Question: How has Oprah changed Americans’ reading habits?

Alane Salierno Mason: Again, I’m a biased commentator because she made a huge
difference for an author I really love, Andre Dubus III, when she selected “House of Sand
and Fog;” and that was a book that I really believed had a mass audience.

It went through a real rollercoaster on publication. It had been turned down by 22
publishers before I signed it up, which I didn’t know at that time, but I had a real struggle
in-house to get it signed up.

Then everything had started to go right. Booksellers loved it. The first reviews were
spectacular and three days after publication, the author’s father died, Andre Dubus Sr.,
also a wonderful writer, very highly regarded.

And all of the publicity tour -- at that time, the kind of physical publicity tour was the
most important thing in getting a book to potentially get on the bestseller list and Andre
had to cancel his and so the book kind of stopped in terms of its momentum.

Then some months later, it was nominated for the National Book Award and there was a
spike again, a lot of excitement and there were 80,000 copies provisionally ordered
waiting for the announcement of the National Book Award Winner. If he won, the
printing was all set to go and of course, he didn’t win. He was very happy to be at the
National Book Award dinner -- I don’t think he really cared whether he won or not. He
thought it was a privilege to be there, but his agents and I were devastated, totally
devastated he didn’t win because we knew that there were 80,000 copies not being
printed.

So the book came out in paperback. It started to do well. It started to get some reading
group attention, but still, I think it had sold maybe 100,000 copies or something in
paperback -- excellent, but nothing like the two and a half million copies that it sold after
Oprah had shown her very strong spotlight on it.

It is the case with many books where you know that there is a huge audience for that
book, but there has to be a very bright spotlight shown on it and often that doesn’t
happen. So, I’m very glad that she had that great big star-making spotlight to shine. It
meant that a lot of readers who were not necessarily Oprah watchers ended up finding out
about the book and reading it because it became number one on the paperback bestseller
list because other people were reading it.