Hello,
This will be the last issue of
Publishing This Week until January 2nd because so few books are published during the second half of December, and in fact we found only one of note publishing next week (which is included below)
.
Back when I started BookBrowse in the late 1990s, a time when the internet was in its infancy and you could take for granted that any halfway decent town would have at least one bookstore, publishers generally piled the majority of their new titles, and certainly most of what they thought would be their strongest titles, into the first few weeks of each of the (usually) three seasons of the publishing year.
This was because the publishing reps sold and bookstores generally bought on a seasonal basis, and bookstores would clear out slow-moving titles before the end of each season to make room for the next batch of books. So, titles that went on sale towards the end of a season (and particulary towards the end of the year) risked getting pulled from the shelf and returned to the publisher unsold before they had a chance to gain traction.
While the seasonal dynamic still holds today to some degree, it's much less pronounced due to a number of factors including the speed of the news cycle, the increasing dominance of online shopping, and the move to digital catalogs that blur the edges of the seasons. In addition, I imagine that publishers are perfectly cognizent that the chances of getting a book reviewed in the consumer media is going to be better at quieter times of the year.
So, in short, where once there would have been little to excite the discerning reader in December, now there are gems to discover, such as
The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed,
True Crime Story by Joseph Knox,
Beasts of a Little Land by Juhea Kim, and Amanda Gorman's much anticipated poetry collection
Call Us What You Carry. You'll find 10 of the 22 new and notable titles below and the remainder (including a bunch of next in series titles) on
BookBrowse.
With best wishes,
Davina Morgan-Witts
BookBrowse Publisher
