Rick Simonson

Fall Upon Us
May 7, 2008

Monday, May 5th, just past 1 p.m. Some email is being tended to as I hear the voice of David Glenn, our estimable Random House 'Blue' rep - various greetings and commentaries going on with my Elliott Bay coworkers. In short order, we do our own exchange of greetings - he gets the laptop out, plugged in. I wrap up email, check the catalogs I have stacked. All there? Including the ones sent out for more expert order-marking?

It's a newsworthy day, too - word of Peter Olson's impending, rumored or more-than-rumored, are in news reports. David says he hasn't seen them. Peter Aaron, our store's owner, gives him the New York Times piece.

A little musing - whatever this may mean - and we decide to get onto it. Sidetracking - getting on to other subjects will happen as a matter of course. For me this is the season opener, first pitch, first at-bat, opening tip, first putting of the ball in play. There's some impatience, if little ceremony. It isn't the earliest this has all started, nor is it the latest. David says he's done a few appointments already.

Our respective computers ready for their part - ours with generating a purchase order number and recording the order's terms, and his for handling the whole order - we begin. Fall Season 2008.

Appropriately, it  begins with add-ons. (Or is it 'early ships'? ... the terminology ....). We review ones may or may not have done. Are we current? We seem to be. But there are new ones.

Yes, add-ons have become more and more part of the game the past few years, some publishers making it a built-in part of business on a grand, if utterly chaotic scale. Something tells me we're facing a season - a fall, fiscal year - unlike any we, as bookstore buyers if not book business people in general, have faced.

In looking broadly at the larger house lists seen so far - most of them, most of them not that closely - I'd say there are some very good, strong-looking books out there, but that no one publisher is going out with any list resembling a best-ever.

Part of that may be a wariness as to how to publish into a national election year. Hence, we see Paul Auster being published in August, doing his touring in September. We have, from what I can see, a weirdly quiet October (author tours for the fall have been booking for a while now, also hinting at this pattern), the big E-Day of November 4 - and then, come November 18 - a big wild burst: hello Toni Morrison, hello added-on P.D. James.I think the added-on Wally Lamb and Gregory Maguire are in that latter stretch, too.

Hand in hand - and unavoidable for publishers under the vise of matching/exceeding previous years' numbers - is the matter of getting those numbers. That won't be waiting for fall.

Yesterday, two days before I'm due to see him, Patrick McNierney, our Penguin hardcover rep was on major order-hunting gathering of an urgent nature (he possibly even used the red exclamation mark, something that's the usual, almost exclusive province of one rep and one New York-based gatherer of author event numbers). Viking had acquired the rights to a self-published author whose book chronicled her recovery from a stroke. Orders needed by today (May 7), books here in day or three, and author then on Oprah - next week. The announced print run was somewhere north of 300,000. Okay, those are numbers. I don't think I can remember anything else about it ... at this point. But am I supposed to? We'll see how it all plays through.

All of which is saying now, as catalogs are looked at, as reps come with add-ons (for now), as other titles no doubt get announced at BEA, and on through winter/spring list presentations in September, the 'fall' will have a fluid, ever-changing look to it.

Meanwhile, thank you David Glenn, it was nice to set to it. So that's what Salman Rushdie's new novel (added earlier in the spring looks like in catalog finery.) And then: David Ebershoff (superb editor and author), Kenneth Pollack (wrong again, wrong again, wrong again), but yes, a few, a few will likely sell), Bill Walsh (maybe a football book that football people will read ... maybe), Curtis Sittenfield (all the obvious reference to her debut, Prep, but wasn't there a subsequent one ..?) ... off and going we are ... 

Posted by Rick Simonson on May 7, 2008 | Comments (0)