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Johnson, Rankin and Steadman lead a souped-up tranche for Super Thursday
The autumn’s biggest publication day bounces back, but there is plenty more across the Christmas run-in.
Boris Johnson’s Unleashed, Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus novel, A F Steadman’s fourth Skandar middle-grade and a raft of memoirs from celebrities including Rick Astley and Alison Steadman are among more than 450 hardbacks that will be released on 10th October, this year’s Super Thursday.
Super Thursday is the industry’s annual heaviest publication day, with nearly 1,900 books due to be published this 10th October, 457 of which are hardbacks. This represents a 30% rise in hard covers over the previous two Super Thursdays, which slumped as book production contracted sharply post-pandemic.
Last year’s Super Thursday started slowly but ended an unassailable triumph. It was by far the most valuable publication day of the year, producing some of the biggest hits of Christmas 2023, including Billy Connolly’s Rambling Man, Mary Berry’s Mary Makes It Easy and David Walliams’ and Adam Stower’s The Blunders. Seven books released on Super Thursday 2023 shifted more than £1m through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market by year’s end in all editions, while 11 exceeded the £500,000 mark. No other publication date produced more than four seven-figure titles.
Unleashed at the very least is certain to start with a bang and could eclipse Tony Blair’s ex-PM autobiography launch-week TCM record of 92,060 copies
Johnson’s Unleashed (William Collins) is set to be the bestselling politics book of the year and may challenge for 2024’s top memoir. Whatever one thinks of his Party-and Wallpaper-gated premiership, Johnson has star power and a track record in the charts with lifetime TCM sales of £6.3m, £3.4m of which was from 2014’s The Churchill Factor (Hodder).
Unleashed at the very least is certain to start with a bang and could eclipse Tony Blair’s ex-PM autobiography launch-week TCM record of 92,060 copies. If Johnson does hit that mark, in one week he would exceed the life sales of his Tory predecessors/successor David Cameron, Theresa May and Liz Truss, whose memoirs (and sort-of memoirs) have combined to shift just under 91,000 units.
Rankin’s Midnight and Blue (Orion) will be the fourth consecutive Rebus novel to be released on Super Thursday with two of the previous three – In a House of Lies and A Song for the Dark Times – claiming Original Fiction number one. Rankin should get an extra boost this time out following the recent BBC “Rebus” reboot.
Rankin leads a strong Super Thursday on the more commercial/reading group end of fiction, which includes Sophie Kinsella’s What Does It Feel Like? (Bantam), Kate Mosse’s The Map of Bones (Macmillan) and By Any Other Name (Penguin Michael Joseph), Jodi Picoult’s first foray into historical fiction. Plus, there is celebrity cosy crime in Julian Clary’s Curtain Call to Murder (Orion) and Shirley Ballas’ second Sequins Mystery title, Dance to the Death (HQ); it will be interesting to see whether the latter will be adversely affected by the “Strictly Come Dancing” scandal.
Gaudy for kids
A F Steadman leads a gaudy Super Thursday children’s contingent, which also includes Jamie Smart’s newest Bunny vs Monkey comic, The Great Big Glitch (David Fickling); Liz Pichon’s Tom Gates Ha! Ha! Ha! Hilarious (Scholastic); and The Christmasaurus and the Night Before Christmas (Puffin), Tom Fletcher and illustrator Shane Devries’ sixth Christmasaurus title, the previous five of which have been festive hits, combining to shift 1.9 million copies for £9.2m through the TCM.
With 1980s pop-star-turned-internet meme Astley and Alison (“Mr Bennet!”) Steadman, publishers Macmillan and HarperCollins (respectively) seem to be aiming for that Miriam Margolyes/national treasure slot: a slightly quirkier celebrity memoir that can catch fire, particularly if accompanied by sparkling turns on chat show sofas.
While Super Thursday is the biggest launch period of the year – and a good excuse for the industry collectively to make some noise about autumn releases – since The Bookseller first identified the phenomenon in 2008, we have stressed that it is but one day in a busy schedule. Overall, the autumn slate looks very strong, which with a following wind could turn spectacular.
A big change to an autumn hardy perennial is Jamie Oliver moving from his usual circa-August bank holiday slot to the last week of September. While we’re not passing the hat for the biggest-selling non-fiction author since records began (TCM to date: £205.8m), it has been five years since an Oliver title sold more than £5m during the Christmas run-in (5 Ingredients Mediterranean “only” earned £2.9m through BookScan in 2023). With Simply Jamie, Penguin Michael Joseph is clearly trying to change the recipe, not only with the new pub date but a fresh, pared-down livery.
Simply Jamie should have a clear run to the Hardback Non-Fiction number one at launch, and perhaps the overall top spot, though it competes with Nigel Slater’s A Thousand Feasts (Fourth Estate), which should have a good Christmas. Plus, there will be a lot of noise for that week’s other big release, Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (Faber).
New Osman series
Richard Osman’s kickoff to his new series, We Solve Murders (Viking), could still hold the overall pole position when Simply Jamie publishes. In 2023, Osman’s The Last Devil to Die sold nearly 147,000 units in its mid-September launch week, on its way to shifting 529,000 hardbacks by year’s end. Mind you, that was 60,000 units down on the performance of 2022’s The Bullet That Missed. With this level of volume, that book-on-book contraction is like a deckchair falling off the “Queen Mary”, but it is perhaps a good strategy to pause the Thursday Murder Club for a new series. It would be hard to bet against We Solve Murders being the best-selling book this Christmas.
Osman’s newest is out on 12th September, the second heaviest release date of the year with 388 hardbacks published. Osman’s competition includes Bella Mackie’s much-anticipated How to Kill Your Family follow-up What a Way to Go (The Borough Press); “Countdown”-er turned Tory scourge Carol Vorderman’s tilt at the Rory Stewart/James O’Brien “broken Britain” space, Now What? (Headline); and The Siege (Viking), Ben Macintyre’s look at the 1980 Iranian embassy hostage incident.
Other key dates: autumn 2024
29th August
The Christmas selling season begins in earnest with two huge releases: Bob Mortimer above follows up The Satsuma Complex (TCM: £5.3m), with a second fruit-titled novel, The Hotel Avocado (Simon & Schuster), while Matt Haig returns with The Life Impossible (Canongate), his first full-length work of fiction since 2020’s all-conquering The Midnight Library.
5th September
The last four Yotam Ottolenghi cookery titles have shifted at least 175,000 copies in their initial Christmas run-ins (and go on to backlist for yonks). The unnecessarily capped-up Ottolenghi COMFORT (Ebury), written with Helen Goh, should continue that run. Helped by its clever packaging and celeb author, Gillian Anderson’s collection of anonymously submitted women’s sexual fantasies, Want (Bloomsbury), seems destined to be a hit.
24th October
David Walliams and Jeff Kinney face off in the same publication week for the first time in over a decade. On current form, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid creator’s Hot Mess (Puffin) has the edge on Walliams’ and illustrator Adam Stower’s Super Sleuth (HarperCollins Children’s): in 2023, Kinney’s autumn hardback outsold Walliams’ by 13%. But Walliams’ newest is his first foray into crime, which may draw a fresh audience.
19th November
Originally acquired way back in 2017, Cher’s The Memoir, Part One (HarperCollins) finally arrives (icons, one imagines, are very busy). In a season light on A-listers – excepting Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy (Century, 24th October) or perhaps the late Donald Sutherland’s Made Up, But Still True (Cornerstone, 12th November) – Cher’s autobiography should be an Elton or Britney-level blockbuster.
