Alma. T. C. Boykin
Is it just me, or are we hearing less about timing your release for reading seasons? I’m not thinking about the obvious ones, like Christmas, romances in February, “beach reads” in May-June*, horror in September, “holiday” titles starting in November, and things like that. It is more about sales seasons and release seasons in general. That used to be a Big Deal.
In part, it went back to when the major publishers dominated the publishing world. The big release pushes were spring, fall, and winter/Christmas/holiday. That may be changing, as this 10-year-old article suggests, but book-sellers still want things they can use for advertising. That means seasonal-themed releases. Also, big cities like NYC tend to be less pleasant in summer, so the offices emptied out, even after the advent of air conditioning. As a result, the big publishers did not plan for a summer book release unless it was something guaranteed to sell, and that could be set up and distributed in advance. Too, the lead time between contract and on-the-shelf was far longer, and required more human hands on the book than is true today, so trying to keep people in the office in July and August might have been counter productive.
Now? There’s not really a season for indie books to be published, in general. Ditto trad pub, although summer remains the slack (with a few exceptions, as always). However, this article suggests that there are days that are better, and seasons as well (hardbacks in fall, kids books in winter, fun paperbacks in spring.) A lot of indie writers used to try for Tuesday releases, or close to pay-day, for a sales boost like the trad-pubs do. I’m not so sure that’s as important now.
People still time themed book releases. Christmas books don’t move much in July, and horror seems to ease off in spring. But not always. And as indie writers, we have a lot more flexibility in terms of scheduling our releases. But that also means it can be easy to get lost in the deluge of seasonal books, especially around Christmas, Valentine’s Day (romances), and perhaps Halloween. Keep in mind, too, that fiction sales sometimes to bump up in summer because of vacation reading, and sales usually taper off in August to early September because of school-stuff buying. However, Dean Wesley Smith observed that books sales in general drop over the summer, because of vacations, graduations, tuition, and summer activities that cut into both reading and buying. I’ve seen both, but your mileage will probably vary.
Sales also seem to slack off around major elections or whenever there is uncertainty in the air. And of course, economic downturns hurt no matter when they come. Reading has to compete for beer money and video game money. When it also competes with grocery and rent money, well . . .
As this article points out, if you want a seasonal release, there are other holidays besides the Christian-based ones. Also, parents might read more during the school year, because the kids are occupied.
I used to do a Christmas release, or tried to. The year Kobo/Rakuten announced in early-December “oh, by the way, we’re closing down from December 17 to January 6 so if you don’t have it in by now, you might have a problem” caught me and a lot of people off guard, and hurt sales for a number of us. Plus trying to come up with a new, interesting Christmas or winter related story for whatever I was working on didn’t always fit. Sometimes, but not as stand-alone sales pieces. Toss in the fact that for a lot of us, November-December’s not the greatest time to be juggling release dates, publicity, family, end of semester/end of sales year/end of fiscal year things with other jobs and you might do better with Halloween, harvest, a Celtic-magic fantasy or romance for March, or something similar.
If you can write in advance and hold onto things, batching releases for times of higher sales can work very well, especially giving you a numbers and ranking boost. One reason the next Familiar Generations book will come out in late summer is that it has a Christmas story, a winter story, a harvest story, and then the rest. If your story is summer themed, a mid spring release would probably do well. You can catch people who are tired of winter, and people who are getting books in anticipation of summer.
I’d argue that the past decade or so has conditioned readers and writers to ignore the publishing seasons and to produce year-round. Readers want more books. Writers are rewarded for publishing quality stories on a relatively fast basis**. Themed books still have a season, but otherwise? Publish when you and the story are ready.
Image: Author Photo, Melrose, Scotland June 2022, 5:45 AM.
*And then there are the “be seen on the beach reading” books like Piketty’s economics tome a few years ago, or David McCullough’s Truman. That seems to be an East Coast thing, or perhaps a DC-NYC thing.
**The standard two-three years from contract to shelf for traditional publishing has become an eternity for indie readers of genre fiction. Literature and lit-fic related genres still have a longer understood time-between-books for indie as well as traditional publishing. I’m not sure why, unless it is partly because many literature readers read more slowly, since they read for language and imagery as well as story.
Mad Genius Club 
14 responses to “To Everything There Is A Season … Except Indie Books?”
Flexibility changes things
It really does. And we seem to be far enough from the start of the Indie Revolution that readers have become accustomed to shorter times between releases. The stigma (if it ever really existed) of “writes too fast” seems to be gone.
I don’t know if the “Pride Month” boycotts will impact anything, let alone book sales, but for once I’ll be glad of recalcitrant stories, because I couldn’t publish this month if I wanted to. Not sure if any widespread blacklisting from the other side would ever affect me.
But seasons? Hmm, food for thought. Maybe hold off publishing during peak Christmas buying, then a sale of early-series ebooks afterwards for all the gifted Kindles?
That was suggested several years ago, but I’ve never tried it. If you do kids books, then release earlier, for parents to put onto kids’ e-readers, but otherwise an early January release might boost things.
Probably it is because the literary side gets more submissions from “my friend from college,” so they have to treat them seriously while having less sales, and hence fewer staff to get things done.
OTOH, more of the rich and connected people might work on that side, and hence not be expected to work quickly.
FWIW, my least unsuccessful release was Shadow Captain, released in KU around the Feast of Stephen/Boxing Day. Nothing particularly seasonal about it, just a space opera with heavy A New Hope/Empire Strikes Back vibes, and I worked a bit harder on setting up advertising than I usually do.
A lot of the Trad Pub seasonal issues are gift-oriented, which is a paper-only issue. Indie (I believe – haven’t looked at recent stats) still skews much more strongly to ebook. (Anyone here have a different experience?]
For us, the biggest thing we can try to goose is attention in the marketplace, for whatever reason. There are ways to do that…
* As Kristine Katherine Rusch likes to remind us, if you have a book related somehow to a sudden headline, be alert to pushing its marketing in a timely basis. [Oh no – train derailment in India. Maybe my mystery-on-a-train book blurb will pass by a reader’s eyes during a search request on Amazon.]
* Series debut or series new-entry (this is one I’m focused on). If you bring out the initial books in a series (in my case books 1-3) at the same time or in close sequence, I would expect the announcements to have a synergistic impact on eachother. My original plan was to do pre-orders, but what sort of experience do you-all have with the utility of pre-orders these days? Is it still worth organizing that? (A lot of time has gone by since I first did the planning). I won’t release at all until book 3 is complete, and book 4 started, but that will still leave a few months between 3 & 4. [Please advise…]
Shadow Captain was the only release I did preorder timeframe on, a month or less IIRC, and that mostly so I could schedule promotions. (including a somewhat frantic email to Sarah that said “I know it’s not live yet but it will be by the next Book Promo post.)
At one time, there was an algorithmic value to preorders on Amazon, in that the money and sales (for rank-value) showed up on your dashboard when the book went live, so the book’s initial rank value on going live was that of all sales made during the preorder period (which gave authors capable of making presales a certain edge). This stopped being a thing at Amazon sometime before October 2019, when I published the Ancestors of Jaiya series all at once. I remember weighing up whether to do preorders on that series, and deciding there was no value added.
This is a recentish article in favor of preorders that summarizes the pros and cons fairly. https://danieljtortora.com/blog/amazon-book-pre-order-strategy
Thanks!
Reader here: I’ve preordered a handful of books. As best as I can tell, they have the following things in common.
a) It’s in a series I find compelling.
b) There’s a firm(ish) release date
c) It’s not likely to be announced in the fora I read every day. (MGC, NTT and certain authors in the two groups get a daily looksee if the creek don’t rise.)
That leaves Larry Correia and Peter Neahlen as most likely to get preorders.
As an aside, the ‘zon’s “author follow” doesn’t always pick up on new releases. Grrh.
Mileage will vary,
Helpful info, especially on the author follow glitches. Thank you sir!
“Literature and lit-fic related genres still have a longer understood time-between-books for indie as well as traditional publishing.”
Probably because over there the perception is still “if you write quickly you’re not polishing enough.”
That’s certainly possible. And it could seep into indie literature writers as well.
I timed ‘Texas at the Coronation’ to release on Texas Independence Day last year. Not sure if that helped or not. Beyond that, I plan to release when the story is ready.
On a different note, good Lord, has it been over a year already?