Behind the Bestsellers
Daisy Maryles -- 4/10/00
Toppling Grisham
Last year's top-selling author in both hardcover and mass market, John Grisham, (see bestseller feature package beginning on page 40) steps down from the top rung on this week's charts (he was #1 for eight weeks). Oprah's 32nd book club pick, Back Roads by Tawni O'Dell, takes the lead spot. The first novel has about 650,000 copies in print and Viking is thrilled that this is the house's third book to be chosen by Oprah. In fact, Oprah started her book club program back in September 1996 with a Viking first fiction hardcover, The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard. The book had 100,000 copies in print pre-Oprah, and wound up with about 995,000 hardcover copies. Exactly a year later, book club pick #8 was Viking's Songs in Ordinary Time by Mary McGarry Morris. The book had sales of about 21,000 in hardcover, and the Oprah announcement came right before the paperback release; copies in print in that edition reached 1.3 million.
In mass market, it's John Irving's The Cider House Rules in the #1 slot. Grisham's The Testament held that spot 12 times in the last 13 weeks, relinquishing it for one week when Certain Prey debuted. Cider House is benefiting from its Academy Award exposure; the movie tie-in edition has about 915,000 copies in print after 17 trips to press. The Morrow hardcover was originally published back in September 1985. It was the 12th bestselling fiction that year, with about 300,000 copies sold. According to the New York Daily News (April 3), Irving was spotted the morning after the Academy Awards ceremony having breakfast alone at the Four Seasons Hotel in L.A., with only his Oscar for company.
Buy Fidelity
It looks as though Hollywood has once again helped propel a book onto the bestseller charts--not that this one needed much help. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby's funny, astute debut novel, first hit these shores in 1995 as a Riverhead hardcover. This "on-the-edge tale of musical addiction" (PW's words) quickly became a cult favorite, and was named a New York Times Notable Book and "one of the top ten books of the year" by Entertainment Weekly. Riverhead's 1996 trade paper edition hit several regional bestseller lists, and film rights were snapped up by Disney/Buena Vista. Fast forward to March 31, 2000, when the celluloid version--starring John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Tim Robbins and Catherine Zeta-Jones--hit theaters nationwide, and promptly racked up the highest per-screen average of any movie in the top 10. ("Movies this wry and likable hardly ever get made," said Roger Ebert.) Riverhead recently published a movie tie-in edition (debuting today on our chart) and has kept the original trade paper edition in print. Numbers for both are impressive: after 14 trips to press, the non-movie edition has 225,000 copies in print, while the tie-in (sporting John Cusack's picture) has 100,000 copies after two trips back to press.
Tyndale Rules in CBA
In Christian fiction, almost all of the top-selling hardcover, paperback and children's books were released by Tyndale, and almost all were written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. In hardcover fiction cloth, the duo claimed the #1, #2 and #5 spots with Apollyon, Assassins and Left Behind. Word's The Visitation by Frank Peretti was #3 and Francine Rivers's Leota's Garden, also from Tyndale, came in at #4. The top four fiction paperbacks were Left Behind, Tribulation Force, Nicolae and Soul Harvest; #5 was The Postcard by Beverly Lewis from Bethany. In children's, six of the top 10 were titles in the Left Behind series aimed at younger readers. The top five nonfiction cloth books were: Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire and Fresh Faith, both by Jim Cymbala from Zondervan; Just like Jesus and When Christ Comes, both by Max Lucado (Word); and Multnomah's Lucado book, The Gift for All People. The top five paperback nonfiction bestsellers in 1999 were: The Power of a Praying Wife by Stormie Omartian (Harvest), I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris (Multnomah); Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman (Moody); The God Chasers by Tommy Tenney (Destiny Image); and The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel (Zondervan).
With reporting by Dick Donahue
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