"It's a blow," said Lorraine Shanley, a partner in the consulting firm Market Partners International Inc., who earlier this week watched former Alaska governor and Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin promote her book on Ms. Winfrey’s show.

"Oprah Winfrey has supported many authors, and her book club has had a huge impact on America's reading habits," added Ms. Shanley. "She made Faulkner a best seller again. She also promoted an eclectic group of authors and created publishing successes for many commercial writers."

*****

Over the years, the book club has helped to bring the works of well-known writers such as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Cormac McCarthy to even broader audiences. The show has also introduced writers such as Edwidge Danticat to millions of readers.

"Other than a book being turned into a popular movie nothing brings readers to a book like Oprah," said Dawn Davis, editorial director of the Amistad imprint of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers. (News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.) "She brings a variety of readers to a variety of books. Her impact is immeasurable."

SIBA has developed the Okra Picks program in response to feedback from its bookseller members who wanted the opportunity to promote current and upcoming southern titles.

The SIBA Book Awards are designed to give longer legs to books that have already been published. SIBA’s Indie Stores and SIBA want to recognize those authors and thank them for the books that have added to the bottom line and to see those titles continue to grow in popularity and readership.

The Okra Picks are a whole new crop just hitting bookshelves that SIBA stores know their customers are going to love. The first dozen Okra Picks will be for the fall and will be displayed at the SIBA Trade Show in Greenville, SC, for the first time.

I spoke with Wanda Jewell, executive director of SIBA, and asked her how she'd cooked up this plan.

"I've had the title in mind for a long time," she said, "trying to figure out how I could use it." In fact, she's been cultivating Okra Picks since she first heard of Oprah's Book Club. "With a good name and good tag line, you can go far."

How does a book get on this new list?

"On December 27, 2008, Herman Rosenblat admitted to fictionalizing portions of his life story, including how he met his wife. Based on this admission, the publisher of his forthcoming memoir — Angel at the Fence — canceled plans to print his book."

This summer, David Wroblewski got the phone call every writer dreams about: Oprah Winfrey was on the line to chat about The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, his debut novel about a mute Wisconsin boy and his dog.

"We talked about the book and her dog Sophie — her 'once-in-a-lifetime' dog," Wroblewski tells USA TODAY. (Winfrey's beloved cocker spaniel died this year.) Friday, Winfrey announced Sawtelle as her latest book club pick. "I think this book is right up there with the greatest American novels ever written," declared Winfrey, who will host a live webcast with Wroblewski. Published June 10 with a first printing of 26,000 copies, the book has 1.25 million in print, thanks to an infusion of 945,000 Oprah's Book Club edition copies.

The book has topped the best-seller list on Amazon.com virtually from the moment Winfrey's choice was revealed, and it is the fastest-selling pick ever at Barnes & Noble Inc., according to a statement issued Thursday by Winfrey.

It's also a record shipment in a four-week span for any book by Penguin Group (USA), which has published such million sellers as Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love" and Ken Follett's Winfrey-endorsed "The Pillars of the Earth."

Known for his rural settings, biblical prose and affinity for bygone worlds, McCarthy said that while typically he doesn't know where the ideas for his books originate, he can trace "The Road" to a trip he took with his young son to El Paso, Texas, about four years ago. There, standing at the window of a hotel in the middle of the night, his son asleep nearby, he started to imagine what El Paso might look like 50 or 100 years in the future.

"I just had this image of these fires up on the hill ... and I thought a lot about my little boy," said McCarthy, whose previous books include "Blood Meridian" and "All the Pretty Horses." He said he wrote some of his thoughts down and didn't really think about it again until he was in Ireland a few years later and the novel came to him. "There was a book, and it was about that man and that little boy," he said.

*****

Having a child as an older man also had its effect on McCarthy. "It wrenches you up out of your nap and makes you look at things fresh," he said. "It forces the world on you, and I think it's a good thing." Winfrey was clearly fascinated with McCarthy's life, particularly the time when he was so poor that he once was tossed out of a $40-a month hotel because he couldn't pay his bill. He told a story of living in a "shack in Tennessee," having so little money that he could not afford to buy toothpaste when he ran out, only to discover a free sample of toothpaste in his mailbox. "Just when things were really, really bleak something would happen," he said.

Many authors jump or weep for joy upon receiving the word from Winfrey, publishing's swiftest and surest path to the top of best seller lists. But McCarthy's apparent indifference to having hundreds of thousands of new readers baffled and charmed the talk show host. "You are a different kind of author, let me tell you," she said, chuckling.

Ms. Lee, now 80, has published virtually nothing of significance since then except a 1983 book review. But now she has written something for publication. It is a letter for O, the Oprah Winfrey magazine, about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town, The Associated Press reported.

In the magazine's July "special summer reading issue," Ms. Lee recalls becoming a reader before she entered first grade. Older sisters and a brother read to her; her mother read her a story a day; her father read her newspaper articles. "Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggily at bedtime," Ms. Lee writes of the popular old-time children's character, right.

She notes that books were scarce in the 1930's in the town, Monroeville, where she still lives part time; and the scarcity of books in a town without movies and parks made them a special treasure. "Now," she writes, "75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books."

A Million Little Pieces publisher Doubleday, still smarting from its initial defense of Frey's best-selling book, is running an advertisement in today's USA TODAY apologizing to readers. And Riverhead, the publisher of Pieces sequel My Friend Leonard, is trying to distance itself from Frey. Riverhead is reconsidering a contract with Frey for future books and is referring inquiries about the authenticity of events in My Friend Leonard to the author.

*****

This month, Riverhead announced it had contracted with Frey for two more books, the first of which was to be a novel. Now, [Marilyn] Ducksworth says, "the ground has shifted. It's under discussion." Stephen Sheppard, a New York attorney who regularly deals with book contracts, says that all contracts with authors "contain provisions" and that publishers have "very extensive discretion in what they want to accept."

Meanwhile, Doubleday is attempting to "bear responsibility" for its culpability in the Million Little Pieces scandal. The ad in today's USA TODAY, which also will run in the Feb. 6 edition of Publishers Weekly, says that future book editions will have notes from the publisher and from Frey himself and that the jacket will indicate the change. Doubleday will not publish new copies until Frey submits his "author's note."

"He's currently working on it," Doubleday's David Drake says. "And we'd like to have it as soon as possible." Drake said Friday that the author's note would be published on the Random House website, randomhouse.com, as soon as Frey submits it. It had not been posted as of Sunday night.

"Although some of the facts have been questioned … that underlying message of the redemption of James Frey still resonates with me, and I know that it resonates with millions of other people who have read the book," Winfrey said in a surprise on-air call to CNN's "Larry King Live," on which Frey was a guest. "Whether car wheels rolled up on a curb...is irrelevant to me."

*****

"I am disappointed by this controversy," said Winfrey, who selected Frey's memoir for her readers' club in October. "I rely on the publishers to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work," Winfrey said in an apparent rebuke of how the book was marketed.

Frey, who is also a screenwriter, defended his work as a "truthful" but "subjective recollection of my life," and said the "essential truth" of the work should not be eroded by challenges to the veracity of some of the events he described. Frey said his embellishments, which he did not address directly, were far outweighed by the basic truth of his experiences.

Frey urged readers to look beyond the fabrications to what he said was an honest evocation of the anguish in an addict's life. But he acknowledged that the questions raised over his embellishments led to inevitable questions about the other more private events in a book set mainly during his time in rehab. "That's something I'm going to have to deal with," Frey said.