There are so many good, or “big”, books coming this fall that one has to wonder whether there is enough interest to give them all the attention they deserve. The publishers are scrambling to get whatever publicity they can. Remember Simon and Schuster’s skeezy offer to pay bloggers a “possible” $100 for promoting (you’ll notice it didn’t say “reviewing”, so it’s highly unlikely a fair but negative review of one of their titles is eligible to “win” this “contest”) their titles? It gets mentioned obliquely here, covered in gooey double talk by the publicity folks who dreamed it up. It’s kind of gross. You’ve got a bunch of big books swimming around like hungry sharks in a sterile tank into which the occasional amputated body part of publicity opportunity falls. There’s bound to be a bit of fighting and blood.

Other authors whose names are not as recognizable will probably be scrambling to get whatever scraps of publicity they can. And while the bounty of new titles could generate more traffic in bookstores, publishers realize they may well pay a price for putting so much out there.

“It’s a double-edged sword,” Menaker said. “I think lots of people will come into the stores to buy one book, and then maybe buy another. But they won’t buy 10.”

Some observers wonder if publishers — eager to boost profits in what has been a financially lackluster year — have miscalculated and flooded the stores with too much. Nowadays, big books open like Hollywood movies, with on-sale dates planned months in advance. Publishers choose those dates carefully, hoping to avoid competition with similar fiction and nonfiction books from rival houses.

Unlike Hollywood studios, which can hold movies or schedule them with more precise timing, publishers have much more product to move and are at the mercy of their writers’ abilities to actually deliver manuscripts. In a year that failed to produce a breakout book early on, many publishers packed as many big titles as possible into the fall season, despite the risk of over-saturating the literary market.

Ah, greed… you’re such a good, close brother to stupidity.