Over the summer, novelist and screenwriter David Nicholls has been something of a hero. With a humorous nod to the less glamorous aspects of publishing life – hastily defrosted canapés and eked-out warm white wine – the author of One Day and adaptor of the Patrick Melrose novels has thrown a series of Twitter book launches, amplifying new releases from writers including (but far beyond) the big names who will automatically elicit review space and window displays. The responses from the authors, especially the debutants, to gaining the imprimatur of a much-loved and huge-selling colleague, and from readers to discovering books to connect with in a time of such immense disconnection, has been powerful and touching. It’s a particularly nice example of someone paying it forward.
Nicholls’s virtual launches have been held every Thursday, the day new books are traditionally published in the UK, but this week’s will be his last. Quite possibly, his publishers have reminded him that the paperback edition of his own book, Sweet Sorrow, needs some love, or perhaps he wants to get on with writing another.
It’s fortunate for him – although arguably less so for the world of books – that he’s bowing out before 3 September. On that day, in a development that has provoked anguish among booksellers, editors, reviewers and readers, almost 600 new books will be published, an increase of about a third from last year. There is such a thing as a crowded market, and then there is this: an avalanche of words that no retailer or media outlet could hope to accommodate. Even Waterstones Piccadilly, the chain’s flagship London store, is feeling the strain, one of the team writing on Twitter: “We are big and I doubt we’ll stock them all. No one has enough space for this.” They added: “We’ll do what we always do. Choose the books we think our Piccadilly customers will love most and those that we can honestly recommend.”
Why the surge? Largely, of course, it’s the pandemic: with bookshops closed and literary festivals and events cancelled or significantly shrunk and moved online, publishers moved swaths of their publication dates to later in the year. Festivals are still in abeyance, albeit with virtual events, but publishing houses – and their authors, many in extreme need of their publication payments, which usually represent a third of their advance against royalties – had to do something. To shift entire programmes to next year, its landscape still highly uncertain, would be to kick the can down a highly congested road.
But 3 September – just the first of a series of similar days throughout the autumn – is a problem. Waterstones Piccadilly has vast premises, but others – including the independent bookshops attempting to weather 2020’s storm – must rely on heavily curated selections and hard choices. For an industry that has suffered a series of shocks – including the collapse of wholesaler Bertrams, owing £25m to its creditors – autumn will be tough. For literary editors presiding over fewer pages for book reviews the issues are similarly intractable.
As ever, certain realities prevail. It is implausible that the autumn’s big releases – which include Martin Amis, Roberts Harris and Galbraith, David Attenborough, Elena Ferrante, Caitlin Moran, Nick Hornby, Ant and Dec and Will Young, plus the cookery books that so often top the charts in the run-up to Christmas – will go under the radar; there is simply too much marketing spend and, generally though not inevitably, too much public appetite for that to happen.
And yet recent months have also intensified long overdue conversations about representation in publishing, and the need for radically overhauling both the systems and sensibilities that dictate who and what ends up in bookshops. Covid-19 has not created an arena in which writers of colour, working-class writers and writers living with disabilities have been marginalised and struggled to find an outlet for their stories, but it would be a travesty of publishing and bookselling’s core mission – to put the best array of writing in front of readers – if it were to make that arena even smaller. It’s not what the literary world’s most dedicated workers, who in better times turn out to eat their semi-defrosted canapés and chug their tepid Sauvignon Blanc with gusto – want or are working towards. Let’s hope the Super Thursday to end all Super Thursdays doesn’t drown them out.