Several mega-authors skip upcoming holiday season

It's not that they had a conclave and reached an agreement. But John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton and Stephen King are giving a jumbo Christmas gift to some very popular but not quite as successful fellow novelists. None of the four megastars is publishing a new book this season.

Or to put it another way: Publishing executives sometimes refer to their best-selling authors as brands, like Coca-Cola. Well, those four are the Coca-Colas of book publishing. If they are not in the bookstores during the Thanksgiving-Christmas season, the best time to sell books, then there's plenty of room and, they hope, demand for Dr Pepper. That's the theory.

So this November-December will see new hardcover books by Jonathan Kellerman, Carl Hiassen, James Patterson, Dominic Dunne and David Baldacci, authors not usually published for the Christmas trade, even though their novels regularly have six-figure first printings, numbers that would make nearly any writer dizzy with pleasure. (One mega-author who will be out there is Danielle Steel, but her following is mostly women and doesn't have the crossover readership. The other mega-author, Mary Higgins Clark, who also sells mainly to women, won't be published until May.) It is not because of publishers' somnolence that the megastars will not be out this season, but simply because none have finished new novels. (Stephen King will continue his trade paperback Dark Tower series, but that's not hardcover.) Certainly, there will be a pretty heavy holiday lineup of authors, with their publishers swept along on the optimism of past performance, no superstar competition and the belief and/or prayer that since book sales have been somewhat flat this year, maybe everyone who didn't buy before will buy now. Add to that the quivering caused by the prospect of the Winter Olympics in February. Book sales suffered during the last Summer Olympics, so if the mega- authors can give them an excuse to publish earlier this year, not in February, they are going to jump. Laurence J. Kirshbaum, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner Trade Publishing, says that all other considerations aside, "Grisham sucks up a lot of readers, so we have to slot our books like movies and TV. Baldacci was moved from September to November and early December to catch Christmas" because none of the megastars will be out there except for Steel. In the six degrees of separation that is the book publishing world there are few secrets, and nearly everyone knows who is publishing whom and when. That makes it relatively easy, Kirshbaum said, "to program a bit for our important writers, like Baldacci." The very fear and power that the megastars generate has created a muscular vocabulary of its own among worried book publishers. Thus, a Grisham book "sucks up" the readers like a vortex, as Kirshbaum says; a Clancy "zooms" into a bookstore like a tornado blowing away everyone else, another publishing executive says; a King "looms" over publishing like El Nino. And why wouldn't they scare everyone away? According to Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine of the book publishing business, only 43 novels have sold a million or more copies in the 1990s, and of those 30 have been by Grisham, King and Clancy and Steel. Because of such relentless zooming and looming, Bantam Books, for instance, devised a somewhat typical strategy for Kellerman this year and got his blessing. For the last decade, Kellerman had been published mainly in January. But when it was learned that none of the megastars would deliver new novels this fall, Bantam concluded that his forthcoming novel, Survival of the Fittest, would probably sell far more copies between Nov. 12 and Dec. 24, the Christmas season, than between Jan. 2 and Feb. 15, when he was normally published. Last year Crichton published Airframe in September, so Hiassen was postponed. During November and December King loomed over the world, placing No. 1 and 2 on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, with total sales of nearly 3 million books. Tom Clancy's Executive Orders published in August, was No. 4 on the list on Dec. 8 and was still contending at Christmas. Clancy's book ultimately sold 2.3 million copies. Publishers realize that with so many important second-tier novelists about to enter the stores, the competition between them will be fierce indeed. And this doesn't take into consideration that the latest books by Dick Francis, Robert Ludlum, Robert Parker and Sidney Sheldon are already in stores and on the best-seller lists. But most publishers say they would rather compete at that level than with the megastars. As one publisher summed up the gamble: "I'm willing to settle for a lower notch on the best-seller list to sell more books. One means ego; the other means money." Several other publishing executives made similar comments. Of course, according to more than one publisher, Christmas came very early this year -- in September, with the unbelievable avalanche of every conceivable kind of books about the Princess of Wales, all of which sold well. Book publishing surely is not sorcery, and strategies fail. Relatively few novels sell really well, and in nonfiction, which generally does much better, Whoopi Goldberg's Book and Paul Reiser's Babyhood (published by Weisbach/Morrow), each having received an advance of more than $5.5 million, have faltered early, with Reiser making the best-seller list for only seven weeks. Anita Hill's book and two books about O.J. Simpson disappeared quickly. "In the end," Kirshbaum said, "the very long and windy scheduling meetings are a bit of a waste of time; no matter how much planning, some author will throw everything out of whack." So where did Cold Mountain come from? Charles Frazier's Atlantic Monthly novel has been on the best-seller list for 17 weeks and will again be No. 1 on Sunday. What does that prove? Only that for publishers, life would be so simple if they didn't have to reckon with readers' opinions.

Copyright 1997
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