The World Is Full of Married Men time, Jacqueline Susann's similarly themed novel "Valley of the Dolls" (1966) had already become a huge bestseller and a hit film, and Collins' novel was accepted. Within a week of its publication, "The World Is Full of Married Men" made the best-seller list. The book was a hit in both the United Kingdom and the U.S., but was banned in Australia. Collins' publishers at the time, W.H. Allen, told her that unless she took the "four-letter words" out, the book would be banned in Australia. Collins proceeded in taking the four-letter words out and it was still banned in Australia.
Naked Came the Stranger year, further spurring the book's popularity. Mike McGrady was convinced that popular American literary culture had become so base—with the best-seller lists dominated by the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann—that any book could succeed if enough sex was thrown in. To test his theory, in 1966 McGrady recruited a team of "Newsday" colleagues (according to Andreas Schroder, nineteen men and five women) to collaborate on a sexually explicit novel with no literary or social value whatsoever. McGrady co-edited the project with his "Newsday" colleague Harvey Aronson, and among the other collaborators were well-known writers including 1965 Pulitzer Prize