It’s a Dry Season If Sex, Celebs Can’t Sell

We have in front of us the current national best-seller lists from Publishers Weekly, USA Today, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

Clearly, not all of the books launched with great thunderclaps of hype in recent months have dazzled book buyers. A few other titles have unexpectedly broken from the pack to become the sleeper hits of the fall.

Gone from the best-seller lists is the autobiography “Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me,” which has to be one of the bigger disappointments in Random House’s otherwise impressive season, considering the publisher paid Marlon Brando $5 million to write the book.

Then again, Peter Manso’s unauthorized “Brando: The Biography” (Hyperion) is nowhere to be found on the national lists. Brando’s lone promotional effort, a clownish “interview” he did with Larry King on CNN, did little to enhance the mystique that both books purported to explore.

The newsmagazines and newspapers were all over “Sex in America” (Little, Brown), a reputable study that found the country’s sexual life to be more traditional than many had believed, and Deborah Tannen’s “Talking From 9 to 5: How Women’s and Men’s Conversational Styles Affect Who Gets Heard, Who Gets Credit, and What Gets Done” (Morrow). However, all of those off-the-book-page stories may have exhausted interest in the books themselves, which have not caught on.

Nor has Christopher Andersen’s “Michael Jackson Unauthorized” (Simon & Schuster). Andersen, who has written shock-a-page bios of Madonna and Mick Jagger, this time had a subject for whom the public’s curiosity had been drained by the scandal-driven media when his new book was published weeks ago. Call it a major stiff of the season.

And what are we to make of the reception for books about two movie legends? Robert Lacey’s “Grace” (Putnam), a biography of Grace Kelly, was mined for awhile by the gossip columns and then faded. Lauren Bacall’s “Now” (Knopf), like Brando’s autobiography, is being “remaindered in place” by its publisher. Retailers were being urged to slash the price to as low as $11.50 in a promotion that will earn booksellers a special credit of $6 on each copy sold by Dec. 31.

Another show-biz title that has underperformed this fall despite the publisher’s expectation is Burt Reynolds’ “My Life” (Hyperion). Reynolds was like Jackson: After the supermarket-tabloid barrage, how much more did readers want to know--let alone pay for?

The top show-biz autobiographies to rise above the densely crowded field have been Reba McEntire’s “Reba: My Life” (Bantam) and Dolly Parton’s “Dolly” (HarperCollins). Other big hits are Tim Allen’s “Don’t Stand Too Close to a Naked Man” (Hyperion) and Paul Reiser’s “Couplehood” (Bantam).

When it comes to fall surprises, who would have thought that this Sunday’s New York Times best-seller list would show radio broadcaster Don Imus’ “God’s Other Son” one notch above thriller master Dean Koontz’s “Dark Rivers of the Heart”?

“God’s Other Son,” a comic novel written by the nationally syndicated Imus, was first published in 1981 and later reissued in paperback. However, after last month’s reissue of 30,000 hardcover copies, Simon & Schuster reports that it now has 250,000 in print.

Another surprise is Richard J. Hornstein and Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve,” a controversial examination of intelligence and race that has stirred crackling debate on America’s talk shows and opinion pages. Published by the Free Press, the book clearly has found a market beyond the policy wonks and academics who might have been its primary audience--its first printing in October was 50,000 copies. Copies in print today: 400,000.

Five weeks after publication, Pope John Paul II’s “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” (Knopf) continues to rank at the top or near the top of the national lists. It’s unclear whether total sales eventually will make the pontiff’s book a profitable venture for the publisher, which reportedly paid more than $6 million for the U.S. and Canadian rights. But the success so far has gone a long way to dispel the doubts of those who had less faith than Knopf.

* Paul D. Colford’s column is published Fridays.