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Oprah Hands Cathie Black Another Hit

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by Jeff Bercovici
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Nov 08 2007 12:00am EDT

Oprah Hands Cathie Black Another Hit

A word of advice for first-time authors: Try to get yourself into some sort of business partnership with Oprah Winfrey. It worked for Hearst Magazines president Cathie Black, whose Basic Black has sold more than 25,000 copies since it went on sale Oct. 23.

And since that figure is from Nielsen BookScan, which only monitors about 75 percent of sales, it's safe to assume it has actually sold well upwards of 30,000 copies. That's an awful lot for a memoir by any executive not named Jack Welch.

It's not exactly a surprise, though. Random House upped its print order to 100,000 after learning that Black -- whose company publishes O, The Oprah Magazine through a joint venture with Winfrey's Harpo Productions -- had been booked for an hour-long episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show.

A spokeswoman for the book declined to comment on sales figures but noted that Basic Black debuted at No. 3 on the The New York Times's hardcover advice bestseller list, and No. 1 on The Wall Street Journal's business-books list.

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