Diane Sawyer: Book Sales Booster

There's a pattern emerging with people who talk to Diane Sawyer while they're shopping books: the books go to the top of the bestseller list.

Jaycee Dugard's first television interview garnered huge ratings for Sawyer, and it also hyped the release of her memoir "A Stolen Life."

Dugard's book sold 175,000 copies in the first day of the release alone. Dugard's publisher Simon & Schuster’s partly attributed the sales to the interview, saying in a statement, "The millions of people who read the excerpt in People magazine and watched Jaycee Dugard’s interview with Diane Sawyer want to hear more of her voice."

Exclusive interviews with Sawyer also launched book promotions for journalist Bob Woodward and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who dropped never-before-heard details on-air. His memoir shot to #1 on the Amazon best seller list the next morning after the interview aired, and spent eight weeks on the New York Times' best-seller list.

Bob's Woodward's book "Obama's Wars" also topped the Amazon and the New York Times Bestseller lists after an exclusive interview with Sawyer last September.

Now, the case could be made that these books would have hit #1 on the list even without Sawyer's help—after all, they were very high-profile tomes. Or maybe Sawyer's the new Oprah. Hey, it could be!