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Jane Fonda's Workout Book, by Jane Fonda. The Extra-Terrestrial Story Book, by William Kotzwinkle. An Indecent Obsession, by Colleen McCullough. Different Seasons, by Stephen King.(Viking)ĩ. The Prodigal Daughter, by Jeffrey Archer.(Linden Press) 4.
Here are the lists of the best-selling books of 1982: HARDCOVER FICTION 1. The undisputed king nowadays is Jim Davis, whose last four Garfield books account for about one-third of the sales for the top 15 titles in trade paperback. Another perennial, ''The Joy of Sex,'' by Alex Comfort, just missed making the list by finishing 17th - 10 years after it first appeared on The Times hard-cover list and nine years after it first made the list in paperback.
ROBERT LUDLUM BOOKS RANKED MANUAL
Right behind it is Richard Nelson Bolles's ''What Color is Your Parachute?'' an iconoclastic manual for job hunters that began life as a self-published book a decade ago. Its performance is all the more remarkable in that the major chains accounted for only 17 percent of the book's sales. The trade paperback list includes a rare literary title, Evelyn Waugh's ''Brideshead Revisited,'' the beneficiary of a 13-hour television production early last year. Leo Buscaglia has one each on the hard-cover and trade paperback lists, and Danielle Steel has one each on the mass market and trade paperback lists. Robert Ludlum, Richard Simmons, James Michener, Colleen McCullough and Stephen King all have one book on the hard-cover list and another on the mass market paperback list. Rooney, the wry television and newspaper commentator, is the only author to have two hard-cover books on the list. Yet ''E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial,'' his novelization of the screenplay, is not only sixth on the mass paperback list but, as a picture book, 11th on the hard-cover list. His previous novels (including ''Christmas at Fontaine's'' and ''Doctor Rat'') received generally enthusiastic reviews for their originality and wit, but never came close to best sellerdom. William Kotzwinkle is an anomaly on the list. ''Eden Burning,'' by Belva Plain, and ''Celebrity,'' by the late Thomas Thompson, similarly ranked higher with independents than with the major chains. And yet, ''Spring Moon'' ranked only 30th among the chains and 12th on The Times fiction list - by virtue of its having ranked seventh among independents. Woodiwiss, 11th on the trade paperback list. They accounted for a whopping 59 percent of the sales of ''A Rose in Winter,'' by Kathleen E. The major book chains are clearly a powerful force in the industry. Prange's ''At Dawn We Slept'' - about nuclear perils, the Presidency and Pearl Harbor, respectively - fall into any of those categories. White's ''America in Search of Itself'' and the late Gordon W. Only Jonathan Schell's ''The Fate of the Earth,'' Theodore H. The nonfiction list is perhaps most notable for the relative absence of polemics, ideology, politics or controversy. '') The only first novelist to make the fiction list is Bette Bao Lord, author of ''Spring Moon,'' also published in 1981. What emerges from The Times fiction list is support for the publishing adage that the surest way to have a best seller is to have previously written a best seller -advice that sounds a little like that given to shipwrecked sailors about making a rabbit stew in order to stave off starvation. Irving's previous novel, ''The World According to Garp,'' ended up as number 20 in mass market. ''Hotel'' did not show up on the Times year-end paperback list, although Mr. The book fared less well in paperback in an address at the recent midwinter convention of the American Association of Publishers, Ron Busch, president of Pocket Books, said that his company had taken a $1 million write-off on the paperback edition of the book, for which it reportedly paid more than $2 million. The fiction list, as usual, was dominated by what are thought of as commercial novels, with only one so-called literary novel - John Irving's 13th-ranked ''The Hotel New Hampshire,'' published in 1981 -among the top 15 sellers. Several of the books on both hard-cover lists were published in 1981, but the sales are only for the calendar year 1982. The rankings for the hard-cover lists and the trade paperback list are based on computer-processed sales figures from 1,600 bookstores in every region of the United States the mass market list is based on computer-processed reports from bookstores and representative wholesalers with more than 40,000 outlets. Robert Ludlum's novel ''The Parsifal Mosaic'' was the biggest selling book in 1982, according to a New York Times survey, edging out the nonfiction best seller, ''Jane Fonda's Workout Book.'' Ranking first with independent bookstores and the major book chains, ''Parsifal'' sold almost twice as many copies as the fiction runnerup, ''North and South'' by John Jakes.