(FORTUNE Magazine) – STAND ASIDE, Rhett Butler, for a new literary hero, who at 64 is even older than Gone With the Wind and really does give a damn. With over 2.6 million copies in print, Iacocca: An Autobiography has become perhaps the best-selling general-interest hard-cover book of all time -- with the exception of the Bible, some cookbooks, and a reference work or two. The sequel, Talking Straight, has spent 27 weeks on the best-seller list, and 750,000 copies are now in print. The extraordinary appeal of the Iacocca works is an example of the growing popularity of books about business and business leaders. Sales were up 20% to 30% in many stores last year, and business-related titles recently took four of the 15 spots on the nonfiction best-seller list compiled by Publishers Weekly. The top authors rake in fortunes -- Iacocca pulled down an estimated $6.5 million just from domestic book sales, and Donald Trump earned some $1.5 million from the hardback edition of The Art of the Deal. (Having other sources of income, both authors donated these earnings to charity.) In the past ten years, book publishing revenues have more than doubled, from $5.1 billion to $11.4 billion. Business and professional books account for $1.8 billion of the total, although that figure fails to include the business titles categorized as general-interest, or ''trade,'' books, which account for the most dramatic growth. Says Judy Guerra, vice president at Benjamin Books, a chain of airport shops: ''The business world is about money, power, and sex. That's what sells, and publishers know it.'' Yes, sex sells, but so does a lot of other fare: the ''how to'' volume of management advice, the get-rich-quick treatise, the kiss-and-tell chief executive biography, the corporate chronicle that traces the rise or fall of a company's fortunes, and the survival guide for hard times -- what author and Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith calls the publishing business's ''cottage industry in predicting disaster.'' Regardless of genre, a popular business book will now regularly sell 100,000 copies or more -- ten times what would have been considered respectable only a decade ago. Even academic business books are finding a growing audience in and outside the universities. The Free Press, a highly respected publisher specializing in | scholarly business books, has doubled sales in the past five years without increasing the number of titles it publishes annually. A Free Press book ''with legs,'' as they say in the popular-fiction business, may meander off the shelf initially but still sell a solid 200,000 or 300,000 copies before going out of print. For example, the sober tomes of Harvard business school professor Michael Porter -- Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors and Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance -- together have sold over 250,000 copies. Erwin A. Glikes, the Free Press's president and publisher, attributes his increased volume to the fact that lay readers as well as academics have discovered that the corporation is a topic worthy of serious study. Says he: ''The role of the corporation in American life was underestimated and undervalued for more than 50 years. It played the villain in the melodrama that American social analysts promulgated to describe what they thought was social and economic reality in America.'' The surge in business book sales has been fostered by two changes in the book-buying audience. One is demographic, the other emotional. The tally of MBAs graduating from the nation's business schools climbed from 43,000 in 1976 to 67,000 in 1986, and the number of undergraduates earning business degrees rose from 143,000 to 231,000. Professor John Kotter of the Harvard business school estimates that more than five million Americans have some form of classroom business training. They make up an affluent cohort that is numerate as well as literate and looks to books on business for fun, profit, and instruction. For a business book to reach the lofty altitudes of the best-seller list, however, it must appeal to a broader audience. Once a synonym for boring, business has become the stuff of fantasy. While TV shows are set in offices, life is busy imitating art: A Dallas computer mogul hires commandos to rescue two employees from the Ayatollah; then Ken Follett, a well-known thriller writer, turns the caper into a nonfiction best-seller called On the Wings of Eagles. Today business finds itself in the cultural mainstream. The nation's newest celebrities are the fast-talking cowboys of the corporate world. Greed and fear also play their parts. Reacting to the stock and real estate booms and the widely publicized fortunes won in billion-dollar mergers and leveraged buyouts, readers crave books that hold out the promise of quick , riches. At the same time, consumers who endured the energy crises of the 1970s and the recession and restructuring of the 1980s have become anxious about hanging on to their jobs, their savings, and their homes. Says William Shinker, publisher of Harper & Row's trade division: ''Whenever in book publishing you can tap into anxiety, the chances are you will have a book that sells very well and could become a best-seller.'' How good are the best-selling business books? Most CEO memoirs that followed Iacocca into print are works of shameless narcissism. Like Iacocca and The Art of the Deal, many are ghost-written. ''You have to be very, very careful when reading ghost-written biographies,'' says Ted Morgan, a biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt. ''The writer is hired to accept on faith what the Great Man is saying.'' Most of the advice books are commonsensical in the extreme. The current best-seller Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive by Harvey Mackay, owner of a $35 million envelope manufacturing company, rehashes material better treated in Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People, published in 1936. In a one-sentence chapter, ''The Acid Test for Hiring,'' Mackay proffers the following: ''Ask yourself, How would you feel having this same person working for your competition instead of for you?'' If you are going to be meeting with a celebrity, Mackay recommends that you read his or her entry in Who's Who. One bookseller whose customers have bought many copies of Swim With the Sharks gives it a trenchant review: ''Garbage. It's a fluffy little thing that you can read on the airplane for a chuckle or two.'' A number of best-selling management books favor the anecdote over rigorous research and analysis. In Search of Excellence offers a crude shorthand for how ''excellent'' companies are managed: ''Moreover, Joe has cared about every customer as an individual. He doesn't think statistically, but emphasizes that he has sold 'one at a time, face-to-face, belly-to-belly.' '' Tom Peters, the reigning brand-name author in the field, who wrote the book with Robert Waterman, defends his anecdotal approach on the basis that most business books are soporific. ''We killed any interest in the business arena because the books were written too dryly,'' he says. IN THE Harvard Business Review, Daniel T. Carroll, the former president of Hoover Universal, a former partner at Booz Allen & Hamilton, and head of Carroll Group, a Michigan-based consulting firm, trounced In Search of Excellence for shallow research, heavy reliance on secondary sources, and superficial conclusions. ''In the final analysis,'' wrote Carroll, ''management and the management literature were not moved further toward excellence by this book and may even have been needlessly delayed.'' Indeed, a year after the book appeared, a number of the supposedly excellent companies fell on hard times, proving that their management methods were less than infallible. But many popular business books do deliver an entertaining read. The details of boardroom bickering and behind-the-arras gossip in such company chronicles as The Big Store, the story of Sears Roebuck, and The Predator's Ball, on Drexel Burnham Lambert, dramatize material that might otherwise be mundane. Writes Connie Bruck in The Predator's Ball: ''This was the Drexel -- the brass-knuckles, threatening, market-manipulating Cosa Nostra of the securities world -- that its rival investment bankers and corporate targets loved to hate.'' Read one of these books and you'll assume you're the only one who ever spent a dull day at the office. Publishers are taking a shine to business books because they're good earners. Bantam, the publisher of Iacocca, probably made some $15 million off the hardback and likely will make another $3 million from the paperback. These titles are not as price sensitive as general trade books because consumers can usually write them off as a business expense. Many sell for a hefty $29.95 vs. $18.95 for fiction. They also have a longer shelf life, often selling better in their second or third year than in their first. No one knows why, but word of mouth may travel farther in the corporation than on the literary cocktail circuit. (If the boss mentions a good book, aren't the underlings likely to hustle up a copy?) When sales slow, a business book can be repackaged as audiotapes or turned into executive training seminars. Warren Bennis and Bert Nanus's Leaders: The Strategies for Taking Charge sold a respectable 300,000 copies in cloth and paperback but never made the best-seller list. Then it was recycled as a popular series of seminars that helped Harper & Row sell more copies of the book and a version on audiotapes. The Predator's Ball entered this line extension league; Bernie Brillstein, chairman of Brillstein Group, says he paid $20,000 to $50,000 to option the movie rights. Michael Milken may be coming soon to a theater near you. AS POPULAR as business books have proved to be, Harriet Rubin, who edits Doubleday's business line, thinks the market remains largely untapped. Says she: ''No one has given thought to finding new voices or a new generation of thinkers or has applied much imagination to the selling of these books.'' Rubin hopes to be the first; she already has some new voices under contract. She is awaiting manuscripts from well-known business executives with operating experience -- as opposed to management consultants like Peters -- who will explain their craft to the general reader. Her list includes Allen Neuharth, the chairman of Gannett, describing how he launched USA Today, and Mitchell Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp., writing The Ecology of Innovation, which discusses how companies and entrepreneurs can develop, evaluate, and market their ideas. Its arrival on the best-seller lists gives business a starring role in the American cultural scene -- long overdue considering that the corporation is arguably the dominant institution in U.S. society. Best-sellers may never be the most thoughtful books on a subject, but when it comes to business, they offer convincing evidence that the American Dream still casts a spell over the reading public.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: PUBLISHERS WEEKLY CAPTION: THE BEST-SELLING BUSINESS BOOKS