Exercise in Best-Selling

By Jose M. Ferrer III

All right, class, rest and review. First we learned that while you may have to sweat to write your fitness book, this is only a warm-up exercise. The real work is promotion, which you should do for as many hours a day as your body can stand. But what if, after all that effort, the book is still headed for terminal inactivity on the remainder shelf? Hear now the tale of Callan Pinckney, whose deep-muscle-exercise regimen hit best-seller lists an unheard- of 14 months after it was published.

The first 12,500 copies of Callanetics (William Morrow & Co.; $17.95) barely managed to sell after a brief tour by the author; the second edition of 5,000 simply lay there. But Pinckney, a rebel of long standing, refused to give up. A ninth-generation descendant of a founding family of South Carolina, Barbara Biffinger Pfeiffer Pinckney of Savannah was born with a silver spoon in her mouth; she was also born needing steel braces on her legs for seven years to correct badly turned-in feet and a spinal deformity. "Restless and bored" with the schools and rules that came with her heritage, she eventually quit college and at 21 left the U.S. for what became eleven years in Europe, Africa and Asia with little more than the 65-lb. rucksack she carried on her back.

That pack and her haphazard life-style had all but crippled her when she finally returned to the U.S. in 1972. Facing surgery, Pinckney decided instead to refine some exercises she had learned during years of adolescent ballet lessons. So impressive were the results that she began to teach friends in New York City, where she was living (and where she had changed her name to Callan on the advice of a numerologist). Enraged by what she considered misinformation in other exercise books, she spent two years writing her own. Pinckney contends that most exercises do not reach far enough into muscles, and she has developed a combination of stretching and deep contractions aimed particularly at tightening the stomach and lifting the rear. She eschews aerobics, preferring many repetitions of gentle, nonjarring movements. Barbra Streisand was sold and wrote Pinckney, "Thanks for teaching me how to keep it up."

But readers were not buying. Undaunted, Pinckney started running up $1,000 monthly phone bills trying to publicize the book. She got on a couple of local TV shows in the South, then in New York. Sales really started to take off after she did Oprah Winfrey's morning show in Chicago. They jumped again when she did the syndicated Sally Jessy Raphael Show, and after she made a network appearance on Donahue four weeks ago, the B. Dalton chain reported that its 10,000 copies sold out immediately. Pinckney had pushed and pulled her way to a publishing miracle. The book is in its 16th edition, with more than 300,000 copies now in print. Paperback rights have just been sold, and a video is in the works.

Callanetics' subtitled claim--"10 years younger in 10 hours"--strikes many specialists in the field as a bit too much of a miracle. "Fat loss is a very long-term process," says Chicago Physiologist George Lesnes. St. Louis Chiropractor R. Alexander Rojas agrees but is impressed nevertheless: "There's something for everyone in this book." Pinckney's biggest fan is her mother. Now 76, with arthritis, she does two hours of Callanetics daily and looks as trim as her 46-year-old daughter. The author does an hour a week, in her book enough for most people. "I hate exercising," she groans. "It's a bore and a drag." Not like book publishing.

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York, with other bureaus