Publishing Houses Spring Into Second Quarter

In lawyer lingo, a rainmaker is a star attorney whose main role involves generating new business for his firm. In this spring publishing season, John Grisham’s “The Rainmaker” may have the same impact.

A confident Doubleday, which reports there are almost 50 million copies of Grisham’s five previous novels in print, plans to introduce his new legal thriller on Wednesday with an unprecedented first printing for a hardcover novel of 2.8 million copies.

In size alone, the launch reflects the importance of the spring season to publishers targeting Mother’s Day and Father’s Day shoppers and to booksellers, whose second-quarter revenues are second only to Christmas sales.

Publishers traditionally bring out dozens of their lead titles in the fall in order to take advantage of the pre-Christmas season. However, the spring can offer strategic value because of the belief that a book can sell fewer copies than it must in the star-crowded fall and still earn a place on the bestseller list. This is important because books that reach The New York Times’ bestseller list are discounted by the chains and many independent stores, further propelling sales.

“I think that all of us are striving to make publishing less dependent on the third and fourth quarter,” said Michelle Sidrane, the president and publisher of Crown Publishers. Sidrane cited the timing of the Grisham release and her own house’s publication this month of Barbara Leaming’s “Katharine Hepburn,” a mammoth biography of the actress the publisher expects will sell for months.

Other high-profile novels on the spring schedule include Stephen King’s “Rose Madder,” described as a “grimmer than Grimm fairy tale” from Viking, which plans to lay down 1.5 million copies on a date to be determined in June; Robert Ludlum’s “The Apocalypse Watch” (Bantam); Mary Higgins Clark’s “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” (Simon & Schuster); Belva Plain’s “The Carousel” (Delacorte); Leon Uris’ “Redemption” (HarperCollins); Michael Palmer’s “Silent Treatment” (Bantam); John Sandford’s “Mind Prey” (Putnam); Robert B. Parker’s “Thin Air,” and Pat Conroy’s long-awaited (and long-delayed) “Beach Music” (Doubleday).

Among the nonfiction titles are autobiographical memoirs, such as Charlton Heston’s “In the Arena” (Simon & Schuster), Shirley MacLaine’s “My Lucky Stars” (Bantam), George Foreman’s “By George” (Villard), Margaret Thatcher’s “The Path to Power,” Isabel Allende’s “Paula” and “Quivers: A Life” (all HarperCollins), by Robin Quivers, the radio partner of popular shock jock Howard Stern. Norman Mailer’s 800-page examination of Lee Harvey Oswald, “Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery” (Random House), will arrive in May.

Publishers say they have come to schedule a few of their bigger titles in the spring not only to reach consumers shopping for moms and dads, but also because bookselling has evolved into a 12-month business. Browser-friendly super-stores, complete with coffee bars and story hours for the kids, are proliferating.

Barnes & Noble Inc. (which includes the B. Dalton and Doubleday stores) recently surpassed Borders-Waldenbooks as the largest bookstore chain, posting sales of more than $1.6 billion in the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, largely because of its aggressive expansion into super-stores carrying thousands of titles. Warehouse outlets such as Price Club are stocking books at even steeper discounts alongside the 50-pound sacks of dog biscuits.

“It’s getting very hard to pick a slow period in the year,” said Irwyn Applebaum, president and publisher of Bantam Books. The house has scheduled Shirley MacLaine’s Hollywood memoir for release on Wednesday partly to take advantage of Mother’s Day buying--but at the same time, Applebaum observed, publishing has become such a mass-market industry that brand names such as Grisham and even O.J. Simpson (“I Want to Tell You”) are selling more and more copies regardless of the season.

Phyllis E. Grann, the chairman and chief executive officer of The Putnam Berkley Group Inc., is widely credited with opening up the sleepy months after Christmas by releasing big books while many competitors were holding back. Grann’s tactic is believed to have turned the medical thrillers of Robin Cook and the family dramas of LaVyrle Spencer, to cite two Putnam authors published in January, into even bigger bestsellers.

“You have to look for when you can get review attention and display space in the stores,” she said. “I would not be inclined, for example, to bring out new fiction in the period from September to December, but to look for a window of opportunity at other times in the year.”

At Putnam, Robert B. Parker’s capers featuring his private eye, Spenser--”Thin Air” will be his 22nd--have been published in the spring, with an eye toward tapping into Father’s Day. On the other hand, Grann explained, Putnam publishes the enormously popular techno-thrillers of Tom Clancy in late August because the company finds this to be the earliest time at which the books can come out and keep selling through Christmas. A similar strategy is behind Viking’s spring release of “Rose Madder” by King, who was last published in the fall; beyond the huge following that King has, the publisher believes his story of a marriage gone quite sour will appeal to mothers, fathers and beach readers--and there’s still a chance to re-market the book at Christmas.

* Paul D. Colford’s column is published Fridays.