Julia Roberts. Katherine Heigl. Meg Ryan. Brad Pitt. Gerard Butler. James Gandolfini. Billy Crystal. Sarah Jessica Parker. Kim Cattrall, Oprah Winfrey. For bestselling author Steven Carter, this is Hollywood's A-plus list. For the past two decades these celebrity superstars have been driving the sales of Carter's books, especially his classic New York Times bestseller "Men Who Can't Love".
Twenty years ago, "Men Who Can't Love" helped shape the genre of self-help with it's analysis of the relationship nightmare Carter described as "commitmentphobia." But bookstores were just the beginning for "Men Who Can’t Love." A career in show business was about to begin...
First came three appearances on Oprah (Carter had five by 1997). Sales quickly approached one million copies. Then there was the famous bookstore cameo in the film When Harry Met Sally, with Carter's book sitting right behind a frightened Billy Crystal trying to explain his relationship behavior to a distressed Meg Ryan. In 1997 "Men Who Can't Love" got another celebrity bump when Julia Roberts desperately read the book for almost ten full seconds, center-screen, in Gore Verbinski's film The Mexican. Brad Pitt had just left for Mexico without Roberts and James Gandolfini was about to intervene. Everything revolved around "Men Who Can't Love."
But the story doesn't end there. Next year will bring us the book's third, and possibly most memorable film role. In April, 2009 Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler will bring "Men Who Can't Love" back to the big screen in Heigl's next film, The Ugly Truth. No one is leaking details yet, but rumors are that the book will be a scene-stealer.
To date, almost four million copies of "Men Who Can't Love" have been sold around the globe, driven by movie star superpower. But Carter has the opportunity to double those sales in the next few years and he won't need Hollywood to help. Carter sums this up in just one word: Brazil.
Last year, another one of Carter's relationship classics, "What Smart Women Know" was released in Brazil and landed on the nation's top ten bestseller lists for a record-smashing 102 weeks. Sales are already approaching one million copies. This success was quickly followed by the release of the sequel, "Men Like Women Who Like Themselves", and the siblings sat together on Brazil's bestseller lists for almost six months. But next year, "Men Who Can’t Love" will land on bookstore shelves throughout Brazil, and the possibilities are incalculable. Carter's success with his Brazilian publisher Marcos Pereira, co-founder of GMT Sextante, was recently the subject of a Los Angeles Times feature story (for the full story, go to: http://www.latimes.com/features/books/la-et-self26-2008jul26,0,2920383.story ).
How much luck can one book have? And how long before that luck runs out? No one is wondering more than Steven Carter. Rumors swirl about writing projects with Sarah Jessica Parker and Candace Bushnell. Will Kim Cattrell be reading "Men Who Can't Love" in the 2010 sequel to Sex And The City? Will Mario Cantone be reading it? That could work. Right now, the only thing we know for sure is that "Men Who Can't Love" is still going strong after more than twenty years, and there is no end in sight.
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