It's that time of year again. No, not the pencil case— and school clothes—buying time, though of course, there's also plenty of that. It's fall—and that means lots of "big books" landing in stores.

But fall is also the season for book awards: the nominations from the National Book Foundation are due out any day, and our very own Quill Award nominations have been announced at www.thequills.org. (Consider this a plug for our corporate sibling.)

So far, so typical. Except for one thing. Last year, I must admit, the Quill nominations didn't thrill me (so much for corporate loyalty). Not that there's anything wrong with, say, Freakonomics or Harry Potter or Jon Stewart, but the nominations of—and eventual wins by—those books made barely a blip in the bookish consciousness. And determining whether they caused a bump in sales (which, let's face it, is what publishers really care about) was similarly unknowable: Did the Quill give Harry Potter a boost at the bookstore? Or was that because J.K. Rowling posted something new on her Web site that week? In other words, like 'em or ignore 'em, these books were already freakishly huge bestsellers, and another prize didn't mean much. But this year's list, while hardly "full" of surprises (Joan Didion's marvelous The Year of Magical Thinking for best book? Duh. Frank McCourt's self-narrated Teacher Man in audio? Ditto) is at least occasionally unexpected. Surely, for example, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill must be gratified to have two big nominees—The $64 Tomato in the Debut category, a book that, frankly, got very little ink in most places, and Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, which did and was a bestseller, but not exactly a blockbuster. And Knopf's ultraliterary Suite Française, written during the German occupation of France and only recently discovered, seems more likely to be an NBCC book nominee, but pleasantly surprising here.

What does it mean that there seem to be fewer "sure things" this year? Maybe, a cynic might suggest, these comparatively obscure titles in the Quills' second year are proof that it hasn't been a blockbuster year (especially for fiction); therefore no "big books." And some will point to the outdated presence of E.L. Doctorow's The March or the aforementioned Didion memoir, which copped the NBA 10 months ago. But I'm choosing to take the long, or optimistic, view: maybe now that the bookish world is getting the hang of this Quills thing, they can venture a little beyond their usual, careful choices and make, rather than follow, the news. As for the presence of these relatively "old" titles: Pollyanna here, quoting Chris Anderson, might call this an example of "the long tail."

This fall, after all, is the season that will see the publication by another author who has hardly been in the limelight, or the bestseller lists, recently. On our Web site the other week, we asked readers to answer the question: "Does Mailer Matter." Interestingly, most—with the exception of the guy who wrote that the most perceptive part of Mailer's Advertisements for Myself was that grandiose title—said he did.

So, who knows? Maybe next year, I'll be sitting here lauding the fact that Norman Mailer is up for a Quill.

Agree? Disagree? Tell us at www.publishersweekly.com/saranelson