Book release delays, especially last-minute ones,

Trying to hold the line with publication dates…

For me, at least, that first nasty surprise ushered in a new era of production schedules changing overnight. At any time, for instance, I might learn that a book that had been due to the printer in six weeks was now due in two weeks.

Our production schedules had been tight to begin with, and we had no full-time in-house editorial staff other than me. I would offer freelancers twice the usual rate for rush jobs, and they often declined.

I would wind up pulling all-nighters to get the proofreading done. My part-time assistant editor, who also worked on another business for the same corporation, put in long hours, too. I feared that even if we were doing our best, proofreading so fast was bound to lead to errors. In at least one instance, we got express shipping to get the book out.

We tried to get books done earlier, in order to make them impervious to delays, but this was difficult to do while also working overtime to push some books through.

The same thing was happening everywhere in traditional publishing. Our much larger competitors weren’t immune. 

Delays are often caused by supply chain issues.

As I understand it, supply chain issues in book manufacturing include intermittent and unpredictable shortages:

•not enough paper

•not enough glue

•not enough workers at the printer

•not enough drivers

In the time I worked in publishing, 2017 – 2022, our production lead times doubled and the paper costs increased by about 30%. Paper manufacturers, glue manufactures, and printers are all estimating what they can do, as best they can, but because of fluctuating circumstances, sometimes they miss.

What causes these intermittent shortages?

• The COVID mortality rate among manual labor, service workers, and retail workers was much, much higher than that of the nation as a whole. Workers at the printing facilities fell into that first category.

•Some workers, facing increased risk at jobs that couldn’t be done remotely, responded by quitting.

• The COVID pandemic led to more ordering from online retailers like Amazon, creating an increased demand for corrugate cardboard that also placed heavy demands on the raw material also used to make books.

•On a very positive note, paper shortages have been exacerbated by rapidly developing countries consuming more and more paper products—as toilet paper, paper towels, and packaging for other consumer goods. 

•At the same time, some paper mills in the U.S. closed for many reasons, including the plummeting demand for printer paper (rarely needed in a remote workplace), magazines, and newspapers.

It seems to me as a reader that there aren’t as many delays as there were in 2021, but they still seem more common than they were before the pandemic.

I couldn’t find any hard numbers on this, so if anyone has them, I would be interested! For instance, in the past year, the book Argylle by Elly Conway was pushed out, which also pushed out the movie date. Bethany Batiste’s The Poisons We Drink has been delayed in the U.S., which was heartbreaking to see, because the book had already been maliciously targeted in fake Goodreads reviews by another author. In the UK, Brandon Sanderson’s highly anticipated The Sunlit Man was delayed from January to March of this year. I’m guessing that these delays were due to supply chain issues, but of course I don’t know for sure.

Of course, sometimes books get delayed for other reasons.

Sometimes, the editing process takes longer than everyone expected—which is fine! That can be a difficult thing to predict, and it’s always better to move a publication date than to put out a book that isn’t the best it can be. Years ago when I went to a game developers conference, I heard a quote that stuck with me: “A delayed game is eventually good; a rushed game is bad forever.” 

Sometimes, a health or personal issue on the part of an author or an editor will lead to a delay. An audiobook may also be delayed due to the narrator’s health. We’re all only human.

Sometimes, the marketing team realizes that there may be a better time to release the book. These types of delays usually happen much further in advance, so they’re not as disruptive.

A publisher may move out a publication date due to a printing error. This was reportedly the reason for a short delay for This Night Is Ours, a YA novel by Chicago-area author Ronni Davis. Of course, many books contain minor errors.

Current events or legal concerns may also bring about a delay. For instance, many people sympathetic to the plight of Ukraine left angry reviews on Elizabeth Gilbert’s book The Snow Forest long before the book was released, because it took place in Russia. Specifically, it was set in mid-1900s Siberia, and followed characters escaping modernism and the oppressive Soviet government. In response, the author has delayed the book’s publication indefinitely, and she also took a lot of criticism for that decision.

Authors and publishers hate last-minute delays.

On the purely financial side, publishers and authors both may have paid for time-sensitive marketing efforts that are going to go to waste. They may be left scrambling to cancel events or attempt to move them to a later date. 

Small publishers who are trying to prove themselves may also worry about whether the delay will make it harder to get bookstore retail chains to carry more books from them.

A delayed publication date can demoralize or even devastate an author. They’ve done rounds of edits, they’ve worked hard to promote the book, and at the last minute, the goalpost is moved.

How can publishers minimize the risk of delayed publication dates?

As I said, getting way ahead of the established production schedule can sometimes prevent a book from going off track. This can be a difficult, since there’s never a pause in the publishing calendar and since publishers may need a certain number of new releases in a given year in order to be profitable. 

While I worked in publishing, I was interested in the solution of creating a parallel print on demand path for every book. If the book was running late, we could launch with print-on-demand editions sold online and switch to the traditional print run as soon as it was complete. We’d have only a narrow profit margin on the print-on-demand books, and it might mean more unsold books from our traditional print run, but we’d never miss a pub date.

Logistically, though, I couldn’t figure out how to pull this off. The print-on-demand edition would require a different ISBN, which would cause a lot of confusion and might result in the traditionally printed books never making it to the online retailer websites. Bookstores might not be thrilled that big online retailers had the book while they didn’t. And we were a tiny publisher distributed by a big 5 publisher; even if our distributor would’ve agreed to it, the bookkeeping would’ve been complicated.

What Are the Best Ways to Deal with Delays? 

I think it’s important for publishers to communicate to authors exactly why the dates got pushed out. If the printer changed their due date to several weeks earlier and they couldn’t meet it, or if the delay happened at the printer after the publisher delivered the files, that’s good for the author to know.

While it might seem reasonable for a publisher to go ahead and release the ebook and audiobook versions on the original pub date, it’s smarter to launch all of the editions together. For one thing, it’s going to be close to impossible for an author to hit a U.S.-based bestseller list if the print and ebook editions don’t come out in the U.S. on the same week.

Authors can explain to readers that printing and shipping delays aren’t unheard-of, and they may be able to transpose the situation into an extra pre-order push. 

Unfortunately, publication date delays are only one of the many unexpected things that can happen with a book launch. (My first novel, published by digital-first publisher, had no cover design for the first couple of weeks that it was on sale!)  Fortunately, books are on sale for a long time, and nothing can change the fact that an author’s written a good book.

Readers can support authors by letting them know that they’re just as excited as ever about the book, and that it will be worth the wait.

Have You Experienced Book Delays, As a Reader or As an Author?

Do you have thoughts about them, or other suggestions on how to handle them? Let us know in the comments! Thanks so much for reading, and have a wonderful week!