Last year was a very good year in terms of publishing, says Maria Norinder, product range manager at online giant Adlibris, who thinks it has given this year's book sale a quality feel.
Several of the titles in this year's book sale are only a little over six months old. This applies, for example, to last year's best-selling book, Dan Brown's "The Last Secret", which was released in Swedish in September. Katarina Wennstam's best-seller "Lucia is Dead" and "The Bodies We Buried" by August Prize winner Lina Wolff are also on sale after a short time in bookstores.
Heaviest titles
Does this mean that the window between publication and appearing in the sale is shrinking further? Maria Norinder does not believe that things are moving faster now than before, but emphasizes that autumn is the period when publishers traditionally release their heaviest titles.
But not all autumn books are included in the sale. The non-fiction winner at the August Gala, Bea Uusma's "Vitön", for example, is not available at the sale price.
It's an assessment the publishers make, and it's made in dialogue with us. It is a choice - not all books are included, says Maria Norinder.
Wennstam peaks
How important is the book sale to the industry? Not as important as during the sale's heyday in the 1950s and 1960s – but it is still, along with Christmas and Black Week, the period when the most books are sold in stores.
In online stores, it is possible to pre-order sale books. At the top of Adlibris' pre-order list are "Lucia is Dead" and "The Bodies We Buried" - but for Adlibris, pre-orders do not generate the most profit.
The big sale starts on Tuesday, says Maria Norinder.
Advertisement
The top titles:
Dan Brown: “The Last Secret”
Henrik Berggren: “The Land Beyond 1–3”
The award winners:
Lina Wolff: “The Bodies We Buried”
László Krasznahorkai: “Satantango”, “Melancholy of Resistance”, “Herscht 07769”, “The Last Wolf”
Niels Fredrik Dahl: “Father's Back”
Han Kang: “I’m Not Saying Goodbye”
Annie Ernaux: “The Young Man”, “The Shame”
Eduardo Halfon: “Canción”
Malin Haawind: “He Who Follows a Star Does Not Turn Back”
Booktok favorites:
Colleen Hoover: “Maybe One Day,” “Hopeless”
Rebecca Yarros: “Iron Flame” and “Fourth Wing”
RF Kuang: “Babel: or the Necessity of Violence – The Secret History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution” and “Yellowface”
The gourmet series:
Solvej Balle: “On Calculating the Range 1–5”
Karl-Ove Knausgård: “Arendal” (part 5 of the “Morning Star” series)
The suspense books:
Pascal Engman: “The Clan”
Katarina Wennstam: “Lucia is Dead”
Notable names:
Sally Rooney: “Intermezzo”
Alex Schulman: “June 17”
Patti Smith: “Angels' Bread: A Memoir”
The classics:
William Shakespeare: “Sonnets”
Emily Dickinson: “Poems”
Ray Bradbury: “Fahrenheit 451”
Homer: “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”
Emily Brontë: “Wuthering Heights”
Vladimir Nabokov: “Lolita”
The feelgood books:
Ruth Kvarnström-Jones: “The Friends at the Nordic Company” and “The Phenomenal Women at the Grand Hotel”
Poetry:
Ingela Strandberg: “When I Was Snow”
Children's books:
Elsa Beskow: “Elsa Beskow's Collected Editions”
Katherine Rundell: “Impossible Creatures”
Jujja Wieslander, Sven Nordqvist: “The Crow Says Beware”, “The Crow Doesn't Say”
