Publishers look ahead after thriving in pandemic
‘Hot vaxxed summer’ has fizzled, but ‘hot books fall’ feels like safe bet
What was it like seeing book sales explode during the coronavirus pandemic? Jonathan Karp, Simon & Schuster’s president and CEO, couldn’t help quoting Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
“A lot of people had extra time at home and they turned to books,” Karp said. Virtual sales and appearances, meanwhile, “made it easier to reach readers directly.”
Still, it’s been a rocky 18 months for U.S. publishers, whose jobs are defined by predictability: They work on monthslong publishing schedules, orchestrate book tours and promotional plans and calibrate printings based on expectations.
As COVID-19 swept across the world last year, they had to throw many of those plans out the window — canceling tours, delaying books and having their media rollouts drowned out by breaking news. Nevertheless, fueled by online sales and the demand of the quarantined and bored, total unit sales for print books in the generally flat industry rose 8% between 2019 and 2020, according to NPD BookScan.
This fall promises something almost as valuable as a boom year: a return to some semblance of normal.
“This year, we’re not letting the pandemic dictate our decisions,” said Reagan Arthur, publisher and executive vice president of Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House. “The pandemic’s been with us longer than some of these books have, and so we scheduled them having a much better sense of how we would publish them, whatever the current climate was.”
It’s been a strong 2021 for adult fiction, led by Amazon bestsellers such as Kristin Hannah’s “The Four Winds,” Matt Haig’s “The Midnight Library” and Laura Dave’s “The Last Thing He Told Me.” This fall is equally promising, with new titles from crossover literary stars including Richard Powers, Anthony Doerr, Jonathan Franzen, Sandra Cisneros and debut thriller novelist Hillary Rodham Clinton (with Louise Penny).
The pandemic fueled some surprising — and perhaps temporary — areas of growth. George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984” is among Amazon’s top 20 bestsellers of the year (so far). And last March, just as the country was preparing for its first shutdowns, Albert Camus’ “The Plague” was flying off of the shelves of stores.
Tobi Harper, deputy director at Red Hen Press, has noticed an uptick in reader interest in dark fiction. (Dystopia has certainly dominated critical attention.) Last fall,
even before the rise of phenom Amanda Gorman, it was poetry. “Any time of extreme political turmoil,” Harper said, “there’s a noticeable jump in poetry sales.”
Nonfiction should see a shift — away from Donald Trump books, for one thing. Jonathan Burnham, president and publisher of the HarperCollins imprint Harper, believes people will want to read both for distraction and information. “I think readers want a wide range of different kinds of books, and that’s good for the general health of publishing and bookselling,” he said.
Books about civil rights, diversity and discrimination have sold at historic levels since last summer’s protests against police brutality, and those sales are expected to stay high.
“We saw a lot of people buying books by Huey Newton and Angela Davis,” said Stacey Lewis, director of publicity and marketing at City Lights Publishers. At University
of California Press, sales remain high for books about social justice, reported Tim Sullivan, its executive director.
With Black Lives Matter, Trump and the pandemic, it shouldn’t be too surprising that 2020 saw the highest sales of political books in NPD BookScan history.
While this year is unlikely to top that, expectations are high for “Peril,” the third and final installment in investigative journalist Bob Woodward’s trilogy of Trump exposés, this one co-written with Robert Costa.
It’s one of several Trump books published this year; it could also be one of the last. The summer saw a rush to publish titles breaking down Trump’s loss and his scramble to hold power in hopes of beating Woodward to the punch and perhaps making one last grab for readers.
News keeps breaking, however, and some big titles will address emergencies that have outlived Trump. “The Path to a
Livable Future,” by Stan Cox, explores the connections among the many crises of the past year and a half. “Viral,” by Matt Ridley and Alina Chan, will investigate the origins of the virus and interrogate the lab-leak theory.
One title Karp is banking on is “World War C: Lessons from the COVID19 Pandemic and How to Prepare for the Next One” by Kristin Loberg and
Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent.
“The media has covered the pandemic so thoroughly that the authors most likely to stand out are ones who either have great expertise or a controversial perspective,” Karp said. It’s why he expects “World War C” to do well.
“We’ve been selective about COVID books,” he said, “because the story is everywhere.”
Tough as the times have been, publishers acknowledge the silver lining of the pandemic.
“The industry is healthy right now,” Karp said. “A lot of people have time to read. They’re still going out less so they’re home more, and there’s only so much Netflix you can watch ... people are buying and reading books, we’re seeing reorders from booksellers, we’re seeing increased demand on our authors year over year.”
All things considered, maybe publishers won’t mind waiting a little longer for a return to normal.