It's not just co-op: certain category and backlist books get free boosts, which leads to offline sales.

Last week the consumer media was abuzz about the New York Times report that Amazon.com is taking a page from bricks-and-mortar retailers and charging publishers for placement of certain books on its Web site.

While that practice d s raise quations about how paid-for product placement should be delineated, what has not been discussed in the current coverage is how online selling has boosted sales of certain titles even without online co-op dollars, and has led to more offline sales.

"The Internet has found a previously untapped market of potential book buyers," said McGraw-Hill's Claudia Riemer Boutote, director of marketing communications and publicity.

Her cases in point: McGraw-Hill's bestselling May 1998 release The Electronic Day Trader by Marc Friedfertig, George West and George Piecznik and the just-published How to Get Started in Electronic Day Trading by David S. Nassar, both of which are aimed at the new target audience of online investors.

Indeed, that particular audience is becoming large enough to rate its own book category. Experts estimate there are 5.8 million online brokerage accounts in the U.S., up from four million for the year before. Those numbers are expected to nearly triple to 14 million by 2001, when online investors are projected to account for 40%-50% of all retail trades.

Since the target audience is buying stocks online, it makes sense that many would order books there as well. While some physical bookstores took respectable stands on the $34.95 The Electronic Day Trader (Borders, for example, featured the book in an endcap promotion), online booksellers took larger than typical percentages of the initial 7500-copy print run. McGraw-Hill had no consumer advertising budget, no tour planned and, in most stores, didn't even get face-out display.

But thanks to its interest to online users, sales of the book on Amazon. com at times outpaced sales for brand authors like Stephen King and Richard North Patterson. While that demand reflects the techie skew of online book buyers, the book's appearance on Amazon.com's bestseller list helped propel the book onto the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek bestseller lists within two months of publication. Those bestseller confirmations led to reorders from traditional bookstores. There are now more than 120,000 copies of the book in print.

To take advantage of its success in this new category, McGraw-Hill quickly created a followup directed more to the novice investor, How to Get Started in Electronic Day Trading. This time traditional bookstores took larger upfront orders: How to Get Started has gotten itself started with a 25,000-copy first printing.

GO WEST: Divine "Ya-Ya" links.

But it's not just the obvious Internet-oriented books that are benefiting from the new online world. An Ivy Books reprint of Michael Lee West's novel Crazy Ladies, first published by Longstreet in in 1990, has enjoyed renewed sales online in the past half-year as a result of many online "linkages" to another bestseller with a similar setting.

West's debut novel, about several generations in the American South, is being compared to Rebecca Wells's current bestseller, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (HarperPerennial). The reader reviews and suggested reading lists that are common to online bookselling sites have considerably spiked sales. In fact, Crazy Ladies is now on Amazon's paperback bestseller list. "It's pretty unusual that a book makes a bestseller list so long after it's first published," said West's literary agent, Ellen Levine.

These online connections are not leading only to online sales, but also are providing a hook for Ballantine to revisit the book and pitch reorders at terra firma outlets. Ballantine's Leona Nevler, who edited the Ivy Books reprint, believes additional sales of Crazy Ladies are happening in the bricks-and-mortar world as well because "there are a lot of people who look up books online, then buy them later at a store."

The online activity is giving literary agent Levine some opportune leverage: she's about to submit West's two planned sequels to Crazy Ladies to option holder HarperCollins, which published West's second and third novels, American Pie and She Flew the Coop. Rumor has it that other publishers may now bid on the book, thanks in part to West's recently heightened profile. If HarperCollins d s get the sequels, it may want to acquire the still-hot Crazy Ladies to repackage along with them, perhaps in the trade paperback format that proved successful for Wells. "It's certainly a delicate moment," noted Levine.

While HarperCollins refused to comment on these negotiations, word has it that West's next book, a memoir/recipe compilation called Consuming Passions (HarperFlamingo, June), is beginning to generate excitement -- and perhaps expansion of promotion plans -- at the house. And the print catalogue copy picks up that valuable Wells connection: "This tantalizing read," it says, "will satisfy the cravings of West's ever-increasing fan base as well as everyone who loved Laurie Colwin, Fried Green Tomatoes and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood."