Each year, seasonal books about the true, anti-commercial spirit of Christmas make their way to stores, backed by faith that "as long as there are wild-eyed people in bookstores on Christmas Eve looking for gifts, there will be a market," as Touchstone Fireside v-p and editor-in-chief Trish Todd put it. This is a particularly bountiful year, with at least 10 new titles joining reprints of older ones.
Why so many? Borders Group fiction buyer Leah Rex posited that the bloom is probably off the poinsettia for John Grisham's Skipping Christmas, which shipped more than two million copies when it was published in 2001. With sales expected to slow after last year's 1.5 million—copy reprint, publishers may be rushing to fill a perceived void.
A few new names are entering the fold this year, though publishers appear to be thinking smaller, in terms of print runs and trim size. Richard Preston—best known for his 1994 bestseller about an Ebola outbreak, The Hot Zone (Random House)—spins a tale about the family of a missing Vietnam vet in The Boat of Dreams (Touchstone, Nov). Jacquelyn Mitchard, known for her Oprah pick The Deep End of the Ocean (Viking, 1996), returns with Christmas, Present (HarperCollins, Nov.), about a family that finds a powerful lesson in a holiday tragedy. The two books are in a giftable 5½"×7½" format with fewer than 140 pages and will retail for about $15; both have 125,000-copy first printings.
But when it comes to tiny Christmas books that double as hardcover greeting cards or stocking stuffers, Jan Karon is the queen. This year, Viking will publish a boxed set of Karon's Christmas books past, Esther's Gift (2002) and The Mitford Snowmen (2001). However, the main event is a new full-length novel, Shepherds Abiding (Oct.), with a first printing that's close to a million copies. "That's a big number, but it's based on how many we shipped of her last novel, In This Mountain [2002], with Christmas taken into account," said Viking Penguin executive editor Carolyn Carlson.
Relative newcomer Donna VanLiere returns with The Christmas Blessing (Oct.; 300,000-copy first printing), a sequel to her bestselling debut, The Christmas Shoes (St. Martin's, 2001), which sold well into six figures when it debuted in tandem with a CBS made-for-television movie starring Rob Lowe. Last year, St. Martin's shipped about 200,000 more hardcovers of VanLiere's first book, and will put out another 100,000 this year in anticipation of another airing of the movie.
There are also handful of titles aimed at specific markets this year. Two hardcover novels plow a new path to the African-American market: Eric Jerome Dickey's Naughty or Nice (Dutton, Oct.) and Donna Hill and Francis Ray's Rockin' Around That Christmas Tree (St. Martin's, Nov.) "Naughty or Nice could become the Skipping Christmas for the African-American readership," said Borders's Rex. "It's the first holiday title by a prominent African-American author that I know of, plus it's brilliantly packaged."
The music industry has long relied on the kind of repeat Christmas business that publishers are courting. Among the top-selling Christmas albums is Mannheim Steamroller Christmas, which has sold more than six million copies since 1984. Now the group's founder, Chip Davis, is getting into the Christmas book game with a hardcover-and-CD package, Mannheim Steamroller Christmas: A Night Like No Other (Pocket, Nov.; 135,000 printing), which the band will promote on its holiday tour. Set in the future, when Christmas is celebrated only in shopping malls, the novel is, naturally, a tale of redemption.
