A crowded fall season leads to serious deja vu

By Sarah on October 19, 2006 9:17 AM

Which probably explains the more-than-faint whiff of familiarity that accompanies Julie Bosman’s NYT piece on fall fiction overcrowding. But props to her for getting Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal to close with the (admittedly obvious) line of the season: “It is Darwinian. Some books will live, and some books will die.”

But if next fall proves to be similarly crowded on the fiction front, perhaps there could be some sort of Tournament of Books-esque competition where titles duke it out, and the winner gets a Merry Marching No-Prize or something similar?

Ron adds his two cents: The nut graf here seems to be Bosman’s observation that “publishers and retailers are hoping for an industrywide lift during this high season, when holiday gift giving pushes up bookstore traffic. It may also be a respite for booksellers, who have been grumbling for several years about sluggish sales and a dearth of dependable blockbuster fiction.” And yet, one of the strongest undercurrents from publishers—though much muted in the span of time from Josh Getlin’s LAT story to Bosman’s follow-up visit—is that with so many books out there with the potential to do well simultaneously, we shouldn’t expect them all to actually live up to their potential. Fair enough…but a cynical observer might also detect a defeatist strain, as if, on the eve of the season that might finally reverse years of “sluggish sales,” publishers are already trying to spin their failure to capitalize on this literary cornucopia before it even falls apart, just in case. In that context, Rosenthal’s other major point cited in the Bosman piece—that “whatever sales might be lost because of the crowded market are usually made up in the higher sales in bookstores”—strikes a much needed tone of rational exuberance.