care of her staff.) Still on that list is “Simple Abundance,” a book Oprah liked. Er, loved. Well, helped make a best-seller.

But this week Oprah is not just top of the how-to charts, she’s controlling the fiction list, too. Jacquelyn Mitchard’s “The Deep End of the Ocean” (Viking, $23.95) knocked Tom Clancy out of first place last week, an unbelievable leap for a first novel published in early summer.

But this first novel not only has been recommended by Oprah - it’s also become required reading for Oprah watchers. On Sept. 17, Oprah announced to her national audience that she was starting a book club and they had until mid-October to read this weeper about an abducted child.

As we’ve seen many times before, when Oprah says buy, her listeners do. Bookstores immediately noticed an increase in sales. More than half the copies of “Ocean” that Borders has sold this year were sold in the week after the episode aired.

Patti Kelly, a Viking publicist, reports that “Ocean,” which had a more than respectable 100,000 copies in print before the show, is now on its 14th printing. By the end of the week, 640,000 copies were in print and stores were still running short.

Needless to say, publishers are thrilled. Although Oprah has been widely credited for making great successes of such nonfiction titles as “A Return to Love,” “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” and “Simple Abundance,” her track record on fiction, aside from “The Bridges of Madison County,” has been less impressive. In large part that’s because fiction hasn’t been as easy to work into the talk show format as self-help books.

Oprah’s Book Club - P.O. Box 617640, Chicago 60661 for those who want to be chosen to discuss this book - presumably will get more fiction on the air. (The next selection cannot be confirmed, says an Oprah spokeswoman. One rumor says Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” is on the agenda.) Even if it’s not totally devoted to fiction, I have to admire Oprah’s push for reading.

As she told her listeners in announcing the book club: “One of the greatest pleasures I have right now in life is to be reading a really good book and to know I have a really, really good book after that to read.”

Indeed.