from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Oprah the Book Fairy: The Astounding Success of the Oprah Book Club
You can bet publisher’s are going to miss Oprah as much as her viewers when her long-running show wraps up next week. Nielsen has just released an accounting of the impact of Oprah’s Book Club on the sales of the books chosen.
In the last ten years she has sold over 22 million copies of books bearing her Book Club branding.
Her full impact on book sales is hard to quantify but there are some amazing concrete numbers regarding how many books bearing the Oprah Book Club selection imprint have sold. For example, the Oprah trade paperback edition of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey sold 2.7 million copies and her edition of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road sold 1.4 million copies.
