Oprah Winfrey
On September 18th of this year Oprah Winfrey will make the first selection of 2009 for the Oprah Winfrey Book Club. Oprah let the world know through a Twitter at the end of August that the game was on. The Oprah Winfrey Book Club Selection has become the most important “book award” in terms of book sales in the world, even eclipsing the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Oprah Winfrey began the book club in 1996, and for publishers it has been a godsend. The book club hasn’t been without controversy including the James Frey “fictionalized autobiography”
What does being selected mean to an unknown author? It is the equivalent of Apollo Creed choosing to fight Rocky on July 4th 1976. In terms of sales, it means more than wining the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the Nobel Prize together in the same year. Oprah Winfrey has turned her fame and influence into the most important soap box to promote books in the world.
In a strange twist, last years two selectees to the book club, Eckhart Tolle and David Wroblewski have both, in separate interviews, mentioned they hope a new underground novel, Cactus Land, will win the selection. Cactus Land, an apocalyptic novel with a bizarre, some say prophetic view of a dreadful future, has become an underground rage. What is very strange is the two authors have both not only recommended it, but said they hoped and believed it will become 2009’s first Oprah Winfrey Book Club Selection. Never before have past winners weighed in on future selections, not to mention two from the same year both pulling for the same book.
We will know in one week. It will be interesting to see Oprah Winfrey’s reaction to her past winner’s comments. As always, the Oprah Winfrey Book Club Selection makes for good reading.
Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/
