Publication Dates
And why your book doesn't have one yet
It's no surprise, but a book's publication date is pretty important. Also referred to as the on-sale date or release date1, pub dates are when a book becomes available for purchase. Just about everything relating to the development, production/manufacturing, sales, and marketing/publicity of new books is scheduled in relation to pub dates. Production deadlines are built to ensure finished copies of books are shipped to bookstores in time for their planned release. Award eligibility is often determined by when a book first published. Bonus advances can trigger if sales hit certain pre-determined milestones within a certain amount of time after publication. And a zillion other things all hinge on the first day a book is sold in stores.
But despite everything in publishing revolving around pub dates, we don't actually know when a book's exact on-sale date will be until pretty far along in the development process. (Except we know it's always going to be on a Tuesday. Really.2)
That may seem weird. Why not just set an on-sale date from the get-go?
It's because figuring out which books come out when is a hugely complex puzzle. There are a lot of factors at play, and some may not all be clear the moment a book is acquired:
cashflow and staffing resources – ideally publishers want to stagger books they're gambling on to be their biggest hits, like a new novel from a bestselling author and a memoir by an A-list celeb, to help balance their cashflow and avoid top titles competing for the same publicity hits. But even outside those top titles, the creative team (editors, designers, etc.) can only work on developing so many books at one time. So all books have to be strategically spread out.
production and manufacturing timelines – complex logistics go into printing and shipping books around the country and the world, and different types of books (e.g. a picture book versus a novel) have different production timelines.
maximizing marketing and promo opportunities – some books are "evergreen" and could publish at any time, but for others the subject matter dictates the timing. You wouldn't want to publish a Christmas-themed book in June! (Holiday tie-in books often have a target pub month earlier than other titles for this reason.)
the author's and illustrator's schedules – creators do some of the heaviest lifting promoting their books, so publishers want to ensure that the author and/or illustrator don't have multiple books publishing too close together. If relevant, they’ll also consider things in the creators' schedules that might help or harm book promo and schedule new books accordingly.
Development process – of course, books can't publish until the author and/or illustrator have finished writing and illustrating them. And try as we might to stick to contractual schedules, we all know the creative process can sometimes take longer than planned…
Multiply all these variables by the many, many new books that publishers release each year, and you can see the issue. Setting a publication date in stone at acquisition would be a nightmare.
So instead, we start with a loose target for when a book will publish, the pub season, and as the season gets closer and the book's development unfolds, we narrow the pub season down to a pub month, and eventually to a specific pub date.
'Tis the Season
Just to keep everything nice and confusing, there isn't one standard definition of pub seasons across the industry in the way that everyone's agreed to publish new books on Tuesdays. There's some overlap with terms and dates, but each publisher ultimately creates their own publication calendar according to what works best for their business.
Most of the large or mid-sized publishers have three pub seasons per year that each span four months. September through December is almost always designated as the "Fall" season. The other two can go by different names. Some publishers designate the January through April season as “Winter” and others call it "Spring." May through August is typically referred to as "Summer", but some publishers call that one “Spring” instead, or “Spring/Summer.”
So when two publishing people are talking about “Spring 2025” for example, that could potentially mean any time between January and August3. 🙃
And to make matters even more fun, some publishers divide the year into two seasons instead of three. Biannual seasons are almost always 6 months long, but they don't always split the year down the middle – for example, a publisher I used to work for designated September through February as “Fall”, and March through August as “Spring”.
Pub seasons don’t disappear once we know a book's pub month or specific pub date. Many sales, marketing, and publicity initiatives are organized by pub season to group all the new books coming out in smaller cohorts – launch meetings and sales catalogues will often cover all the books in one particular season, for example. Once your book has been out in the world for around a year, though, the relevance of the pub season starts to melt away.
You won't be surprised to learn that most of my Airtable title tracking is organized by pub date too. But how does that work when dates aren't available for much of the time a book's in development? Next time, I'm going to show you a cool formula I use to automatically estimate and update pub dates and keep all my data organized. We'll also go over the basics of setting up formulas in Airtable and look at a few of the formula functions I use the most often.
Get excited, fellow spreadsheet nerds!
also informally, a 'book birthday'
I honestly have no idea why Tuesdays are the designated day for everyone's on-sale dates. I just googled it, and this article shares some theories that make a lot of sense!
An editor and I recently fell into the classic "Spring" miscommunication trap – we went around and around trying to schedule a new book and ultimately realized we were both aiming for the same thing the whole time (the Jan-April season) but were calling it two different names without realizing. We figured it out eventually! 😅