It looks like the Oprah effect has spread to the UK: the extraordinary success of a ‘book club’ on a 5pm daytime TV show has shaken up the publishing world.

When the Richard & Judy show featured Joseph O'Connor’s The Star of the Sea, it hit number one on the bestseller lists, and has now been on the list for 22 weeks. Several other books featured on the show have seen sales rise by 1,000 per cent. And a survey by Publishing News suggests that 1.8 million people have bought a book as a result of a recommendation on Richard & Judy.

The Independent newspaper has an interesting report on the phenomenal power of this book club:

Of the 10 titles featured in the first series, nearly all took off. Nigel Slater's Toast more than doubled sales. David Nicholls' Starter For Ten experienced an 871 per cent hike.

The series culminated with the debut of the Richard & Judy Best Read of the Year prize at the British Book Awards, voted by viewers. The winner, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, has now sold well over a million copies.

Sales success is not automatic: Monica Ali’s critically acclaimed Brick Lane registered barely a blip. (In this writer’s opinion, that’s because it’s virtually unreadable.)

The producer of Richard & Judy, Amanda Ross, thinks we could be seeing a paradigm shift in the way publishers pitch their books to the public:

… the club is smudging the boundaries between literary and commercial fiction ‘There are influential people in the publishing industry who understand what's happening,’ says Ross. ‘Take Gail Rebuck of Random House, who has an incredibly wide and varied selection of authors, from esoteric to 'gold block'. She told me that R&J had awakened them to the fact that you can have a massive hit with a history book.’

That’s something we already know in New Zealand, thanks to Michael King’s Penguin History. So how long will it be before our own Good Morning starts a book club ..?

NB: If you’re interested, this is the Richard & Judy summer reading list. Click on a title if you want to order it:

• The Mermaid and the Drunks by Ben Richards. ‘A politically charged novel set in Chile from Richards, who has written four London-based novels, and contributed to the New Puritans anthology. The title comes from a poem by Pablo Neruda.’

• Liars and Saints by Maile Meloy. ‘A debut novel by American Meloy, who draws the Californian saga of four generations of the Santerre family, from the Second World War to the present.’

• A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly. ‘Set in turn-of-the-19th-century America, around the Adirondack mountains, this is a coming-of-age story featuring a 16-year-old heroine, Mattie Gokey, who wants to be a writer, with a murder mystery woven in.’

• Hunting Unicorns by Bella Pollen. ‘Chick-lit comedy in which an American journalist is sent to England to report on the decline of the upper class, and becomes embroiled with an eccentric aristocratic family.’

• PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern. ‘As the 22-year-old daughter of the Irish PM, Ahern's book has done well commercially, but has inevitably garnered criticism. "A love story from beyond the grave", it's the story of a couple, and what happens when one of them dies.’

• Want To Play? by P J Tracy. ‘A crime thriller, this starts with the murder of an old couple in a small US town, then turns into a search for a serial killer. PJ Tracy is the pseudonym of a mother-daughter writing team from Minneapolis.’