How the 'Oprah Effect' changed publishing

America's most popular reader, Oprah Winfrey, says she is not done talking about the books she loves.

As The Oprah Winfrey Show ends its 25-year run on Wednesday, its host says Oprah's Book Club will follow her to her fledgling cable network, OWN. Without offering details, she vows, "I'm going to try to develop a show for books and authors."

Book discussions never attracted her best ratings, but that "doesn't matter," Winfrey tells USA TODAY. "Some things you do because it is necessary. We've done OK with them. … We found the more I could connect the author and the book to the audience, the better the numbers would be."

And in the book world, her numbers are beyond compare.

It began Sept. 17, 1996, with Winfrey's announcement that The Deep End of the Ocean, Jacquelyn Mitchard's novel about the kidnapping of a child, was the club's first selection.

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Fordham University marketing professor Al Greco estimates that sales of "Oprah editions" of the 70 titles in her book club total about 55 million copies, "and there wasn't a James Patterson or a John Grisham among them."

Winfrey's critics cringed after some touchy-feely selections and after discussions that were more about the readers than the books they read. But no one doubted her power as the ultimate in word-of-mouth recommendations. It's called the Oprah Effect. For example:

•In 2004, Leo Tolstoy's tragic 19th-century love story, Anna Karenina, hit No. 1 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list after Winfrey embraced it.

•In 2009, she rocketed Say You're Not One of Them, Uwem Akpan's short-story collection about Africa, to No. 9 on USA TODAY's list. (His publisher reports 77,000 copies in print before Winfrey; 780,000 copies reprinted with the "O" logo on the cover.)

"She made book discussions interesting, educational and entertaining," Greco says. "Literature professors can be interesting and educational, but are they entertaining?"

Little, Brown publisher Michael Pietsch, who had four books that became Oprah's Book Club selections, including Akpan's, says Winfrey "didn't originate the idea of book clubs, but more than anyone, she has spread the idea of reading a book as a shared community."

‘Blessing from book gods’

He challenges the idea that there's such a thing as an Oprah kind of book: "She's a woman reader, and it's mostly women readers who responded to her selections. But she's open to all kinds of reading pleasures, from Toni Morrison to Jonathan Franzen."

Beyond her book club, Winfrey's show helped make celebrities and best sellers out of Mehmet Oz, Deepak Chopra, Phil McGraw, Suze Orman and others.

An author's appearance on Winfrey's show "was a blessing from the book gods," says book publicist Patricia Eisemann. But unless it was the book club, it didn't guarantee big sales. Eisemann recalls having an author (she declines to name) on the show for 20 minutes, "but she was followed by a sports reporter with a book about his dying college professor, and he won the hearts of the audience. The needle on our book did not move. Morrie (by Mitch Albom) became publishing history."

The book club repeatedly made history. Winfrey got stores to order more than 500,000 copies of a book — not knowing its title, only that it was her next selection. Morrison, who was chosen four times, got a bigger sales boost from Winfrey than from winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

"Oprah invigorated the concept of book clubs," says Carol Fitzgerald, founder of TheBookReportNetwork.com. But with fewer selections (18 in 1999 and 2000; only three last year), she lost momentum, then picked books by Faulkner and Dickens that "people read like homework but did not love," Fitzgerald says.

At the club's peak, "Oprah gave America an excuse to talk about books every couple of months," says David Kipen, former director of literature for the National Endowment for the Arts.

"More Americans talk about books anyway than folks might think, with or without her," he says. "But she served a useful purpose in the same way that the myth of summer reading does: reminding the forgetful that reading exists, which greatly expands the number of people us bookish types can talk to."

Most important, Kipen says: "She paid attention to fiction, which interviewers hardly ever do. She didn't exactly make interviewing novelists look easy, but she made it look possible, which is more than C-SPAN or most NPR public affairs shows ever do."

She expanded "the idea of what it's possible to do on TV — and not just public TV," says Kathleen Rooney, a DePaul University English professor who wrote Reading With Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (2008). "Oprah showed how media — books and TV — that for years had been seen as antithetical could actually function together harmoniously."

Harmony didn't always prevail, but book club controversies made for good TV and thrust authors into the news.

In 2001, after Winfrey picked The Corrections, a literary family saga, its author, Franzen, questioned putting the book club's "logo of corporate ownership" on his cover and warned that it "was a hard book for that audience."

Franzen's televised dinner was canceled, but the logo stayed. He apologized, and when his novel won the National Book Award, he thanked Winfrey for her "enthusiasm."

Franzen apologized again last year when he appeared on Winfrey's show after she chose his latest novel, Freedom. Both novels then hit No. 1 on USA TODAY's list.

In 2002, Winfrey suspended the club, saying she could not keep up with the reading. A year later, it was back with a new format: Authors no longer had to appear on TV. In fact, they didn't have to be alive.

John Steinbeck (East of Eden) and Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) joined the club.

In 2005, Winfrey switched directions again, selecting A Million Little Pieces, James Frey's memoir about addiction and recovery. But key parts of it turned out to be exaggerated or fabricated. That led to Winfrey's on-air excoriation of Frey.

Last week, Frey returned to Winfrey's couch, saying, "I got ambushed" the last time, but "in some ways I deserved it." Frey's new novel, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, isn't part of Oprah's Book Club, but it got a boost from his TV appearance, rising from No. 10,286 on Amazon's sales rankings to No. 253.

In December, Winfrey chose two Charles Dickens novels, Great Expectations and ATale of Two Cities, confessing that she had not read them yet, or any Dickens. The two books, in one volume, peaked at No. 52 on USA TODAY's list.

That was a mistake, she now says. "I would have to say Dickens let me down. Dickens let me down! Of all the people! We were being sentimental about it. We misread the pulse and I had never read it, so I had no enthusiasm."

She continues to attract the scrutiny of scholars and literary critics.

During the Franzen-Winfrey feud, Scott Stossel, an editor at The Atlantic, wrote about why he found her book discussions so cloying: "There is something so relentlessly therapeutic, so consciously self-improving about the book club that it seems antithetical to discussions of serious literature. Literature should disturb the mind and derange the senses; it can be palliative, but it is not meant to be the easy, soothing one that Oprah would make it."

‘A writer’s groupie’

But Marilyn Johnson, who wrote the first major article on Winfrey as an evangelist for books in Life magazine in 1997, now says: "You have to understand that Oprah is in awe of the writers she loves, in the same way that people revere her. She's like a writer's groupie."

Mostly, she has been a friend to other readers, says Nora Rawlinson, publisher of EarlyWord, a digital newsletter for librarians. Citing surveys showing friends' recommendations are the top reason people buy a book, Rawlinson says: "Oprah is the ultimate friend to her audience. It will be sad to see that go. I hope she reinvents it on OWN."

Literary agent Lawrence Kirschbaum, former CEO of Warner Books, says her move could be a boon for books: "She won't have just one show, but an entire network. Sure, her audience will be smaller, but it will be more intense and passionate about books."

Kipen thinks "it's kind of odd that she used to make time for books when she had only one hour a day, five days a week. Now that she's got 24 hours a day, seven days a week, what happened to all the books?"

As Winfrey might say, stay tuned.

Contributing: Ann Oldenburg