Are There Too Many Great Books Coming?

Josh Getlin of the LA Times proposes that “the largest number of new titles by brand-name authors in recent memory is hitting bookstores” this fall, and has people like Michael Cader wondering “whether this is too much at once, whether the market can handle it.”

Getlin observes: “There are new books from bestselling ‘blockbuster’ types such as John Grisham, making his first foray into nonfiction; John Le Carré; Stephen King; Michael Crichton; Robert Ludlum; James Patterson; Dean Koontz; Michael Connelly; Tess Gerritsen; David Baldacci; and Danielle Steel, all of whom rarely, if ever, publish a sales dud.”

And then there’s a bunch of literary fiction (“Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy, Isabel Allende, Richard Ford, Mary Gordon, and Charles Frazier“) and a bunch of high-profile nonfiction (“Bob Woodward, Frank Rich, Bill O’Reilly, Andrew Sullivan, John Ashcroft and Sen. Barack Obama“), plus a couple other A-list authors thrown in for good measure (although the idea that the forthcoming memoir from Gore Vidal is going to burn up the bestseller lists strikes me as rather wildly optimistic). Totally missing from Getlin’s estimation of the market, however, are potential bestsellers from the science fiction and fantasy market, including new books by Neil Gaiman, Susanna Clarke, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Orson Scott Card…a curious omission since the hardcover fiction bestseller lists (especially the New York Times) always seem to include at least one SF/F title these days. In next Sunday’s list, for example, the genre accounts for seven of the 35 titles on the extended list, or 20%—more if you want to include the new Tim LaHaye.

So count me in among the “not impressed by all those big names” camp; despite all the hoopla over this season’s bumper crop, I suspect you can point to just about any season and find a roughly comparable slew of hot writers with new products, and if the publishing industry somehow fails to make oodles and oodles of cash this holiday season, it’s not going to be because too many nifty books drove potential readers into inaction, unable to choose between the new Crichton and the “new Ludlum.”* Frankly, I found a much more interesting aspect to Getlin’s story in a tiny section about how publishing hottie Leah Wasielewski reached out to non-literary websites in order to create buzz around Robert Harris’ Imperium. Other than that, this story’s a long chain of same old same old, I’m afraid.

*And how the heck did Getlin manage to put that on his list with a straight face?

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