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Printer Jam: Serious Supply Issues Disrupt the Book Industry’s Fall Season

Capacity issues at the two largest printing companies are among the factors creating havoc for authors and publishers.

A shopper at a Barnes & Noble store in Glendale, Calif., in June. A backlog at printers is creating havoc as publishers prepare for their big fall season.Credit...Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

This spring, when the pandemic forced bookstores across the country to close and authors to cancel their tours, many editors and publishers made a gamble. They postponed the publication of dozens of titles, betting that things would be back to normal by the fall.

Now, with September approaching, things are far from normal. Books that were bumped from spring and early summer are landing all at once, colliding with long-planned fall releases and making this one of the most crowded fall publishing seasons ever. And now publishers are confronting a new hurdle: how to print all those books.

The two largest printing companies in the United States, Quad and LSC Communications, have been under intense financial strain, a situation that has grown worse during the pandemic. LSC declared bankruptcy in April, and the company’s sales fell nearly 40 percent in the fiscal quarter that ended June 30, a drop that the company attributed partly to the closure of retailers during the pandemic and the steep fall of educational book sales. In September, LSC’s assets will be put up for auction. Quad’s book printing business is also up for sale; this spring, the company had to temporarily shut down its printers at three plants due to the pandemic.

At the same time, there has been a surprising spike in sales for print books, a development that would normally be cause for celebration, but is now forcing publishers to scramble to meet surging demand. Unit sales of print books are up more than 5 percent over last year, and sales have accelerated over the summer. From early June to mid-August, print sales were up more than 12 percent over the previous 10 weeks, according to NPD BookScan. The surge has been driven by several new blockbuster titles, including books by Suzanne Collins, Stephenie Meyer, John Bolton and Mary Trump. Publishers have also seen an unexpected demand for older titles, particularly books about race and racism, children’s educational workbooks and fiction.

“The infinite printer capacity hasn’t been there for a while, now enter Covid and a huge surge in demand, and you have an even more complex situation,” said Sue Malone-Barber, senior vice president and director of Publishing Operations for Penguin Random House, which is delaying titles at several of its imprints as a result of the crunch.

The backlog at the printers is creating havoc for authors and publishers. Reprints for books that are selling well, which normally take two weeks, are sometimes taking more than a month.

The CNN anchor Brian Stelter’s new book “Hoax,” about the relationship between Donald Trump and Fox, was out of stock on Amazon this week shortly after its August 25 publication date, and showed a ship time of one to two months. Mr. Stelter’s publisher, One Signal, a Simon & Schuster imprint, which initially printed 50,000 copies, has ordered another 100,000 copies. “We print things on dead trees, and that presents enormous operational challenges,” said Julia Cheiffetz, vice president and publisher of One Signal.

Print runs for new titles are getting squeezed and pushed back. Carefully calibrated publication schedules are being blown up as books are moved into late fall and even next year.

Knopf and Pantheon are shifting the release of more than a dozen fall titles, including a memoir by the cookbook author Deborah Madison and a biography of Sylvia Plath, due to “severe capacity issues with our printing partners.” The imprints are also delaying fiction by Robert Harris, Martin Amis, Jo Nesbo, Alexander McCall Smith and Tom Bissell, whose story collection, “Creative Types,” is being bumped to 2021.

The reshuffling is impacting prominent, award-winning authors and first-time novelists alike. Doubleday has postponed the publication of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Joby Warrick’s forthcoming book, “Red Line: The Unraveling of Syria and America’s Race to Destroy the Most Dangerous Arsenal in the World,” until February of next year.

St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan, pushed back “Tsarina,” a debut novel by Ellen Alpsten, from October to November, a month many publishers had been avoiding because of the election.

“They just couldn’t get the copies from the printer in time,” said the literary agent Deborah Schneider, who represents Ms. Alpsten. “There’s a domino effect. We’re going to have bottlenecks not only in terms of getting stuff from printers but in terms of marketing. Everything is a seat-of-the-pants decision now.”

Some authors have had their publication dates moved multiple times. Earlier this year, Sasha Issenberg was preparing to release his book “The Engagement: America’s Quarter-Century Struggle Over Same-Sex Marriage” with Pantheon this June, timed for Pride Month.

When the shutdown started, his publisher moved the book first to early September, then to late September. Recently, he was told that it would be bumped again — to June of next year — due to shortages at the printers. The delay has complicated his teaching schedule and his plans to start work on another book. He worries about losing the momentum built by advance reviews in publications like Publishers Weekly.

“This was already an incredibly difficult time to put a book out into the world,” he said. “A lot had already been in place for this, and it’s disruptive on a number of levels.”

A backlog at the printers can have a ripple effect up and down the supply chain, causing delays at warehouses and slower delivery to booksellers, who may lose out on sales when customers can’t find the books they want.

“It’s lose lose,” said Dennis Johnson, the co-publisher of Melville House. “Heaven help you if that printing was a reprint of a book in demand. The delay can really be devastating to the book’s chances.”

Publishers have been struggling with capacity issues at the printers for several years. In 2018, the 125-year-old company Edwards Brothers Malloy closed. A proposed merger between Quad and LSC fell through last year after the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit to block the deal. More than a decade ago, when e-book sales were growing, many printing companies believed that digital would eventually overtake print sales, and so for years there was little capital investment in printing infrastructure. But then sales of print books started to rebound and have held steady; printers have been playing catch-up.

In recent months, the pandemic and shutdown have put even more financial strain on printing companies, as printers have faced a sharp drop in academic and textbook sales.

There are no quick solutions to the supply chain issues, publishing executives say. Printing books overseas, or using on-demand printing services, can provide a stopgap if a book is out of stock, but are costly alternatives.

Some worry that the current crunch could reverse the yearslong trend of stable and sometimes rising print sales, sending readers back to digital books, which are less lucrative for publishers and authors, and especially brick and mortar retailers. “With a lack of capacity and growing uncertainty in a printing world, will that force the marketplace back to digital?” said Corey Berger, senior vice president of marketing for Readerlink, the main book distributor to Target, Walmart and other outlets.

Booksellers are worried that as publishers release a massive number of new books this fall, titles will run out of stock, leaving them unable to fulfill customer orders.

“We’re concerned about the unknown author, the first-time novelist who may be down the pecking order in terms of print priorities,” said James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble. “Booksellers want to get their hands on them, and the copies aren’t there.”

Elizabeth A. Harris contributed reporting.

Alexandra Alter writes about publishing and the literary world. Before joining The Times in 2014, she covered books and culture for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she reported on religion, and the occasional hurricane, for The Miami Herald. More about Alexandra Alter

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Backlog at Printers Is Wreaking Havoc On Book Industry. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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