I hate Christmas. Let me rephrase that: I love Christmas.
The whole book trade lives and dies by the results of the three months-or-so before Christmas. If publishers and booksellers don't make money in this period, they don't make it for the whole year. Whatever doesn't sell then, never does; and even what apparently sells comes back in returns from booksellers over the next several months.
Just to add to everybody's anxiety levels over the stakes involved, Christmas as a retail activity seems to be happening later each year. This can make the suspense, difficult to deal with at the best of times, hard to bear. That so much should hang on so little, over such a short period of time, is awful; that such crass concerns should be held hostage to what should be a celebration of family values, human decency, and religious beliefs is absurd.
Nevertheless, publishers' lists reflect this reality. All large publishers hold back their best titles for the pre-Christmas period -- a time when weekly turnover in bookshops far exceeds their sales in any given week of the first six months of the year. This is even after allowing for mini-seasonal peaks such as Mother's Day, Anzac Day, and Father's Day.
Bookshops sometimes complain about this behaviour by publishers (arguing that more and better books should be published earlier in the year), but the truth is that it's rational behaviour by them. Any large publisher who puts out too many big books between January and June is at grave risk of doing both her authors and her publishing company a significant disservice.
Conversely, any publisher who releases a serious book between November and December is likely to regret the decision. The seasonal avalanche of celebrity bios, blockbusters, brand-name authors, summer reads, and sports books crushes everything in its path.
That's why I feel deeply conflicted about Christmas (it's not just because I'm a deracinated Jewish atheist, in case you wondered). The way that Christmas forces us to skew our publishing programme always makes me fret. We're obliged to publish many of our good books at a time when bookshop activity is relatively light, and then we're forced to subtly change the nature of our list and to get out of the way of the gorillas when activity surges.
Because of this, our sales figures tend to be more evenly distributed than those of our larger peers. We have fewer bestsellers, but a relatively more reliable spread of sales over the year. We published our biggest-selling new title of the year in May -- The Longest Decade, by George Megalogenis. Among other notable titles (in terms of awards and/or sales) that we released in the first half of the calendar year have been Asbestos House, by Gideon Haigh (February); Good Health in the 21st Century, by Dr Carole Hungerford (April); and Fear and Politics, by Carmen Lawrence (June).
Our version of a commercial Christmas book is almost laughable by comparison with the big boys' output: to take this year as an example, we've produced a couple of cartoon books: Best Australian Political Cartoons 2006, edited by Russ Radcliffe, and Make Cakes Not War, by Judy Horacek; the paperback edition of Julian Burnside's Wordwatching, and The Science of Happiness, by Stefan Klein. (I'm happy to add that all four titles are selling well.)
Just to test conventional understanding, we also published Inside the Global Jihad, by Omar Nasiri, in late November -- apparently successfully.
The point (or the trouble, depending on your point of view) is that we can't bring ourselves to trash our own brand. We've learned from bitter experience that we're incapable of publishing books cynically and well, and that if we have to meet the market we must do it on our terms.
So we're going to keep publishing good books over the whole year -- and, if I say so myself, 2007 is looking like the best publishing list we've ever had -- and we're going to keep assuming that intelligent readers don't disappear in November and December.
Astute readers will notice that this stance is a combination of principle and pragmatism. What can I say? It's the Christmas season, after all.
Henry Rosenbloom