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Some publishers are pushing publication of titles back into the summer to avoid ongoing lockdowns, although the widespread changes to schedules seen last year have largely been avoided.
With England's lockdown set to last until at least the end of March, some presses have resisted making changes. However, in recent weeks HarperCollins, Walker Books, Atlantic and Oneworld have been among publishers rescheduling several of their books which were due for release over the next few months, citing lockdown and the ongoing closure of physical bookshops as the reason. Quercus has also delayed three of its March titles until June, although a reason has not been given.
At HarperCollins, books that have recently had publishing dates delayed include HQ titles Anna Kent's House of Whispers and Darren O'Sullivan's The Players, although the company said most books were being released as originally scheduled. A spokesperson said: "As in the first lockdown and throughout 2020, we have held our publishing programme in place, although we have moved a few titles that rely heavily on the support of high street bookshops."
Oneworld publisher Juliet Mabey explained her titles benefit the most from high street shops being open. Affected books include The Good State by A C Grayling, The Edge by Jamie Collinson and Karolina, or The Torn Curtain by Jacek Dehnel.
She said: “Last year we postponed almost all our titles from May and June to 'safer' months when bookshops were expected to be open, so at the beginning of January when we suspected bookshops might be closed until Easter, we took a hard look at that experience, especially at the March and April 2020 titles that we couldn’t move in time. As a result of that review, we decided to move the majority of our UK editions scheduled to publish in February and March to April-June dates.
“Although like other publishers we are investing more money and energy in online advertising and social media, we still feel that most of our titles benefit enormously from the support of brick and mortar bookshops so, despite the likely disruption, this measure was felt to be in our authors’ best interests."
At Atlantic, Will Atkinson said his team were only rescheduling paperback releases after last year's experience showed decent publicity and online sales through Amazon allowed the firm to make “quite a fist of things”.
He said: “We're moving titles that Waterstones had indicated they would support. We've moved six — one from February to March, a very big one from March to late August, and a few others.
“Waterstones really come to the fore with our non-fiction publishing. We can't move everything but those ones that Waterstones has indicated it wants to support, we have moved for a time when they are hopefully open.”
He added: "It's not like March last year which was barely existential, we sort of know what we're doing — the e-book sales have already started to [rise], they haven't gone bananas like they did in April but they're now certainly 20% to 30% up on where they would be. Our physical sales are down, so we are going to have to play catch up for the next three quarters of the year."
However, after a 2020 when many in the trade actually saw strong sales despite disruption caused by the pandemic, other publishing firms have been reluctant to make changes to their schedules.
Penguin General has moved publication days for a couple of titles but The Bookseller understands this was not necessarily related to the lockdown. Schedules are thought to be much the same across Penguin Random House, with no proactive changes of the like seen in parts of the trade early last year.
At Canongate, commercial director Jenny Fry said: "We’re sticking with our adult publishing schedule, with Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library in paperback leading the way. It proved the perfect antidote to last year’s lockdown and we’re hoping it does likewise for readers this late winter and spring. We are however moving Jess Kidd’s debut children’s book Everyday Magic to April, when we can give it a noisy kids campaign during the Easter holidays."