From The Bookseller:
Super Thursday has arrived early this year. Thanks to some overexcited reporting, the annual media frenzy that follows the yearly revelation that a lot of new hardback books are published in the autumn, has been focused on early September, rather than October, as we used to know it.
For numbers people, here are a few. Yesterday (3rd September) around 260 trade hardbacks were released.
. . . .
Come “real” Super Thursday on 1st October, we go again with some 450 trade hardbacks, a healthy increase on 2019, but mercifully down on 2018’s record.
This is not new, of course. For as long as there have been books, there appear to have been more of them than there are readers. Overproduction has often been denounced as a plague, but rarely have we done much about it. For publishers, a book is the thing that can cure all of our ills—just one more, as I’ve been known to say while on my way to the bar. It is easy to scoff, but the media’s fascination with this subject should not be taken too lightly, not least because for all of the smart campaigns that will be launched between now and December, this one costs us not a jot (except perhaps in reputation). In fact, we ought to be revelling in this big moment for books, just as we can take solace from how books kept us entertained and informed during the lockdown.
The trade is not just about big books (though we might like them), but also about the people who write and sell them. As the author Joanne Harris argues, for writers these weeks will likely just be “confusing, stressful and culminating in annihilation”. For booksellers, as pictures circulating on social media of stacks of as-yet-unopened deliveries suggest, it is both a physical and mental assault course.
This time around there is the added spice of having to contend with the new normal. We are often accused, in this sector, of denying the obvious. This year we cannot. In his half-year results address, Penguin Random House chief executive Markus Dohle talked about a world in which online book sales have become more important. He is not wrong; Covid has shown us all how fragile a supply chain can be when it is reliant on customers wanting to visit physical locations together.
Link to the rest at The Bookseller
PG wonders if traditionally-published authors ever question whether it’s a good idea for their books to be released on the same day as hundreds of other books are released.
PG also wonders how good a job underpaid publicity people and unpaid interns do with providing excellent support for a massive launch of so many books at once.
PG will note that the OP is focused on the British book business, but large US publishers have similar and often synchronized book release schedules.
If your debut novel is released on the same day as Delia Owens’ second novel is released and JK Rowling’s US publisher releases a new Harry Potter sequel, guess how much attention your book will receive.
For publishers, building up enthusiasm among the literati and press might be a great idea.
For an individual author’s book dumped onto the market along with a bunch of other new books, maybe not so much.
Sounds like Oct 1 would be a great day to re-release forty year old books set a hundred years ago. Zillions of people never heard of them.
It used to be that new books only competed with other new books, because unless they were exceptions, older books were cleared off the shelves and regulated to “books in print” – if they were even that lucky.
Now, new books compete with older books, and even older books, all of which are still available both electronically and in print – used and POD. As choice balloons, new releases are swimming against a higher and higher tide. Authors have to justify what they are writing. Is it really creative in an engaging way? Or is it just me-too, or worse – novel, but annoyingly so.