Jan Karon's sixth installment in her bestselling The Mitford Years saga, A Common Life: The Wedding Story, lands in the #1 spot after just one week in the stores. It gets to boot another Viking bestseller—Stephen King— from that coveted place. Karon is in the midst of an eight-city author tour. With its strong Christian overtones, her latest is both a Main Selection of Crossings Book Club (a Bookspan specialty club serving the Christian market) as well as a featured alternate for the Literary Guild. First printing for the book was 520,000, and Viking already boasts 680,000 copies in print after six trips to press. The series centers on two characters, an Episcopal priest and his wife, a children's book illustrator, in a North Carolina town, and got its start back in 1994 with At Home in Mitford. That and book #2, A Light in the Window, were published by Lion, a small Christian publisher; first printings for these two books were a mere 5,000 each.
Topping the nonfiction hardcover chart is The Prayer of Jabez by Bruce W. Wilkinson. The book has been on the charts for two months, and a few weeks ago in this column we noted that it may become the bestselling hardcover adult book in 2001. Our prediction now seems even more on target—Multnomah has sold more than 3,638,000 copies in the first three and a half months of the year. Published just about a year ago, the book has more than 5,468,000 copies in print. The follow-up book in the BreakThrough series, Secrets of the Vine, also by Dr. Wilkinson, has already made a strong debut, hitting the CBA bestseller list at #13 in its first month of release; it has 850,000 copies in print. Time magazine ran a story on the Jabez phenomenon, noting that "after decades of willful ignorance, the publishing world has learned that titles by and for evangelical Christians can sell angelically." Considering that books for this market lead the general-interest charts and that the titles in the Left Behind series have performed astonishingly well, one can expect all publishers to aim more titles at this huge and growing constituency.
