Behind the Bestsellers
Daisy Maryles -- 4/24/00
The Quick and the Sick?
Two Bantam hardcovers that share an April 4 pub date are each marking their second appearance on our fiction list--Amanda Quick's Wicked Widow and Michael Palmer's The Patient. Quick, as many of her fans know, is a pseudonym for Jayne Ann Krentz, the award-winning author of many contemporary romances. Between them the "two" women have a total of 24 New York Times bestsellers to "their" credit, with nearly 25 million copies in print. Wicked Widow, Quick's 16th historical, has already gone back to press and now has an in-print total of 170,880. In addition to its PW standing, the novel has already hit both the USA Today and NYT bestseller lists (#33 and #11, respectively).
All of Michael Palmer's eight previous bestselling medical suspense thrillers--which total more than seven million copies in print--are chockablock with authentic details that hark back to his years as an ER doctor. Judging from its fast start out of the gate, The Patient is no exception. With more than 150,000 copies in print after two printings, Palmer's latest is performing especially well at the chains, Ingram and the clubs. And Hollywood has come calling again (his Extreme Measures was made into a 1994 movie starring Hugh Grant): Patient was optioned by Wyle/Katz Productions--which seems appropriate, as that company was formed by Noah Wyle, who plays Dr. Carter on TV's ER.
Cybill Action
Also marking its second week on our lists--nonfiction, in this case--is a memoir with which the title mavens clearly had a great time: Cybill Disobedience: How I Survived Beauty Pageants, Elvis, Sex, Bruce Willis, Lies, Marriage, Motherhood, Hollywood and the Irrepressible Urge to Say What I Think was published by HarperCollins on April 5 (copies in print after two printings: 80,000). "Irrepressible" is just one of the many vivid adjectives that suits veteran performer Cybill Shepherd, whose many-faceted career covers film (who can forget her in The Last Picture Show?) and television (Moonlighting, Cybill), and whose many personal "leading men" include Elvis, director Peter Bogdanovich and author Larry McMurtry. Shepherd now adds "author" to her resume (Disobedience was written with Aimee Lee Ball). HC's extensive campaign began a month before pub date and continues well into next month; the schedule of Shepherd's numerous appearances and extensive press coverage reads like a publicity director's Baedeker.
Psycho-Pseller
Nearly a decade after Vintage's 1991 publication of American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis's controversial satire of '80s greed and inconspicuous consumption has once again captured the spotlight with the April 14 release of the movie adaptation. (It finished seventh for that weekend, with the second highest per-screen average of the top 10.) Several rave reviews (in the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Time and Rolling Stone), plus Ellis's appearance on Charlie Rose and an NYT Style section feature on American Psycho's history have landed the novel in the #11 spot on our trade paper list. In an interesting marketing partnership, Vintage and Lion's Gate Films joined with Pseudo.com to develop Internet promotion for the book and movie through a live Webcast on April 13, which included a discussion with Ellis and members of the film's cast. With a boost from the film, the media and Vintage's recent publication of Glamorama, Ellis's latest foray into the world of fame and fashion, book sales are slicing through expected figures. In fact, American Psycho has even begun to outsell Less Than Zero, the novel that, for many, defined a generation. After 35 printings, Vintage has more than 500,000 copies of American Psycho in print, with another 60,000 books coming in the next few weeks.
We Forgot the Plume!
In the trade paperback section of our April 10 feature on 1999 bestsellers, we inadvertently omitted The Carbohydrate Addict's Lifespan Program by Dr. Richard F. Heller and Dr. Rachael F. Heller. Since Plume shipped an impressive 1,574,956 copies of this title last year (its original Plume pub date was January 1998), it clearly belongs in the "1 Million+" segment--in the third spot, to be precise. Our apologies to all concerned.
With reporting by Dick Donahue.
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