A Push From Oprah Goes a Long Way

One of the surer shots in the otherwise iffy business of publishing is the power of Oprah Winfrey to help move lots and lots of books from shelves to cash registers. Authors’ appearances on her popular daytime TV show, watched by nearly 9 million people a day (and growing), have turned even sleepy titles into bestsellers.

Would Sarah Ban Breathnach’s “Simple Abundance” (Warner), an advice book for women, be in its 30th week as a national bestseller without the Oprah touch? Would Laura Day’s “Practical Intuition” (Villard) be climbing so quickly without the author’s visit to the show earlier this month?

Now, Winfrey, a serious reader and author herself, is putting her powerful magic behind fiction, and publishing executives are panting at the prospect that one of their books will receive her blessing.

It began with “The Deep End of the Ocean.”

Published by Viking in mid-summer, Jacquelyn Mitchard’s novel about the disappearance of a young boy and its impact on his family had been optioned for the movies by Michelle Pfeiffer and earned reviews solid enough to run up a total of 100,000 copies in print.

Then came Oprah. On Sept. 17, she announced on TV the start-up of a monthly “book club,” which would convene on her show in mid-October with a discussion of “The Deep End of the Ocean.”

Alerted by Winfrey’s office, Viking had printed many more books. That demand grew during the weeks before the book-club broadcast on Oct. 18, putting the novel on the New York Times’ national bestseller list for the first time. And interest has continued since Winfrey presented the prerecorded dinner discussion of the book involving herself, Mitchard and members of the TV audience and live chat in the studio with the author.

The show propelled the book to No. 1 on the Times’ list, while multiplying the number of copies in print from 100,000 to 750,000, a huge payday for the author and Viking.

On the same day Winfrey was praising “The Deep End of the Ocean,” she announced that her book club would next discuss--in mid-November--Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon.”

Published in 1977 as a Knopf hardcover, Morrison’s classic novel about Macon (Milkman) Dead and the black experience won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was reissued the next year by Signet in a mass-market paperback edition that went on to rack up a total printing of 1 million copies. Plume, a sister company to Signet, brought out an oversize paperback edition in 1987 that has had printings of 360,000 copies.

After Winfrey told Plume and her TV audience that “Song of Solomon” would be featured in November, the publisher cranked out an additional 580,000 copies.

“I know it sounds unreal, but it is real,” Lisa Johnson, Plume’s director of publicity, said this week. “On the weekend after Oprah made the announcement, I saw three people in the subway reading the book.”

Recent sales of the $11.95 Plume paperback will put the book back on the Times’ bestseller list Sunday, at No. 5. Meanwhile, Knopf, which retains hardcover rights to the book, now part of its Everyman’s Library series, rushed out an additional 47,000 copies of the $20 hardback and has 40,000 more ready to ship.

“I think it’s a phenomenon,” Phyllis E. Grann, chairman of the Putnam Berkley Group, said of the book club. “And, oh please, God, I hope she picks one of mine.”

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Fade to Sassy: Eight years after Sassy came on the scene, shaking up the publishing business by presenting frank talk to teenage girls about such thorny issues as date rape and incest, the magazine is shutting down.

Los Angeles-based Petersen Publishing Co., acquired last month by Willis Stein & Partners and a group of investors led by former Hearst Magazines President D. Claeys Bahrenburg, told New York advertising agencies early this week that the December issue will be the last. Wednesday, Petersen announced that Sassy’s circulation will be merged into ‘Teen, also owned by the company. A Sassy section will appear in ‘Teen beginning in March.

Sassy, whose monthly circulation of 706,000 in the first half of this year was down 8.6% over the same period in 1995, had been struggling when Petersen unexpectedly bought the magazine from Lang Communications in 1994. By adding Sassy’s audience to ‘Teen, Petersen said the latter expects to guarantee advertisers a circulation of 1.7 million.

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Afterwords: Bound to happen: On Wednesday, Villard Books will put on sale “Champions! The Saga of the 1996 New York Yankees,” by New York-area sports writers Bob Klapisch (the Record) and John Harper (Daily News).

* Paul D. Colford is a columnist for Newsday. His column is published Thursdays.