Write Faster, Authors! Oprah’s Quitting In 2011

Her first show, 1986.Image via Wikipedia

Oprah quitting? I just watched her tearful announcement — watching “Oprah” is my occasional late afternoon treat — and thought, damn! I better hurry up and finish my memoir so I can still maybepossiblyonecanalwayshope, right? achieve the dream of many-to-most ambitious writers, certainly women who want other women to read and buy their books — a mention or interview on her show. As most of us know, and certainly anyone who writes for a living, a nod from Oprah means mega-sales, even for books and authors no one had ever heard of before.

The loss of her star-making machinery will hit authors hard; in a world where some 200,000 books are published each year, we fight elbows-out for every scrap of media attention.

Here’s an excerpt from a story I wrote in 2005 about the Oprah effect:

The phone call, on January 10, 2000, would forever change the life of Robert Morgan, a low-key English professor who had taught at Cornell for decades. A woman, who did not introduce herself, began chatting with him about his fifth book, “Gap Creek”, a tale narrated in the voice of an older Southern woman. “I’d like to include it in my book club,” she said. “That sounds nice,” murmured Morgan, assuming she was a Southern reader who found the theme familiar.

The woman finally disclosed her location – Chicago – and her identity, Oprah Winfrey.

“We decided it was a prank call,” Morgan recalls. “Then the second call came from her producer wanting us to fly back to Carolina to film a segment and to book my studio visit to Chicago. I asked my wife how many copies she thought this might sell – 20,000? We had 500,000 copies in bookstores within a week.”

Within a month, “Gap Creek” had sold 650,000 copies, winning unprecedented attention and financial success for Morgan, who had been writing poetry since college, teaching since his mid-20s and publishing well-reviewed books for a decade. At 55, he was already a well-established, well-paid author at midlife. “I already had a new Volvo,” he jokes. “I had money in the bank.”

After repaying their initial advance, most authors receive 10 percent of the cover price as their royalty – even at $2.50 per hardcover and $1.30 or more per paperback, mega-sales still mean a serious windfall for many writers.

“What it meant most was having all those new readers,” says Morgan. “I hadn’t begun to win a large audience of female readers and that gave me millions more. I got thousands of letters from all over the world, from Denmark, Germany, Australia, Canada. I still get hundreds today.”

For many authors chosen, these monumental sales are a comet’s flash, a brief, brilliant moment that illuminates  — or jumpstarts — a long and productive writing career. “I still feel the glow from it,” Morgan says today, “but I was old enough to know that this was just a great stroke of luck – being called up by NPR and CNN and CBS for interviews. It would have been harder if I were younger. You would think this was normal!”