Booksellers up and down the country are preparing for the annual deluge of hardbacks published on what has become known as Super Thursday, which will see more than 500 new books by authors from David Attenborough to Jacqueline Wilson hit the shelves today.
Given the name by the Bookseller magazine – in the vein of annual shopping events Cyber Monday and Black Friday – 4 October marks the start of the race for the Christmas No 1 in the book charts. This year, there will be 544 new hardbacks released – 40 more than last year.
Waterstones called it a “particularly strong Super Thursday … that truly offers something for everyone”.
This festive period looks to have fewer celebrity autobiographies than previous years. The Bookseller’s non-fiction previewer Caroline Sanderson said the guaranteed bestselling memoirs will be “big names in their 70s”: Eric Idle’s “sortabiography” Always Look on the Bright Side of Life; Tina Turner’s memoir My Love Story; Roger Daltrey’s memoir – named Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite, after the authoritarian headmaster who expelled him from school aged 15; and Michael Caine’s Blowing the Bloody Doors Off, all out this month.
“I felt that publishers think if they’re going to do this, they need somebody with a lot of life to write about,” Sanderson said. “The vloggers have really dropped off.” Memoirs from Gary Barlow, Shane Warne and Jo Brand are also slated for pre-Christmas releases.
Sanderson also highlighted puzzle books as “the new colouring books”, with the nation’s wits set to be tested by titles from GCHQ and the Ordnance Survey, which promises “over 200 fiendish puzzles to find out who will be the ultimate map-master”. Astronaut Tim Peake and the European Space Agency, meanwhile, have teamed up to offer The Astronaut Selection Test Book, which “comprises 100 real astronaut tests and training exercises for readers to try at home, and outlines the full ESA selection process for the first time”.
Waterstones’ buyer Bea Carvalho predicted: “The Astronaut Selection Test Book should corner the gift market much in the same way that GCHQ and Bletchley Park Brainteasers have done in the past couple of years.” Waterstones is also expecting that Michael Lewis’s The Fifth Risk, Andrew Roberts’s biography Churchill and Kevin Keegan’s My Life in Football will all sell well.
An updated edition of Attenborough’s Life on Earth is also out to mark the 40th anniversary of its first publication, with new text and photography.
On the fiction front, big titles range from Wilson’s much-anticipated My Mum Tracy Beaker to The Essex Serpent author Sarah Perry’s Melmoth, a title the Bookseller called a “gothic horror triumph” and tipped as leading a literary trend for all things darkly atmospheric. Carvalho said Melmoth was a real highlight, alongside new novels by Bernard Cornwell, Ian Rankin and Peter James. A collection of Leonard Cohen’s last poems and writings, The Flame, is also out next week.
With nearly 63m books typically sold in the run-up to Christmas in the UK – a third of the market’s annual volume – the influx of new titles will continue in the coming weeks: in November, JK Rowling publishes the screenplay of The Crimes of Grindelwald, while Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming is also out.
But Sanderson said publishers appear to have steered clear of humour titles this year, after a decline in popularity. In January, WH Smith noted a reduced appetite over the last festive period for the likes of the Famous Five and Ladybird parodies, after a particularly strong performance in 2016.
“There seems to be a dearth of humour titles. Perhaps no one can find much to laugh at,” she said.
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