The Magic Number - Bard Press

Book launches have been hard to do in the last 12 months. As the reality of the coronavirus settled in last March, publishers made decisions to push many releases later into 2020 or fully into 2021. Those pushes made sense to me with many venues either unavailable or overwhelmed for much of last year. Physical bookstores were closed. Media outlets were fully committed to COVID and the US elections. And readers weren't reading as many books. They were searching websites, twitter feeds, and podcasts for reporting on the current events.

That doesn't mean books weren't being purchased. The business category was down 11% for the year, but that still meant that millions of copies were purchased last year. With less launches though that meant that books that were being purchased were already published.