Super Thursday 2021 production drops but it still packs a punch

This Super Thursday—which The Bookseller has identified as 14th October—will be the “lightest” in years, with the pandemic rattling autumn publishing schedules for the second consecutive year.

But while fewer titles will be released on the UK trade’s annual peak production day than in recent times, 2021’s line-up is pound-for-pound one of the strongest in years, with highlights including the first full memoir from Billy Connolly, comedian Michael McIntyre’s return, John le Carré’s final novel, a raft of cookery titles from the likes of Nigel Slater, the Hairy Bikers and Gordon Ramsay—plus a strong children’s offering led by superstars Julia Donaldson, Liz Pichon, Tom Fletcher and the first kids' title by Sir Lenny Henry.

In total, 292 new hardbacks are scheduled to be released on Super Thursday 2021, down from the bottlenecked 790 last year and the 495 in pre-pandemic 2019. From 2008 to 2019, there was an average of 445 hardbacks released on Super Thursday. The 2020 Super Thursday spike was due to publishers switching release dates to deal with lockdowns. But as The Bookseller pointed out last year, despite some clogged points, production actually fell sharply in 2020, a trend that has continued in 2021. There are 11,955 hardbacks scheduled to be released from 1st August to 31st December, a 16% drop on the same period in 2020—which itself was the lightest autumn schedule in seven years.

At the moment, just under 140,000 titles in all print and digital formats have been or are due to be released across 2021 in the UK (technically, 139,642 new ISBNs have been issued). If that holds—and publication levels rarely change significantly by this point in a year—2021 will have the fewest books published for 15 years.

Connolly’s Windswept & Interesting (Two Roads) and McIntyre’s A Funny Life (Macmillan) lead the Super Thursday stand-up race, but they are not alone, as a number of comedians seem to have had some time on their hands in the last year or so. They are joined on the day by Jack Whitehall’s How to Survive Family Holidays (Sphere), Rob Beckett’s A Class Act (HarperCollins) and Julian Clary’s The Lick of Love (Quercus), the last an “autobi-dog-graphy” of how his pooches have changed Clary's life. The wider celeb market also sees newly-minted Olympic gold medalist Tom Daley's Coming Up for Air (HQ), "Rupaul's Drag Race UK" runner-up Bimini Bon Boulash's Release the Beast (Viking) and Love and Fury (Hodder), TV personality Paris Fury on life with her heavyweight champion husband Tyson "the Gypsy King" Fury.

Nor is le Carré’s Silverview (Viking) the only posthumous fiction surprise. Mantle will publish Andrea Camilleri’s Riccardino, translated by Stephen Sartarelli. The late, great Italian crime writer actually wrote the novel in 2005 and kept it locked in a vault with instructions for it to be published after his death. Other fiction highlights include Sophie Kinsella's The Party Crasher (Bantam), Christine Pride and Jo Piazza's much-hyped "Little Fires Everywhere meets The Hate U Give", We Are Not Like Them (HQ), plus the conclusion of Heather Morris' the Tattooist of Auschwitz trilogy, Three Sisters (Bonnier).

In children's, Donaldson's and illustrator Victoria Sand√∏y's The Christmas Pine (Scholastic) is adapted from a poem the Gruffalo co-creator was commissioned to write last year by the Poetry Society to welcome a Christmas Tree to Trafalgar Square. Pichon's Random Acts of Fun (Scholastic) is her 19th outing in the Tom Gates series, the last five of which have been the children's number one in their début week. The Christmasaurus and the Naughty List (Puffin) will be the third in Fletcher and Shane Devries' series, the previous two of which have combined to shift £3.8m through BookScan in all formats. Henry and illustrator Keenon Ferrell's The Boy with Wings is a middle-grade novel that also includes a comic book with art by Mark Buckingham and is the first in a massive middle-grade and picture book deal Henry signed with Macmillan Children's last year.

As has been the case for the last few Super Thursday weeks, a number of high-profile titles are being released on the Tuesday in order to gain two more days to bolster first-week sales numbers. Sixty hardbacks will be published on 12th October, led by J K Rowling's latest entry for younger readers, The Christmas Pig (Little, Brown), with illustrations from Jim Field; and three authors from the celebrity non-fiction space with début crime novels: Ant Middleton's Cold Justice (Sphere), astronaut Chris Hadfield's The Apollo Murders (Quercus) and Hillary Rodham Clinton's State of Terror (Macmillan). The former First Lady and US secretary of state is writing her thriller with Canadian novelist Louise Penny and if there is familial competition at play, the Clinton/Penny team need to shift more than 18,961 copies if they are to eclipse Bill Clinton and James Patterson's début-week sales for their first collaboration, 2018's The President is Missing (Century).

As also has been the case for the last few years, there are a few "mini-Super Thursdays" with heavy publication schedules and high-profile releases. The race for Christmas kicks off in earnest, as it does almost every year, with the Thursday that the newest Jamie Oliver comes out. Oliver's Together (Penguin Michael Joseph) launches on 2nd September and if it matches the £6.4m Veg (PMJ) earned in autumn 2019, by year's end the celeb chef will become just the second author in history to pass the £200m mark through BookScan. Other big books out on 2nd September are actor David Harewood's memoir of race and mental health, Maybe I Don't Belong Here (Bluebird), ITV's Robert Peston's first foray into crime writing, The Whistleblower (Zaffre), and The Dark Remains (Canongate), a "team-up" of Scots crime greats, with Ian Rankin completing a new Laidlaw book from the late William McIlvanney's notes. The 16th is September's other flashpoint, featuring Malorie Blackman's final Noughts and Crosses title, Endgame (Penguin), hardy perennial Guinness World Records 2022 and what assuredly will be the number one that week, Richard Osman's second Thursday Murder Club title, The Man Who Died Twice (Viking).

The 28th is October's mini-Super Thursday, with outings including cricketer Freddie Flintoff's The Book of Fred (Blink), Mary Berry's Love to Cook (BBC), Max Hasting's Soldiers (William Collins) and Putting the Rabbit in the Hat (Quercus), the memoir of character actor turned "Succession" superstar Brian Cox.

At the Booksellers Association, m.d. Meryl Halls said this year's Super Thursday would be vital for shops that have experienced endless period of lockdown during the coronavirus crisis.

She told The Bookseller: “After an uncertain year for booksellers, in which key sales periods were affected by lockdowns, restrictions and decreased footfall, this year’s Super Thursday will be more important than ever for our bookshops. The months before Christmas are always a vital time for booksellers, and this year many will be looking at ways to maximise sales and build on the consumer return to bookshops. Super Thursday will give a boost to media coverage of the great books coming for Christmas, and give a focal point for bookshop promotion. We’ll be urging consumers, as we always do, to choose bookshops in October, on and around Bookshop Day, and discover the exciting new titles being released this Super Thursday.”