Consider it her parting gift to the book business; in the final season of her show, Oprah is bringing back the Book Club. Macmillan has alerted accounts that the announcement will be made on Sept. 17th, which is also the book’s on sale date (that’s the date for the edition with the official sticker; the book might have already been published, according to the bookseller Newtonville Books Community blog).

And, guess what literary darling is published by one of Macmillan’s companies? Freedom by Jonathan Franzen is published by FSG. Would Oprah be willing to revisit the author who dissed her in the past, causing her to revoke his invitation to appear on the show? It might make for an interesting segment on forgiveness.

The price fits; Oprah #64 is $28 and so is the Franzen. However, the fake ISBN indicates Oprah’s selection is a St. Martin’s Press title. The price is puzzling, though; it doesn’t fit any titles in St. Martin’s catalog. My guess is that they would be more likely to fudge the price than the ISBN. So, ignoring the price question, here are a couple of titles that might be possibilities:

Some Sing, Some Cry: A Novel Ntozake Shange, Ifa Bayeza Retail Price: $26.99 Hardcover: 576 pages Publisher: St. Martin’s Press – (2010-09-14) ISBN / EAN: 031219899X / 9780312198992

Ntozake Shange wrote the award-winning 1975 play,  for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, which Tyler Perry just finished directing as a film. Originally announced for Martin Luther King Day weekend release, it was just moved to November and is getting Oscar buzz. Perry and Oprah are friends and were co-executive producers of the movie Precious.

…………………………

A Secret Kept Tatiana de Rosnay Retail Price: $24.99 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: St. Martin’s Press – (2010-09-14) ISBN / EAN: 0312593317 / 9780312593315

The follow up to de Rosnay’s best-selling Sarah’s Key is, according to Kirkus, about “the crushing cost of keeping secrets,” a recurring theme on Oprah’s show.

Carolyn Kellogg examines whether a book’s popularity translates to box office success on the LA Times Jacket Copy blog, in response to Deadline‘s Mike Fleming’s post theorizing that the success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy bodes well for the English-language film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Kellogg says not so fast; the movie Eat Pray Love suggests differently. This enormous hit as a book translated into a merely “satisfactory” movie at the box office, despite a strong opening weekend. Kellogg concludes that this lack of success proves movies can never fulfill readers’ expectations (she doesn’t take into account the success of the Twilight series in both book and movie form, however).

Relativity Media, the company behind the film based on Nicholas Sparks’ forthcoming book, Safe Haven (Grand Central, 9/14) clearly disagrees. They are sinking money into promoting the book a full year before the movie’s release (perhaps nobody told them that Sparks is already a best-selling author).

But can movies rely on a book’s devoted fans? A look at the numbers shows that a film requires a much larger audience than a book to become a success. According to Gilbert’s web site, Eat, Pray, Love has 7 million copies in print after four years, making it a blockbuster. On the other hand, the movie has sold nearly 8 million tickets in just two and a half weeks, rendering it merely satisfactory. (Ticket sales arrived at by dividing the movie’s gross by average ticket price, as reported by TheNumbers.com)

Title recognition may help in marketing a movie based on a best-selling book, but the movie must connect with audiences on its own to succeed.

The more important question for the book business is the reverse; how a movie affects book sales. The tie-in of Eat, Pray, Love hit lists shortly after its release and quickly became the top-selling book in the country well before the movie arrived. In 2008, the tie-in edition of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road became a best seller even without the movie it tied in to, which ended up being delayed for over a year.

In both cases, it was not the quality of the movie that sent people to the book. We probably don’t have to look very deeply for motivation; buyers may simply respond to a familiar title reappearing front of store with a brand new jacket featuring Hollywood stars, regardless of whether they see the movie.

Note: The issue is different for comics and movies, as Robin Brenner explored in an earlier post on EarlyWord (Comics to Film: Who Boosts Whom?).

One of the titles on our Watch List for this week, Skippy Dies, arrives in the US after being a hit in Britain. It receives a warm welcome from the Washington Post, which says,

If killing your protagonist with more than 600 pages to go sounds audacious, it’s nothing compared with the literary feats Murray pulls off in this hilarious, moving and wise book. Recently named to the Man Booker Prize long list, Skippy Dies is an epic crafted around, of all things, a pack of 14-year-old boys.

It’s also received an A from Entertainment Weekly, (which only granted Franzen’s Great American Novel, Freedom an A-) and 3.5 of a possible 4 stars in the 9/13 issue of People.

Although it sounds like an unlikely premise for a movie, it is currently being adapted by Neil Jordan (The Crying Game), who is also planning to direct.

Skippy Dies: A Novel Paul Murray Retail Price: $28.00 Hardcover: 672 pages Publisher: Faber & Faber – (2010-08-31) ISBN / EAN: 0865479437 / 9780865479432

According to the cliché, you’ll know you’ve mastered a language when you begin dreaming in it. Deborah Fallows tells NPR’s All Things Considered that, despite years of study, Chinese Mandarin only entered her dreams in the form of “dictionary dreams,” where she desperately tried to find the words she needed.

In her book, Dreaming in Chinese, Fallows tells the story of moving to Shanghai to live with her husband. Despite how difficult it was to learn, it was the language that helped her begin to understand Chinese culture.

As a result of the interview, the book rose to #120 on Amazon sales rankings, from a lowly #44,298 yesterday.

The book wasn’t reviewed prepub, but it is reviewed in the September issue of O, The Oprah Magazine and in National Geographic Traveler.

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons In Life, Love, And Language Deborah Fallows Retail Price: $22.00 Hardcover: 208 pages Publisher: Walker & Company – (2010-08-31) ISBN / EAN: 0802779131 / 9780802779137

We can’t help but cringe at the title of a new book that criticizes current treatments for prostate cancer; Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers.

It’s been rising on Amazons sales rankings (currently at #207, from #28,021 yesterday), based on coverage in the New York Times Well Column on Monday. The book’s authors point out that only 1 man in 48 is saved by prostate surgery; the others would be better off if it was treated as a chronic condition.

The NYT columnist finds the book’s arguments persuasive, even though he happens to be one of the 48 who was saved by surgery, which uncovered the fact that his cancer was more advanced than his doctors had originally thought.

Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers: No More Unnecessary Biopsies, Radical Treatment or Loss of Sexual Potency Mark Scholz M.D., Ralph Blum Retail Price: $24.95 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Other Press – (2010-08-24) ISBN / EAN: 1590513428 / 9781590513422