Brown and Pullman bookend strong Super Thursday offer

This year’s Super Thursday falls on 5th October, The Bookseller can reveal, with 505 new hardbacks scheduled to hit shelves on that day, all competing for a slice of the Christmas-gifting pudding.

The stakes are high, with booksellers vying for their portion of more than £558m worth of book sales; 66 million books were shifted between 2nd October and 24th December last year, according to Nielsen BookScan, with the success of key titles making or breaking many businesses in the last quarter.

Super Thursday will see the release of Five Escape Brexit Island by Bruno Vincent (Quercus) - the follow-up to Five on Brexit Island, which finished second in the race to be Christmas Number One last year - Tom Fletcher’s The Creakers (Puffin) and Mary Berry’s Mary’s Household Tips & Tricks (Michael Joseph). Also out that day are Richard Branson’s Finding My Virginity (Virgin Books), David Jason’s Only Fools and Stories (Century), Nadiya’s Bake Me a Festive Story by “Great British Bake Off” winner Nadiya Hussain (Hodder Children’s) and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair (Picador). And pipping Super Thursday titles to the post by just two days is Dan Brown’s fifth Robert Langdon book, Origin (Bantam Press), out on Tuesday 3rd October.

To boost the titles’ chances of success, retailers across the country will be holding parties on Bookshop Day to mark the launch of cross-industry campaign Books Are My Bag on Saturday 7th October.

A “mini Super Thursday” falls two weeks later on 19th October, with the release of 260 hardbacks, including the first in Philip Pullman’s much-anticipated Book of Dust series, La Belle Sauvage (Penguin Random House Children’s and David Fickling Books), which several retailers are tipping to grab the Christmas Number One crown. However, the novel, which returns to the bestselling world of His Dark Materials, is likely to tussle for the top spot with two new Harry Potter books coming from Bloomsbury: Harry Potter: A History of Magic, a £30 hardback with full-colour illustrations, coinciding with a British Library exhibition entitled “Harry Potter: A History of Magic”, on 20th October; and paperback Harry Potter: A Journey Through a History of Magic (£12.99), published on the same day.

The children’s category is incredibly strong this year, booksellers have reported, with titles from John Green, David Walliams, Jeff Kinney and Julia Donaldson joining Fletcher, Pullman and Harry Potter in the festive release line-up. Katharine Fry, trading buying manager for Blackwell’s, said: “Our Christmas number one will be Pullman, a publishing event every bookseller can celebrate which is bound to see amazing sales. Children’s is looking great, with Pullman publishing just after John Green and Harry Potter to follow.”

General fiction is also looking robust, Waterstones buying director Kate Skipper noted, with offerings from John le Carré, Richard Flanagan, Tom Hanks, Lee Child, Robert Harris and Stephen King, in addition to Hollinghurst and Brown. However, non-fiction is more “variable”, Skipper reckoned, with strong history, politics, current affairs titles and gifting highlights such as The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young (Faber) and Tim Peake’s Ask an Astronaut (Century) being offset by a “quiet” year for celebrities and sport.

She added that while cookery had “bounced back” after a weak 2016, with titles from Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver and Yotam Ottolenghi, celebrity memoirs were thinner on the ground, citing Me Life Story: Sofa, So Good! (Blink Publishing) by Scarlett Moffatt from “Gogglebox” and Sarah Millican’s How to be a Champion (Trapeze). Instead, celebrities appear to have turned their hand to writing children’s books, with stories coming from Cara Delevingne, Miranda Hart, Alison Steadman and Tim Minchin all out on Super Thursday.

Among booksellers, a leftfield choice for a Christmas celebrity hit was vlogger The Chicken Connoisseur, who has penned The Pengest Munch: In Search of the Nation’s 50 Favourite Chicken Establishments (Blink).

While the past few festive seasons have seen the emergence of fruitful trends for bookshops such as adult colouring, nostalgia titles and last year’s Danish-inspired hygge, booksellers are torn on what might cut through this year.

Many, such as Amazon.co.uk books director Dan Mucha, tipped lagom, Sweden’s version of the lifestyle trend, which translates roughly as “not too much and not too little, but just the right amount”. “Following the popularity of hygge, we expect to see the Swedish trend of lagom, meaning balanced living, to be the next big thing with a number of upcoming releases on the trend,” Mucha said.

However, Sarah Walden, group buying and merchandising director at The Book People, was less convinced. “Our customers responded to hygge last year but we’re not convinced that they will understand lagom in quite the same way, so we will only dip our toe into this market,” she said. “We are still hoping that something might emerge to replace the previously successful trend of adult colouring.”

Waterstones’ Skipper thinks books on “kindness” might break through instead. “The next major trend remains to be seen,” she said. “There is certainly plenty more Scandi-lifestyle publishing to continue that trend, but I have my fingers crossed for kindness [titles].” Books the retailer is supporting in the category include Kindness: The Little Thing That Matters Most by Jaime Thurston (HarperCollins) and The Little Book of Kindness by Bernadette Russell (Orion).

Similarly, Emma Milne-White of Hungerford Bookshop said “self-care” titles were proving popular with customers. “I’m tired of spoof texts, but I’ve noticed books on things in life that can make you happy, a trend of simplification, and self-care coming through,” she said.

Bertram Books head of commercial development David Pagendam agreed that books on mental health and introspection had proved popular this year, and he believes political books will be boosted considering the current climate. “The trend for colouring books and celeb memoirs appears to be waning,” he said. “But politics is back on the agenda with a renewed interest in publishing in this space. In non-fiction, mental health has emerged as a strong trend.”

There will be a slew of parenting titles hitting the market, inspired by the success of The Unmumsy Mum (Bantam Press). Among them are: Sketchy Muma: What it Means to be a Mother by Anna Lewis (Quercus), Why Mummy Drinks by Gill Simms (HarperCollins), Confessions of a Learner Parent by Sam Avery (Orion) and Parenting the Sh*t out of Life by Anna Whitehouse (Hodder), along with The New Mum’s Notebook by Amy Ransom (Hutchinson).

Fry said of the overall offer: “It’s shaping up to be a really strong autumn, with some stellar names and also a great selection of titles that indie [booksellers] can really get behind.” Amazon’s Mucha added: “What is certainly clear is the high number of first-rate books being released in the run-up to Christmas, proving the strength of the UK publishing industry.”