GO EAST, YOUNG MAN
David Guterson's 1994 literary debut, Snow Falling on Cedars, is one of the great publishing stories of the '90s. Greeted with euphoric reviews, the haunting courtroom drama became a tremendous handselling favorite; the trade paperback spent 78 weeks on PW's charts, won both the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the American Booksellers Association's ABBY award, and ranked second on PW's 1996 year-end bestseller list. Following the April 20 publication of Guterson's second work, East of the Mountains (debuting at #5 on our fiction chart), Harcourt is hoping that lightning will strike twice in Washington State -- the setting for both works. Media and print coverage on local and national levels is supporting the author's current 15-city tour, with bookstore and offsite lectures/readings scheduled at each stop. Two weekends ago, Guterson was a featured author at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books; he also appeared at BEA, where he autographed his new novel and was a guest author at yesterday's Literary Luncheon. Publicity highlights include an April 25 CBS News Sunday Morning feature story, with NPR's All Things Considered and Diane Rehm still to come. Print coverage has already appeared in Time, People and USA Today; additional stories are slated for the Washington Post and the L.A. Times. Harcourt's first printing was 475,000, with a $500,000 promotional budget.

SELLING WITH SOUL
Professionally speaking, what might a person do to prepare for a career as a bestselling author? In Terry Goodkind's case, the Nebraska native studied drawing (at the Omaha School of Fine Arts) before going into his father's mail-order business; he subsequently labored as a carpenter, a hypnotherapist and a wildlife artist -- winding up, as surely anyone could have predicted, as one of the country's most popular writers of heroic fantasy. Today Goodkind's Soul of the Fire, the fifth volume in his Sword of Truth series, marks its second appearance on our fiction list (it's also on the charts at the New York Times, USA Today and Amazon.com). Published by Tor on April 13, the novel has 200,000 copies in print after two printings. Goodkind has just concluded a six-city tour for his latest epic, which is a Science Fiction Book Club main selection; he'll also be doing online publicity, said Tor assistant publicity manager Karen Lovell.

TWO AUTHORS OWE OPRAH
Once again, that canny talk-show host demonstrates her bookselling prowess -- in this case, without the titles' even being chosen for her on-air club. Shooting into our top trade paperback spot is The Seat of the Soul, which was published in a Fireside edition back in 1990. According to Fireside publicity director Sue Fleming, author Gary Zukav did several Oprah appearances last year: in November, her "Remembering the Spirit" segments spotlighted Seat of the Soul for an entire week, and Zukav was the sole guest for her Christmas Eve show. Oprah received so much e-mail for Zukav on her Web site that she devoted another full hour to him, on April 21, this time bringing in several of Zukav's correspondents, who told how Seat of the Soul had changed their lives. (It was, said Fleming, "a four-hankie appearance -- one of those made-in-heaven shows.") After 33 printings (two of which were prompted by the April 21 show), the book has 1,167,000 copies in print.

John Gray's How to Get What You Want and Want What You Have, which was published by HarperCollins on January 29, spent eight weeks on our nonfiction list, with its last appearance on March 29. Now, following a one-hour Oprah appearance on April 20, the title shoots back onto the list at #5. In all fairness, Roseanne evidently deserves part of the credit for Gray's resurgence; she, too, devoted a full hour to Gray -- the same day as his Oprah gig. Eight trips back to press have boosted the 210,000 first-print figure to just over 457,000.


With reporting by Dick Donahue.