What exactly is Super Thursday and defying book bans – Autumn Trends with Caroline Sanderson
Caroline Sanderson, RLF Fellow and Associate Editor of industry magazine The Bookseller, gives us her expert opinion on this season’s publishing trends
Super Thursday
It is a truth universally acknowledged (by publishers’ publicists) that the steepest challenge they face in getting attention for books is the number of competing titles being published at any given moment. On the second Thursday of October, however, the challenge becomes vertiginous with the arrival of Super Thursday.
Never heard of Super Thursday? This annual book trade phenomenon was first identified by The Bookseller in October 2008 when a publicist lamented the sheer number of big titles arriving to market one particular Monday. Then the magazine’s charts editor spotted an even bigger bookish glut landing on the following Thursday; Thursday being the most common publication day for most publishers. The name “Super Thursday” was coined, and it stuck.
Since then, Super Thursday has come to denote the industry’s most prolific publication day annually. This year it falls on 10th October when, according to a recent report by my Bookseller colleague, Tom Tivnan, 1,900 books are due to be published. 457 of these are hardbacks, representing a 30% rise on the previous two Super Thursdays , both of which occurred after book production had contracted in the wake of the pandemic.
Even so, last year’s Super Thursday helped super-charge a profitable autumn selling season which started slowly but ended, according to Tivnan, as “an unassailable triumph”. It launched some of the biggest hits of Christmas 2023, including Rambling Man by Billy Connolly, Mary Makes It Easy by Mary Berry and, for younger readers, The Blunders by David Walliams and Adam Stower.
Seven books released on Super Thursday in 2023 shifted more than £1m worth of copies each, according to Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market report. The highest number of £1m earning titles published on any other date that year was four.
Books due to be published on Super Thursday this year include Ian Rankin’s new Rebus novel, Midnight and Blue; bestselling children’s author AF Steadman’s Skandar and the Skeleton Curse; and celebrity memoirs from Rick Astley and Alison Steadman. Plus, Boris Johnson’s Unleashed, which warns us to stand by for his thoughts on Britain’s future as they “explode over the publishing world like a much-shaken bottle of champagne”.
Trending this autumn
I’ve been previewing new non-fiction for The Bookseller long before Super Thursday was even a thing. Because I work to a lead time of around 4 months ahead of a book’s publication date, anything being published in October 2024 is now a distant memory. At the time of writing I’m just finishing off my feature covering January 2025’s non-fiction titles.
This advance perspective gives me a wonderful privilege, but it also means I’m frequently called upon to answer the question: “What’s trending?”
The glaring answer in non-fiction recently has been “air fryer cookbooks.” In fact, all sorts of cookbooks have – to my mind – an astonishing ability to dominate the bestseller lists: batch cooking, slow cooking, speedy week night cooking, baking books, patisserie, rotisserie…..(okay, I made that last one up).
Beyond this, trend-spotting is a topsy-turvy business and, in my view, mostly pointless. Despite dire predictions about the death of the novel, dozens of new novels continue to be published every single week of the year, and some – witness, for example Intermezzo by Sally Rooney – still have the power to take over the literary news agenda and send booksellers into paroxysms of anticipation (for the record, I don’t think it’s her best).
In my own specialty area of non-fiction, The Guardian reported back in 2015 that “readers’ love affair with the celebrity memoir is cooling”. But you wouldn’t know that from Autumn 2024’s offering. There are memoirs by Carol Vorderman, Venus Williams, Russell Watson, Al Pacino, Geoff Hurst, Neneh Cherry (I’ve read that one and it’s very good), Bill Clinton, the late Sven-Göran Eriksson, the late Donald Sutherland, and Cher. Oh, and Dolly Parton and her sister have a cookbook out.
And just when I think I have reached peak memoir, especially following a pandemic when almost everyone - including me - decided to write one, I read an astonishing book like Ootlin, Jenni’s Fagan’s account of growing up in care, and I’m reminded how many important personal stories still remain to be told.
Banned books
It might be an uncomfortable truth for writers, but getting that publishing deal is almost always a question of economics. Art comes into it, of course, and after more than two decades reporting from the coal face of publishing I keep the faith that brilliant books can, and do go on to enjoy stellar sales. H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and Educated by Tara Westover are three that I’ve personally championed, and then cheered on as they rose up the bestseller lists.
But sometimes books are way more important than sales or even the sum of their parts. Earlier this month I interviewed Amanda Jones, a middle school librarian from Louisiana for The Bookseller. Her book, That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America, which is out in the UK in November, articulates what is at stake in the face of extremist book banning campaigns. Such campaigns typically target books aimed at young readers with LGBTQ+ themes, and books featuring main or secondary characters of colour. For her ongoing campaigning against book bans, Jones has received death threats and almost continuous online harassment.
And yet in her honest, spirited and rallying book, Jones declares defiantly, “I am a librarian, damn it. I’m not some weakling,” and concludes by calling on book lovers everywhere to rise up in defence of readers. Those who find it hard to imagine such book bans gaining any traction in this country would do well to read a Bookseller report published only last month about an Index on Censorship investigation which revealed that 28 librarians across the UK have been asked to remove books from shelves.
Books are my work, and my pleasure. But I’ll try never to forget that for others, they are a matter of life and death.
Caroline Sanderson is a writer and books journalist. She is Associate Editor of The Bookseller for which she has compiled the monthly New Titles preview of forthcoming non-fiction since 2000.
Caroline is a Writing For Life Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund, and is currently Writer in Residence at South Tees NHS Foundation Trust and the Programme Director for Stroud Book Festival.
Caroline is the author of six non-fiction books, including biographies of Jane Austen and the singer, Adele. Her memoir – Listen With Father: How I Learned to Love Classical Music – will be published by Unbound in July 2025.
Really enjoyed this post Caroline.
Good for you, Caroline. Is there a list of the would-be book banners harassing librarians? I find the growing espousement of censorship alarming. Pressure groups with an anti-free speech agenda are infiltrating previously free speech organisations and writers’ groups. I feel writers need to wake up.