It's Joel Osteen's time to shine on the bestseller pages. His first book,
Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential moves up to the #4 spot on PW's hardcover list in its fourth week on the chart. Warner Faith now boasts 700,000 copies in print; just a week earlier, the publisher was reporting half a million in print after nine trips to press. A hefty number, but Osteen's weekly congregation figure is even more impressive. He is pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, Tex., the largest church in America, with more than 25,000 people in attendance each weekend. Osteen did a seven-city tour and his events drew large crowds, always more than 1,000. "An Evening with Joel Osteen" sold out two evenings at Madison Square Garden October 21—22 and filled a 5,000-seat overflow auditorium. At Wal-Mart in Fayetteville, Ga., more than 1,200 books were sold in a few hours. Nielsen Media Research rated his weekly TV broadcast (it's on six national cable networks) the #1 inspirational program nationally, based on average viewers per market. If it follows in the path of pastor Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life (more than 20 million copies sold so far), Your Best Life Now is just beginning its bestseller life.
