SEQUEL / ‘PHENOMENON’ AUTHORS : Singular Sensations : Richard Bach, Marabel Morgan and David R. Reuben each wrote one bestseller. Then, despite subsequent efforts, each slipped from the limelight.

It’s the dream of authors, the lifeblood of publishing and talk shows. It’s the “phenomenon” bestseller, a book whose huge success few predicted but many will gladly explain.

In a classic case, the book starts with a limited printing and less promotion and “just takes off,” moving up the charts, out into worldwide sales in the millions. And the little-known author makes the tours, takes the money and quickly tries to extend the “phenomenon.”

The word is phenomenon because whatever grabbed the public, it wasn’t a major new literary talent. It was an idea, so right for the time and the public temper that it could sell two, four, maybe even more sequels in rapid succession, describing a long coda of substantial but declining sales until the basic idea was finally used up.

To the general public, what sticks is the book that started it. They’ll ask, whatever happened to the guy who wrote that book about the sea gull? The “Total Woman”? The doctor who wrote “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex”?

For starters, that’s not all they wrote. . . .

At first, Richard Bach couldn’t sell anyone his story of a sea gull dedicated to flying “for the joy of flying” and not just transport. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” was short, precious and heavily inspiring. (“The gull sees farthest who flies highest.”) It was universally rejected.

The Long Beach minister’s son hadn’t written it so fast either. He started it at age 23 in 1959, when the beginning appeared to him, mystically, “in Cinerama on my wall,” and he “mulled it around” for eight years before the ending came to him. During that time, he did a lot of flying and a lot of writing, including three books about flying--flying airplanes.

Just when his agent advised him to drop this book about the bird, an editor at Macmillan who also flew planes and liked one of Bach’s other books wrote to him. The result: Macmillan (which had once turned “Jonathan” down) did a first printing of 7,500 in 1970, and “orders kept coming in, with no promotion, all word of mouth,” says Bach. “People were seeing things in ‘Jonathan’ that I had no idea were there.”

“Jonathan” has since sold an estimated 30 million copies in 3 dozen languages. What’s more, Bach had more books in him, and more bestsellers--from 1977’s “Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah” to 1984’s “The Bridge Across Forever” and 1988’s “One.” The last two sold a mere third of a million copies each--creditable but no “Jonathan.” Almost all, says Bach, “use flight as a method to reach inside my heart.”

He was also good at the TV shows and the tours. “I could talk about Jonathan,” he says. “He was a dear, dear friend who could teach me a lot.”

Unfortunately, he who flies highest also tempts fate. Bach, he says now, was “not anywhere near ready to live the consequences of the commercial success.” He made millions, couldn’t handle it and “did what many did, found a friend and said, ‘You handle this.’ ” By the end of the ‘70s, he’d lost a fortune, owed a fortune in taxes and declared bankruptcy.

But like Jonathan, he has prevailed. With the help of his second wife, Leslie, whom he married in 1981, he got “extremely organized” and is now not just solvent but also very comfortable. He lives near Seattle and flies a para-glider--”the closest thing to real flight I’ve found.”

Trying to strike a balance between “overexposure” and “keeping a hand in,” Bach only occasionally gives public talks now. As for writing, “every book seems my last, until along comes one I can’t run away from and I’m waking up at 5 a.m., writing notes.”

Meantime, his 25-year-old son--Jonathan (of course)--will take a turn. Morrow, Richard Bach’s current publisher, is about to come out with Jonathan’s “Above the Clouds,” a book about his relationship with his father.

Marabel Morgan’s “Total Woman” was a woman’s guide to attaining the good life by making her husband happy. Laced with Christian maxims, it seemed an unlikely bestseller in 1973, its very premise guaranteed to offend the emergent feminism of the day.

Her publisher, a religious house, gave it a first printing of 5,000--their idea of big. They ultimately sold more than 1 million copies, and paperback and foreign editions sold several million more.

Morgan, a Miami resident, was as amazed as her publisher. She was not a writer but a housewife, she says, who found herself “married six years, not communicating with (my) husband and fearful about the future. I’d been trying to change him, which didn’t work, when a light bulb went off: I was going to change myself.” This involved offering her husband heavy doses of appreciation and calculated “sizzle,” including a variety of sexy “costumes” to greet him at the door. (The most famous--Saran Wrap--was not her idea; someone had written her suggesting it.)

It worked, noticeably. Her women friends began asking “What happened to Charlie?” and urged her to share her secrets at living-room gatherings for $15 a person. When the wives of a dozen Miami Dolphin players came and later joked that her teachings led to their husbands’ Super Bowl victory, Morgan became famous.

The book “was just a condensation of my class,” she says, and was hardly anti-feminist. “I wasn’t even aware of a feminist movement. I was involved with the diaper pail.” Besides, she was talking to all women: “I think if you’re married, you want it to be happy, not miserable. And (the book) struck a nerve because we’re all the same: We want to be appreciated.”

Open and unassuming, she admits she found her sudden stardom “hard to handle. I had two little kids, my comfort zone was the kitchen--and I was sitting across from Barbara Walters. But my brain just kicked in, and I talked.” She interrupted her multi-city tours to go home on weekends, relieve her baby-sitting mother-in-law and do the wash.

The classes continued, at their peak involving 75 teachers, and Morgan continued to write. “Total Joy” (1976) also sold 1 million copies, offering more on marital life, her own and that of others. It was followed by the quieter “Total Woman Cookbook” (1980) and “The Electric Woman” (1985), which gave harried modern women advice on “how to create an atmosphere of uppers” in a life of ups and downs.

All wasn’t uppers for Morgan. She didn’t mind criticism, believing “controversy’s good.” But she did mind reporters churning up tales (untrue) of impending divorce and rejecting her denials.

Moreover, Morgan, now 55, has had some health problems, including thyroid cancer several years ago--a series of downers that have only set her philosophy “in concrete.” “If you feel low,” she says, “start cheerleading. The Bible says that as a man thinks in his heart, so is he. And I say a cheerleader never quits, regardless of the score.”

Her daughters are grown, one an attorney, the other working in public relations. Total Woman Inc. still runs seminars, Morgan still lectures on marriage and family relationships, and her belief in her approach is “stronger than ever.”

Other blockbuster authors, though equally unknown, were a lot less open and ingenuous in their celebrity. Once only opaque or evasive, they’re now, as the agent of one puts it, “unreachable.”

“Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” was David R. Reuben’s first book, but the California psychiatrist was not overwhelmed. He had a talent for public appearance--he was on the “Tonight Show” a dozen times--and he wrote four more pop health books in the decade after his 1969 hit. Then he essentially disappeared.

“Everything You Always Wanted to Know . . .” rode the crest of the sexual revolution, giving participants information about exactly what they were doing. It was apparently much-needed: The book sold 1.5 million in hardcover, 11 million in paperback, and world-wide sales approached 40 million. It even sold to the movies, or at least its title did, with Woody Allen supplying the rest.

Reuben stuck with sex for two more bestsellers (“Any Woman Can” and “How to Get More Out of Sex”). He then shifted to nutrition, which sold only slightly less well than sex (“The Save-Your-Life Diet” and “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Nutrition”). His last--and least--book was 1982’s “Mental Health First Aid Manual.”

For all the apparent medical expertise, Reuben was somewhat scant on both academic references and professional credentials and didn’t much welcome questions. According to the American Medical Assn., which he never joined, Reuben, now 59, had a medical degree, an internship and only one year of a psychiatric residency. He had no record of further training or specialty certification--only “self-designated specialties” in psychiatry, nutrition and clinical pharmacology.

For a while, he practiced in San Diego, changed his name (from Rubin to Reuben) just before his first book, then let his California license lapse in 1976.

By decade’s end, he’d had enough of both American practice and public life. He’d offended feminists by his vision of the post-menopausal female as old, unattractive, “no longer a functional woman.” Gays protested what seemed a negative stance on homosexuality. The National Academy of Sciences sued him for disparaging comments on its Food and Nutrition Board.

So he moved to Costa Rica--for “peace,” he wrote. In the last decade, he has written mostly, and infrequently, for the Reader’s Digest--on the dangers of smoking and suntans. The Digest says he doesn’t want to be interviewed or included in any article. But that may change: His New York agent says he’s working up a new book--subject unknown.