There Are Only Three Seasons in Publishing
A primer on publishing seasons, harried editors, and presidential elections
Every year in school come January and February I remember filling out those two final numbers of the date wrong on assignments. Book publishing is like that, only if forgetting the year occasionally was taken to a Dante’s Inferno extreme. Publishing operates, unlike most businesses, in three seasons Spring (Jan-April), Summer (May-August), and Fall (September-December)— I’ve capitalized them all, not because it’s grammatically accurate but because that’s how it feels they should be written. And you’ll notice that publishing has eliminated Winter entirely, how cheery of us (At least where I work; one publisher’s Spring is another’s Winter).
Each of the publishing seasons has an unofficial mood board of books. Fall is when the Big Books publish, the repeat heavy hitters, your Kings and Grishams, and all your big nonfiction books as well, presidential biographies, Michael Lewis, the celebrity memoir takeover du jour of the bestseller list (last week, Jada; this week, Brittney). Fall has the simplest business logic of any publishing season, because it follows the general retail pattern of the fourth quarter holiday season, where there’s the most retail traffic and money spent. Summer is the season of thrillers and beach reads and book club favorites—it doesn’t take a scientific approach to figure out why this is—but genuinely serious books tend to cluster around the colder seasons early or late in the year. Spring is the deep breath, clear-the-deck season for debut novelists, serious literature, and, naturally, self-help books. Publishing Spring is a set of months where the world at large is usually a little more able to focus, without the laziness and distraction of summer travel or the mad rush of the holidays. In many ways it’s a lovely time to publish a book. In publishing, we place a lot of emphasis on timing and creating these distinctions between the seasons and months, trying to control the factors we can control. But there is so much about making a successful book that is out of our hands that even when we miss the mark entirely on timing— after thinking about it too much— a book can still takeoff in a later month, season, or year. The bottom line is that readers generally don’t much care about when something was first published. 1984, which has seen a huge resurgence in our dystopian times, was originally published in Summer of 1949—maybe readers had a different idea of beach read back then.
Publishing Time
Our three weird little seasons is just the start. Editors also work simultaneously in the present (weeks at a time), the future (years at a time), and the past (an indefinite amount of time). Weeks at a time, because books are being published, put out into the world, hopefully to be purchased, and editors are the circus leaders of this process, getting everything in order, going to author events, ensuring that no balls are dropped while all of those stones get unturned. For the future, we are editing, writing sales copy, making presentations for books that are going to publish a year or years in the future, which means constantly working on projects that “exists” in 2024 or 2025 while living in 2023. Add to this: the paperback, which comes roughly one year after the initial hardcover publication. Finally, your past catches up with you as every book that you’ve ever edited or published is yours to own, in perpetuity, handling production updates, being the contact for author at the publisher, and putting out new editions until you move publishers or pass the buck to someone else. This treatment of time all amounts to an exercise in professionalized ADD.
Imagine an elaborate wooden set of tracks for marbles with twenty different starting tracks at the top. Now each time you work on a book you drop a marble on one of the tracks. Your job as editor is to watch all the marbles carefully at all times, knowing exactly where they are, making sure they don’t get stuck as they each travel their path, waiting for them so at the end you can catch them as they shoot out the other side. One marble, not so hard. But each track is not the same, they interweave and sometimes overlap (like how every author seems to deliver their manuscript for editing at the same exact time without communicating with each other), each with different grooves and curves, loops and slopes, traveling various lengths and speeds to reach the end. Drop three marbles. Now Five. Now Fifteen. Okay—all twenty at once! It makes it hard to remember what year it is or even what universe you’re in.
For some reason this metaphor makes me think of the final scene in Men in Black where the marbles are planets in the universe, and a big, weird-looking alien comes and picks one up that resembles the earth. Probably an unwatchable CGI nightmare at this point, but a great concept!
Biggest “News” in Books: Election Season
I believe this axiom is adjacent to Murphy’s Law: it can get worse. While publishing’s seasons and timelines can be maddening, it’s the additional season that has been added that may sap more energy than all of the above: Election Season. While readers today may be enjoying the wonderful books of Fall 2023, the quirk of working a year or more ahead of time means that for us it is already Fall of 2024. And that means we are already in the throes of what is sure to be another messy, unfun, no good presidential election cycle.
Last time around, following Trump’s election, we routinely saw million copy bestsellers like What Happened, Fear, and Fire and Fury being minted as backlash. Last election cycle, political science books saw a remarkable 30% jump in sales (Bookscan) from this already normalized new high. In books, what we saw following the election was an almost identical polarization of book tastes within readers— half of books sales were cleaved off into people who were completely consumed with politics, while the other half wanted to completely detach from reality and read something nice to combat the ruthless news cycle.
Although political book sales have gone down from their last feverish peak in 2020, it is less that they have receded and more that they have been on a simmer waiting to boil. Look at the bestseller list this week and you’ll see the stranglehold politics has still on the nonfiction bestseller list: Rachel Maddow, Trump’s former special assistant, Democracy Awakening, four other history books authored by people in the political sphere, and the greatest, bottom-of-the-barrel, caveman title, The Democrat Party Hates America. Likewise, what publishing has dubbed “counter programing” has entrenched itself more and more on the opposite side of the spectrum. While fiction sales are flat across many categories this year, the only three categories that are seriously growing, and by double digits, are fantasy, horror, and romance.
This is the way polarization effects not just politics but has spillovers into culture and art, as these conditions have effectively crowded out any books that aren’t breaking news or divorced from reality entirely (or aren’t the latest installments from beloved, longtime franchise authors, but I would argue putting these in the comfort food category as well). That pushes out a lot of the good stuff, both nonfiction and fiction, that we would consider literature. Books that aren’t informational, feeding a political itch, or assuaging some of the anxiety of our times by offering comfort and distraction. Just like it feels harder to have a real conversation without devolving into politics, it feels harder to get people to read and excited about books that speak to complexity and don’t take a sharp angle into the zeitgeist or have a news peg.
Because publishing has reached a consensus that Fall 2024 will be similar for our business as Fall 2020, many editors are ducking the season entirely, not publishing at all during election season if their books don’t fit into a political or escapist mold. This is going to create a very predictable 50-car-pile-up in Spring and Summer of 2025 as hundreds of books that publishers have willfully delayed so they don’t get lost in the riptide of the election come out all at once. An absolute golden year of books might very well follow the election, one in which we can finally reset our normal and consider something other than the extremes. Or, as we’ve learned to treat Murphy’s Law seriously, Spring 2025 could be Spring 2017 all over again. At least, for us editors, our minds will be living in Spring 2026 by then.