A Better Balance

We miscommunicated last week when we noted that Oprah pick #44, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, was "one of the poorest performing picks in the Oprah Collection." What we were referring to was how it performed on PW's charts and how rapidly it dropped to #14 on last week's list. The folks at Vintage pointed out that the book is selling well and, in fact, is doing better than some of the other Vintage/Anchor titles that had been selected. Prior to the on-air discussion of the book, sales were already over 542,000 copies (the house printed about 700,000 in anticipation of increased sales; before Oprah, there were about 65,000 copies in print). According to v-p/director of publicity Russell Perreault, sales doubled and tripled at the national accounts, and the book reappeared on many independent lists. On PW's list this week, it jumped from #14 to #5. Oprah pick #45, Scribner's Fall on Your Knees by Anne-Marie MacDonald, is also having a good run, hitting the list in the #2 slot (the very strong #1 is another S&S trade paperback, the movie tie-in edition of A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar).

With reporting by Dick Donahue