> Our phones are flooded with fundraising text messages. Our mailboxes are stuffed with campaign fliers.
> Another side effect of election season? Fewer new books to read.
> Conventional wisdom in the publishing industry has long held that it’s best to avoid releasing new books during the fall of a presidential election. It’s harder during those months to book authors for promotional media appearances, with politics eating up all the airtime. It may also be more difficult to get attention from social media influencers and book bloggers, with everyone’s eyes fixed on the news.
> “There are conversations at publishing houses everywhere about this very issue,” said Jonathan Karp, president and publisher at Simon & Schuster. “It is definitely a source of agita.”
> The effect seems especially stark at independent presses. Debra Englander, a consulting editor at Post Hill Press, said she advised authors to either publish by September or wait until the first quarter of 2025, “just because it’s hard to predict what people’s moods will be. But certainly, from August on, it’s going to be wall-to-wall ads, conventions, debates.”
> “Getting press coverage can make or break a book for us, and while I cannot see into the future, I knew from past experience that publishing during the peak of the election cycle would be an unforced error,” Christina Ward, vice president and editor at the publisher Feral House, wrote in an email. “Pushing those titles to January and February 2025 — even with the potential for political shenanigans in January — seemed like a far better course of action than knowingly consigning them to the press abyss.”
> Similarly, at She Writes Press and SparkPress, “we consciously have a shorter list,” publisher Brooke Warner said. “We front-loaded into September, early October, and then we pushed a bunch of books to December and January.” The worry that elections would dampen public interest in books has been on the industry’s radar going back decades, Warner said, “but 2016 was a whole other level. When Trump ran the first time, it was very clear to publishers that he was just a media cyclone.”
> Avoiding election season is probably just a “cautionary” measure, Warner said, but “there are certainly books that have failed or been compromised because they came out in terrible moments.”
> “Sales during election years don’t show major declines,” Brenna Connor, a book industry analyst for the market research firm Circana, wrote in an email to The Post. In 2016 and 2012, sales dropped by 1 percent compared with the prior year; in 2008, they grew by 7 percent. In 2020, sales hit a 15-year high — in part because adults had more time to read, and bought more educational materials and children’s books as a result of school closures.
> Since 2020 was an outlier, Connor looked at data from the previous presidential election, in 2016, and found that there were fewer new books that November compared with the previous year: New ISBNs, the unique tags used to identify books, fell by 8 percent.
> “I think sometimes it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Todd Stocke, editorial director and senior vice president at Sourcebooks. “We assume that people are going to be distracted, and we therefore adjust our schedules around it — but it’s an assumption.”
> The idea that books shouldn’t come out during the fall of a presidential election is “somewhere between being an old wives’ tale and a canard,” said Karp, rattling off a number of major titles coming from Simon & Schuster imprints: novels by Janet Evanovich and Chuck Palahniuk; biographies of John Lewis, Mitch McConnell and Johnny Carson; a book investigating Opus Dei.
> But, Karp added, “if you’re publishing books off the news — if your main objective is to get news attention, and the news media is preoccupied 24/7 with presidential politics — then it might behoove you to publish another time.”
> As for fiction, he said, a genre that tends to be less dependent on news coverage — “Janet Evanovich, Chuck Palahniuk don’t have to worry about who’s running for president. If you’ve written an exquisite first novel for delicate sensibilities, then publishing into the din of an election might not be advisable. But actually, that’s true even in years when there isn’t an election — the fall does tend to be when the heaviest hitters are taking their swing.”
> Kathleen Schmidt, who writes the newsletter Publishing Confidential, said, “If you’re a midlist author or you’re a debut author — you’re not getting published in the fall, you’re getting published after the inauguration.” Schmidt said that the upcoming election season will be a major test for many publishers. “There isn’t a pandemic,” she said. “Social media has been overtaken by politics — it’s a cesspool. Books coverage has been decimated; it’s really tough to get reviews.”
> Others are less apprehensive. “There’s nothing different happening in our bookstores,” Stocke said. “There’s nothing different happening at major-market retailers, in their book sections, that’s any different in the months of the election than occurs the rest of the time.”
> Some genres may be completely unaffected by political events — or may even enjoy a boost during the tumult of the election. Pamela Jaffee, senior director of brand marketing and publicity at Sourcebook imprints BloomBooks and Casablanca, recalls flying to Ohio for a romance author event days after Trump was elected in 2016, and seeing hundreds of attendees. This summer, during the presidential debate in June, thousands of readers instead chose to log on to a romantasy authors panel.
> “Genre lovers are still going to want to escape,” Jaffee said. “Readers are still going to want to turn away from the TV and find their Zen moment.”
1 Comment
Just in case there’s a paywall, here’s the text:
> Our phones are flooded with fundraising text messages. Our mailboxes are stuffed with campaign fliers.
> Another side effect of election season? Fewer new books to read.
> Conventional wisdom in the publishing industry has long held that it’s best to avoid releasing new books during the fall of a presidential election. It’s harder during those months to book authors for promotional media appearances, with politics eating up all the airtime. It may also be more difficult to get attention from social media influencers and book bloggers, with everyone’s eyes fixed on the news.
> “There are conversations at publishing houses everywhere about this very issue,” said Jonathan Karp, president and publisher at Simon & Schuster. “It is definitely a source of agita.”
> The effect seems especially stark at independent presses. Debra Englander, a consulting editor at Post Hill Press, said she advised authors to either publish by September or wait until the first quarter of 2025, “just because it’s hard to predict what people’s moods will be. But certainly, from August on, it’s going to be wall-to-wall ads, conventions, debates.”
> “Getting press coverage can make or break a book for us, and while I cannot see into the future, I knew from past experience that publishing during the peak of the election cycle would be an unforced error,” Christina Ward, vice president and editor at the publisher Feral House, wrote in an email. “Pushing those titles to January and February 2025 — even with the potential for political shenanigans in January — seemed like a far better course of action than knowingly consigning them to the press abyss.”
> Similarly, at She Writes Press and SparkPress, “we consciously have a shorter list,” publisher Brooke Warner said. “We front-loaded into September, early October, and then we pushed a bunch of books to December and January.” The worry that elections would dampen public interest in books has been on the industry’s radar going back decades, Warner said, “but 2016 was a whole other level. When Trump ran the first time, it was very clear to publishers that he was just a media cyclone.”
> Avoiding election season is probably just a “cautionary” measure, Warner said, but “there are certainly books that have failed or been compromised because they came out in terrible moments.”
> “Sales during election years don’t show major declines,” Brenna Connor, a book industry analyst for the market research firm Circana, wrote in an email to The Post. In 2016 and 2012, sales dropped by 1 percent compared with the prior year; in 2008, they grew by 7 percent. In 2020, sales hit a 15-year high — in part because adults had more time to read, and bought more educational materials and children’s books as a result of school closures.
> Since 2020 was an outlier, Connor looked at data from the previous presidential election, in 2016, and found that there were fewer new books that November compared with the previous year: New ISBNs, the unique tags used to identify books, fell by 8 percent.
> “I think sometimes it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Todd Stocke, editorial director and senior vice president at Sourcebooks. “We assume that people are going to be distracted, and we therefore adjust our schedules around it — but it’s an assumption.”
> The idea that books shouldn’t come out during the fall of a presidential election is “somewhere between being an old wives’ tale and a canard,” said Karp, rattling off a number of major titles coming from Simon & Schuster imprints: novels by Janet Evanovich and Chuck Palahniuk; biographies of John Lewis, Mitch McConnell and Johnny Carson; a book investigating Opus Dei.
> But, Karp added, “if you’re publishing books off the news — if your main objective is to get news attention, and the news media is preoccupied 24/7 with presidential politics — then it might behoove you to publish another time.”
> As for fiction, he said, a genre that tends to be less dependent on news coverage — “Janet Evanovich, Chuck Palahniuk don’t have to worry about who’s running for president. If you’ve written an exquisite first novel for delicate sensibilities, then publishing into the din of an election might not be advisable. But actually, that’s true even in years when there isn’t an election — the fall does tend to be when the heaviest hitters are taking their swing.”
> Kathleen Schmidt, who writes the newsletter Publishing Confidential, said, “If you’re a midlist author or you’re a debut author — you’re not getting published in the fall, you’re getting published after the inauguration.” Schmidt said that the upcoming election season will be a major test for many publishers. “There isn’t a pandemic,” she said. “Social media has been overtaken by politics — it’s a cesspool. Books coverage has been decimated; it’s really tough to get reviews.”
> Others are less apprehensive. “There’s nothing different happening in our bookstores,” Stocke said. “There’s nothing different happening at major-market retailers, in their book sections, that’s any different in the months of the election than occurs the rest of the time.”
> Some genres may be completely unaffected by political events — or may even enjoy a boost during the tumult of the election. Pamela Jaffee, senior director of brand marketing and publicity at Sourcebook imprints BloomBooks and Casablanca, recalls flying to Ohio for a romance author event days after Trump was elected in 2016, and seeing hundreds of attendees. This summer, during the presidential debate in June, thousands of readers instead chose to log on to a romantasy authors panel.
> “Genre lovers are still going to want to escape,” Jaffee said. “Readers are still going to want to turn away from the TV and find their Zen moment.”