The lament of the bookseller: too many cooks, too many books

Bookshops make at least one third of their annual profits during the pre-Christmas period, but should more be done to help sales year-round?

It's the time of year when bookshop shelves groan under an abundant harvest of titles, offering readers a feast of literary treats to feed on as the nights grow long.

This year's autumn book-buyer can pick from scores of new titles, including keenly-awaited novels by Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Tony Parsons, Zadie Smith and Donna Tartt, autobiographies of David Attenborough, Murray Walker and Kate Adie, and no less than six "celebrity" cookbooks.

The surfeit of riches is a traditional feature of the book industry's pre-Christmas sprint, when many shops make at least one third of their annual profits.

But this year the stream of titles from the publishing houses has become a flood, provoking booksellers to warn that some high-quality titles are at risk of being drowned. With heavyweight names like Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Ruth Rendell and Nigella Lawson demanding prominent displays in windows and in the front of shops, other books will fade into the background.

Even authors with track records, like the thriller writer Ken Follett, have difficulty competing, with some book chains warning that his new novel Hornet Flight could miss out. David Attenborough's autobiography will be a guaranteed seller, but while some shops might have chosen it for a weekly promotion at quieter times, they say it is too far back in the queue now.

Other new releases, such as Umberto Eco's Baudolino, Giles Foden's Zanzibar, or Middlesex, by the American Jeffrey Eugenides will get a fraction of the promotion they might have received at less crowded times of the year.

"Middlesex is a phenomenal book that deserves to do fantastically well, but I have got so many hardbacks to promote that it will inevitably lose out because it is less well known," one director of a high street chain said. "If it was released at a different time it would get a much higher profile."

The situation has been much more pronounced this year because of what book chains describe as a "dearth" of new titles in the spring and summer.

So deep is the concern with which booksellers have viewed this year's lists that they have called a conference with publishers later this month to plead for a more even distribution of releases throughout the year, to allow middle-ranking titles room to breathe. The meeting has been called by the Booksellers Association to tackle what it calls an "absurd and unmanageable glut" of books by trying to persuade publishers that a more even spread would be in their interests.

Tim Godfray, the association's group chief executive, said trade in the first half of the year had been "depressing", with very few new titles. Many shops had felt that publishers were delaying releases until Christmas because they feared the World Cup and Jubilee would distract potential readers.

"More good titles need to be published in the first six months of the year," Mr Godfray said. "The difficulty is that bookshops don't really have the space to give these titles the proper space they deserve when they all come out at once."

"We have to persuade the publishers that it is in their commercial interest to spread the publication dates. This is the first year that booksellers have really felt that that it warrants getting together and talking to the publishers as a matter of urgency."

But publishers argue that they are taking common-sense commercial decisions in putting out popular books at a time when the country is most thinking about buying them, and the figures support their logic.

Last year, high street book sales in the four weeks before Christmas totalled £178m, compared with £56m in April. Sales for the last two months of the year were £264m, nearly 30 per cent of the whole year's £960m sales, according to the industry body, Nielsen BookScan.

Bookshops recognise that publishers are acting in what they believe to be their best interests, but argue that the trend has become so pronounced it is starting to backfire. "There will be phenomenal sales this Christmas, but there are also so many books released at once that buyers and booksellers will have to choose which ones," Trevor Goul-Wheeker, managing director of Hammicks Bookshops, said.

"There will be some mid-list books that will miss out. The very big books will always come through, although maybe their sales will not be as great as if there were less around and if there were not so many fighting for the same shelf space."

Mr Goul-Wheeker believes the focus on Christmas sales risks damaging people's book-buying habits by leaving them nothing of interest in bookshops for the rest of the year. "Forty per cent of my customers come in once a week or once a fortnight to buy something for pleasure," he said.

"If there are not enough new books being published early in the year, there is a risk that they will walk down the high street and see the same titles in every window and it will be a very grey world indeed. If that happens, they will lose the habit, and if they do that they will not come back at Christmas."

Kathy Ferrier, director of books at WH Smith, agreed that bookshops were forced into going from "famine to feast" by publishers. But although some mid-list titles might benefit from being released at a less competitive time, it was difficult to see how publishing schedules harmed sales when the chain made 30 per cent of its annual sales in the last two months of the year, she said.

Some publishers estimate the proportion is even higher, with up to half of annual sales coming in the last quarter of the year, making it commercial nonsense to put popular titles out at any other time.

Jacqui Graham, the publicity director for Macmillan publishers, acknowledged that some titles do not get the promotion they deserve at Christmas. However, she said, they would still do well because of the high volume of sales.

Publishers already put books out earlier in the year when they believed it made sense. New authors to whom the publishers wanted to draw attention would come out in the spring, rather than Christmas. But releasing big titles earlier in the year was a gamble because there was no guarantee the shops would re-order them in the autumn.

"We would love it to spread releases out because everybody agrees the run-up to Christmas is a nightmare," Ms Graham said. "But if you do that, you take the risk that a book that would sell 60,000 at Christmas sells 20,000 in the spring."