By Julie Bosman
Published New York Times: September 6, 2010
For booksellers fall is a long lead-in to the holiday season, the period of their highest volume of sales for the year.
With Labor Day behind them, publishers are starting to roll out their heavyweight titles, the books sufficiently serious or flashy or important to draw attention in the crowded months leading up to the holidays.
Booksellers love the fall season, having carefully planned months in advance an inventory that this year takes in historical nonfiction and cookbooks, thrillers and memoirs. “There’s a cornucopia of big titles to suit everyone’s taste in every category,” said Lily Bartels, a book buyer at RJ Julia Booksellers in Madison, Conn.
There are novels by Ken Follett, Michael Cunningham, Nicole Krauss and Tom Clancy; cookbooks by Ina Garten and Jamie Oliver; humor books by both Amy Sedaris and David Sedaris; a collection of poems, notes and letters written by Marilyn Monroe; and a book by the Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward that is so supersecret its publisher, Simon & Schuster, refused to reveal the title. (A Borders executive said that it is “Obama’s War.”)
This fall is especially intense because of the midterm elections, which coincide with a handful of political memoirs, polemics and studies of the Tea Party movement, President Obama and Glenn Beck whose releases have been timed to the weeks before November.
Tony Blair, the former prime minister of Britain, just released “A Journey” (Random House), an account of his time in office and its aftermath, and was promptly the target of protesters tossing eggs and flip-flops at his first public reading, in Dublin, on Saturday. Bill O’Reilly, the Fox News commentator, will see his latest political book, “Pinheads and Patriots” (William Morrow), published on Sept. 14. Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, has written a memoir of her family and childhood in Alabama, titled “Extraordinary, Ordinary People” (Crown Archetype).
Full story at NYT.
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