EARLIER this month, Oprah Winfrey looked into a camera and announced to the world that she was about to do the “most exciting thing I’ve ever done.”
Addressing an Internet audience, Ms. Winfrey said: “I am most proud of the fact that all of you have joined us in this global community to talk about what I believe is one of the most important subjects. And presented by one of the most important books of our times.”
Sitting across from her was the book’s author, a peaceful, goateed, somewhat mysterious man in a beige sweater named Eckhart Tolle. And if you haven’t heard of him, you haven’t spent much time in the self-help section of a bookstore in the last decade or so.
Mr. Tolle, 60, is the German-born spiritual speaker and author of “The Power of Now.” With a seemingly limitless pool of middle-class discontent to tap into — and a major push from Ms. Winfrey — he has become the most popular spiritual author in the nation. His books hold the top two spots on the New York Times best-seller list for paperback advice books. Since March 3, he has been host to a weekly online seminar series alongside Ms. Winfrey in support of his 2005 book, “A New Earth,” which is her latest book club selection and No. 1 on the list.
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Mr. Tolle is hardly the first writer to tap into the American longing for meaning and success.
Dale Carnegie made a bundle on “How to Win Friends and Influence People” during the Depression, and in the 1950s came Norman Vincent Peale’s best-selling “Power of Positive Thinking,” which shared Mr. Tolle’s aversion to negativity in life. A generation later, Ram Dass brought Buddhism to the masses, while recent self-help stars like Deepak Chopra have taught very Tollean messages — like embracing silence and living in the moment — on television and on tour.
Sara Nelson, the editor-in-chief of Publishers Weekly, said that Mr. Tolle was just part of a surging market which includes “The Secret,” by Rhonda Byrne and “Eat, Pray, Love,” by Elizabeth Gilbert, two other spiritually minded, mass-appeal best sellers backed by Ms. Winfrey.
“There’s always sort of an evolution of styles, but the books are really all the same,” Ms. Nelson said. “The message is how to be happier, how to live the life you want, how to be at peace, how to be a more successful human. The genre never goes away, it just slightly changes its form. But it’s doing amazingly well right now.”
Debra Matsumoto, the marketing manager for 10 Speed Press, the publisher in Berkeley, Calif., that prints New Age books under the Celestial Arts imprint, was even more blunt. “We have already published books with very similar messages, to be honest, and we will continue to do so,” she said “We might already have it. We just need to slap a cover on it and get it into Oprah’s hands.”
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