Mo Farah and Jennifer Saunders autobiographies compete against latest Bridget Jones and Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch
The Christmas season began in earnest, with celebrities, sports stars and literary titans hitting the bookshop shelves on the second of the publishing industry's Super Thursdays.
Autobiographies by actors Jennifer Saunders and David Jason, football manager Harry Redknapp and Olympic gold medallist Mo Farah jostle for attention alongside fiction from British and American authors, Conn Iggulden and Dave Eggers respectively. But according to Waterstones' Jon Howells, publishers are moving away from a big bang of major releases.
"Super Thursday was a real thing four or five years ago, when publishers brought out everything at once," he said, "but frankly it got a bit ridiculous. Over the last couple of years things have got a lot more sensible, with big titles published over a six-week period. It's better to think of it as a Super Thursday season."
One of the novels Howells is expecting to be a Christmas bestseller is Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, the story of a young New Yorker whose life is turned upside down by a terrorist bombing. Hailed by the New York Times as a dazzling Dickensian thriller, the US author's first novel in more than 10 years will not be published in until 22 October. The latest Bridget Jones novel by Helen Fielding, Mad About the Boy, was published in the UK earlier this week.
"The important thing for us is that a lot of good books are published in this part of the year," Howells explained. "What day they're published doesn't really matter to the people buying them, or the people selling them, as long as we have them in time for Christmas."
The last quarter of the year is vital for booksellers, as for all retailers. Figures from Nielsen Bookscan show that almost a third of UK book sales are made between mid-October and Christmas Eve. The Christmas period is even more important for celebrity memoir – in 2012, 62% of sports autobiographies and 72% of arts autobiographies sales were made between 10 October and the end of the year.
The heyday of the celebrity autobiography may have passed, however, with 2012 sales of £23m being 45% down on their 2008 peak. The genre still features heavily on Christmas bestseller lists – celebrity memoirs fill seven of the top 10 slots in the latest betting for this year's seasonal bestseller – but the top slot has gone to fiction, with Fielding installed as 4/6 favourite despite poor reviews. According to Ladbrokes' Alex Donohue, the death of Jones's long-term love interest, Mark Darcy, has "whipped fans into a frenzy … We're convinced it's a certainty to be the the chart-topping book as a result."
For Howells, the slew of high-profile titles published this autumn – including accounts of the first world war from the historian Max Hastings and the cartoonist Joe Sacco – also brings in customers who don't usually spend much time in bookshops. "Most people enjoy browsing. Ideally somebody will go in looking for one book and come out with two or three."
While the Super Thursday season tended to offer a slightly distorted picture of publishing, he said, it was the less publicised works that were likely to endure.
"After you get away from the film stars, the sports stars and the rock stars, you'll find literature – great fiction, great non-fiction – still on the shelves. These are the books that will last."
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