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A New Twist -- and Test -- for the 'Oprah Effect'
Judy Quinn -- 9/15/97
Oprah Winfrey, the country's most visible handseller, is back doing her daily show this week -- and deciding by today whether she'll do any shows beyond this year. It's a decision that makes publishers tremble, but in the short term there's plenty of good news: her discussion of Mary McGarry Morris's Songs in Ordinary Time, the last selection of her Book Club, announced last June, is expected to air later this month or early next month, and will no doubt spark extra sales of Morris's book; and the next Book Club selection, as per Winfrey's routine, will be announced at the end of the show.
But here's more Oprah book-related news: A November 2 air date has now been confirmed for the ABC-TV movie adaptation of Connie May Fowler's Before Women Had Wings, starring Winfrey and Ellen Barkin, which is the first of Winfrey's six-picture deal with ABC to for her Harpo Films to produce made-for-TV movies under a new "Oprah Winfrey Presents" banner.

Ballantine, which released the trade paperback edition of the book in May and has seen sales of over 100,000, is issuing a new edition of the book to tie into the series. The book is also one of the first seven selections of its new Ballantine Reader's Circle series (the others are Sarah Smith's The Knowledge of Water, Donna Woolfolk Cross's Pope Joan, Jill McCorkle's Carolina Moon, Kristin Hunter Lattany's Kinfolks, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow and Louis Begley's About Schmidt), to be available in stores by mid-September. Each selection features a new spin on reader's guide books: discussions guides and author interviews are bound into the back of the book. Anchor also plans to do this reader's guide innovation and will start with its reissue of Margaret Atwood's backlist that begins this winter.
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