POTTER RULES

Yes, Harry Potter is ahead of all other bestsellers on the national charts, and by leaps and bounds. On the fiction charts, J.K. Rowling's third Potter title, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is outselling the #1 PW hardcover adult novel, Black Notice, by about 10:1. And the first two in the Potter series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, are outselling the fiction leader by about 4:1; ...The Sorcerer's Stone, which has just been released in trade paper, is outselling PW's #1 trade paper bestseller, The Pilot's Wife, by about 6:1. Since PW has a monthly Children's Bestseller list (where Potter titles reign, and where the latest, which was just released, will surely top the list reflecting September's sales), the magazine d s not track these titles for its weekly lists. And few children's titles enjoy the sales velocity that would put them in direct competition for the top positions on the weekly national charts. Potter's numbers are phenomenal. According to Scholastic, ...Prisoner now boasts about 1.6 million copies in print after six trips to press. Total hardcovers in print for the three Potter books is about 5.1 million copies in the U.S.

MIXING POLITICS AND BESTSELLERS

Arizona senator John McCain is having a nice run on the national charts with his new book, Faith of My Fathers: A Family Memoir, written with Mark Salter. The Random House book, published Sept. 8, was launched with a 130,000-copy first printing and has gone back to press twice, each time for an additional 25,000 copies; total copies in print are 180,000. Not surprisingly, the author, who is also a Republican presidential candidate, has done lots of national media, including CBS This Morning, ABC's 20/20, NBC's Tonight Show with Jay Leno, CNN's Larry King Live (scheduled for this week) and more. Radio's Don Imus gave the author a considerable amount of air time recently, coming close at times to sounding as if he was going to endorse McCain's bid for the presidency. The senator's book chronicles his own life as well as the lives of his father and grandfather -- all three men made the rank of four-star Navy admirals, the only American family to achieve that distinction. It also chronicles McCain's years as a POW in Vietnam.

DOLLARS FROM HEAVEN

John Gray's latest relationship book -- this one about parenting -- shows that the author still has the golden touch: Children Are from Heaven boasts 300,000 copies in print after three trips to press, according to its publisher HarperCollins. Gray's first bestseller, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, is in the running for the bestselling hardcover of the '90s, with domestic sales to date of almost seven million.

VANZANT PAPER SUCCESS

Hardly a week has passed in the last 18 months that didn't feature a nonfiction hardcover bestseller on our list from the irrepressible Iyanla Vanzant. Now the bestselling author is hoping to achieve the same kind of tenure on the trade paper charts. The first of her books to make it on PW's trade paper list is In The Meantime, which had a 35-week run on our hardcover list, growing from a modest 52,000-copy first printing into a whopping success story, boasting 875,000 copies in print after more than two dozen trips back to press. The Fireside trade paper edition had a 300,000-copy first printing and has already gone back for 65,000 more. Through October and November, Vanzant will be on a 30-city concert tour for her In the Meantime CD, which features spoken performances by her along with music from a dozen artists. Vanzant will also be on Oprah every other Tuesday from September 14 through the end of October.

PARKER'S NEW PI HITS THE SPOT

It looks like Robert Parker's Spenser fans are more than willing to tag along with his new Boston-based (and female) PI Sunny Randle, whose sleuthing is featured in Family Honor. Putnam has 137,000 copies in print after two printings. Book publicity will also include some joint interviews with actress Helen Hunt, a Parker friend who approached him to create the character for her; the film version from Sony Pictures is scheduled for next year.