Maybe. January might be the better window, and for some books February makes more sense still. Here’s how to work out where yours belongs.

By Sarah Ewen

Every August this question starts landing in my inbox.

"Have I left it too late to launch before Christmas?"

Sometimes the answer is yes.

Sometimes the answer is "Please don't rush it."

The manuscript is nearly there. Christmas is coming. And the thought starts creeping in: if I can just get it out in time, perhaps I’ll catch the biggest book-buying season of the year.

Sometimes that's exactly right.

Quite often it isn't, and the author only finds out in the second week of December when nobody is answering their emails. They’re either trying to finish everything before Christmas, already at the office party, or sitting through their third nativity show of the week.

So let's look at what actually happens at Christmas... and what happens in January.

The Christmas book-buying market is real, and it's enormous

No argument from me here.

Aerio's analysis of holiday buying found that online searches for "books" have spiked in November and December for five years running. In the UK, NielsenIQ reports that nearly a quarter of all print book purchases happen in the final eight weeks of the year.

That's a serious concentration of money and attention, and if your book is the kind of thing somebody buys for somebody else, you'd be mad to ignore it.

But there's a number underneath that one which changed how I think about this.

NielsenIQ also found that only about a fifth of print books bought in November and December are actually intended as Christmas gifts. Across 2023 and 2024, around 37 million books were bought as Christmas gifts. That sounds enormous, but in each year Christmas gifts accounted for only roughly 5% of total annual book purchases.

So the season is huge, but it isn’t the pure gift market everyone assumes. Four-fifths of the print books bought in November and December weren’t recorded as Christmas gifts.

Which is good news, actually. Your book doesn’t have to look like a Christmas present to find readers during the busiest buying period of the year.

And when people are buying books as gifts, they’re not spreading the money evenly. More than 60% of those gift purchases were children's books. Around a quarter were non-fiction. Adult fiction took the rest.

The Christmas deadline nobody mentions

If your Christmas plan involves bookshops or libraries, there’s one deadline you need to know about.

The Book Designer points out that shops and libraries typically order seasonal titles four to six months in advance, which means pitching happens between June and August.

If you're reading this in the middle of August, that window is closing while you read it.

Their advice is blunt: unless publishing after 15 October is part of a deliberate plan, wait.

They also make an observation I hadn't thought about and now can't unsee. A book published in November looks dated by January, because the rest of the world rounds up to the nearest year. Your weeks-old book is suddenly "last year's."

And then there's the week most people never plan for...

There are actually two different post-Christmas bumps, and they often get bundled together.

The first is ebooks. Aerio's data shows searches for "ebooks" spike just after Christmas and into the first week of January. Not before. After. Which makes complete sense once you picture it: people unwrap e-readers, tablets and gift cards on Christmas Day, and then they need something to put on them.

The second is print. In the first week of January 2021, US outlets reporting to NPD BookScan - which tracks print rather than ebook sales - recorded 17.1 million units. It was the first January week in BookScan’s history to pass 17 million, up nearly 25% on the same week the previous year.

Of course, there is a fairly large pandemic-shaped asterisk next to that number. January 2021 was hardly a normal January, so I wouldn’t use the 25% rise as a forecast.

The more interesting part is where that growth appeared. Body, mind and spirit rose 63%, self-help 30%, cooking 22% and adult fiction 29.5%. Travel, which had no obvious place in a locked-down January, fell 41%.

It doesn’t prove that every January behaves the same way, but it does show how strongly early-January demand can favour books connected with change, reflection and starting again.

So there's a genuine second wave, in both formats, for slightly different reasons.

One thing that catches people out either way

Whichever window you pick, know this before you commit.

Linden Gross, writing in October 2025, is direct about it: "Unless you already have a strong following or are releasing a holiday-themed book, avoid this window." She describes mid-November through December as an industry blackout.

The Alliance of Independent Authors have said much the same for years. Publishing "pretty much goes into wind down from the first week in December."

Editors, cover designers, formatters, distributors, reviewers, podcast hosts are booked solid or already gone.

And a launch isn't one decision. It's about forty small ones, and a fair number of them need somebody else to answer an email. If your cover needs one more revision on the 12th, you may not get it. If your print proof turns up damaged, you may not get a replacement in time either.

Personally?

I wouldn't plan anything important after the first week of December if it depended on somebody else.

So which one is your book?

Right. Decision time.

I'd go for Christmas if most of this is true:

• Your book is genuinely giftable. Physical, beautiful, funny, seasonal, local interest, cookery, children's books, something with a person in mind when you look at it.

• The manuscript is done and production is finished or close to it. Not "nearly done." Done.

• You already have an audience to tell. A list, a following, a community, something.

• You've already pitched any shops or libraries, or you're not relying on them.

• You can realistically get physical copies into hands and local press.

I'd go for January if most of this is true instead:

• Your book is ebook-first, or ebook-mostly.

• It's non-fiction that helps someone change something. Health, money, work, habits, faith, food.

• You don't have much of a list yet and you need the autumn to build one.

• The manuscript still needs proper editing and you'd be rushing it.

• It’s your first book and you’re still building an audience around it.

• You'd quite like to enjoy your own launch rather than spend Christmas week chasing a designer.

And one honest complication, because January isn't an empty field either. Publishing loves a "New Year, New You" campaign almost as much as gyms do.

Gross points out that January gets crowded with traditionally published "New Year, New You" titles, and suggests February or March as the real sweet spot. If your book sits in one of those obvious resolution categories and you’ve no platform yet, February may give you more breathing room than forcing a January date.

Worth bearing in mind as a third option rather than a compromise.

Here’s where I land after looking at our own data. Among the hundreds of authors who completed our launch readiness quiz between June and August 2026, 86% have nothing set up to capture an email address and 70% have no list at all. For those authors, a Christmas launch means walking into the noisiest month of the year with no way to tell anybody the book exists.

The later windows give them the autumn to fix that first. That's not a small difference.

The pre-order question, and the bit some people get wrong

Here’s the bit that catches authors out: Amazon does not save all your pre-orders and drop them onto publication day as one glorious sales spike.

If you're going for January, somebody may tell you to open a pre-order in early December so you catch the gift-card crowd. Someone unwraps a Kindle on Christmas morning, spends their gift card on your pre-order that afternoon, and the book appears on their device in January.

That part's true, and it's a nice bit of having your cake and eating it.

On Amazon, each pre-order affects your ranking when the reader places it, not when the book is published. Kobo, Apple and Google Play do it the other way round, counting the sale when it's ordered and giving you a lift at launch as well.

That doesn't make long pre-orders bad. They can do real work for discoverability, for a series, for total sales. But if what you want is a concentrated publication-week spike, a long Amazon pre-order spreads that activity out rather than saving it up.

Match the length to what you're actually after.

What the timeline actually looks like

If you're going for Christmas

You don’t have a leisurely three-to-six-month runway left. August and September are production, positioning, ARC recruitment and launch preparation. The book should ideally be live by late October or early November, leaving November for reviews, discovery and sustained promotion. If production is not already close to finished, that is useful evidence that January - or later - is the better decision.

If you're going for January

A January launch gives you a three-to-six-month preparation window.

I think of it as two phases. The first is decisions. The second is execution.

So if you're reading this in August, your January launch has already started.

August to late October: make the decisions. 

This is where you decide who the book is for and settle the positioning. Choose your publication date. Book your editor, designer and anyone else whose diary you depend on before December takes them.

Start building, or waking up, your email list. If you need a reader magnet, create it now so it has time to attract readers before you ask them to buy anything. Begin identifying ARC readers, even if you don't approach them yet.

Now count twelve weeks back from a launch in the second half of January and you land around the end of October.

That's where the second phase begins.

Late October to early December: involve other people. 

Approach your ARC team. Open a pre-order of a length that matches what you're trying to achieve. Keep growing your list. And finish anything that depends on somebody else's diary before the first week of December, because after that you're largely on your own.

Early December to January: finish what you can control. 

Write the launch emails. Finish the retail page, including the blurb, categories and keywords. By this point, that page is the last thing standing between a reader clicking and buying.

Two outside things can still catch you out during this stretch.

Your ARC readers are real people with Christmases of their own, so nudge them early and gently rather than appearing in their inboxes on 2 January.

Retailer deadlines vary too. Final ebook files are often due 48 to 72 hours before publication, while print deadlines can be earlier. ALLi's pre-order guide includes the cautionary tale of an author who uploaded the wrong file and found the pre-order locked before she could replace it. Check the deadlines for every retailer and format you're using, and put them in your diary now - not during the first week of January.

Writing your own launch emails on a quiet afternoon between Christmas and New Year is one of the more pleasant jobs in publishing. Chasing a designer in the same week is one of the worst.

Second half of January.

Publish, then run the plan you've already made, including week two.

Almost nobody plans week two, and it’s often what decides whether you had a launch or merely a spike.

Fiction and non-fiction pull in slightly different directions

For non-fiction, the new year is close to ideal, and the tighter your book sits against a resolution the more the timing does for you. Your reader has just decided to change something and you're the instructions. That's also exactly why February deserves a look.

For fiction, the opportunity is less about resolutions and more about post-Christmas digital browsing. New devices and gift cards can create a useful discovery window for ebook-first titles.

Fiction also has a stronger claim on Christmas itself, along with plenty of non-fiction: cookery, humour, illustrated books, memoir, local interest, anything with an obvious recipient. And children's books above all, given they're over 60% of the gift market.

What I'd do this week

Don't try to build the whole launch this week. Start with one decision. Pick a date.

Not a vague 'sometime in January'. An actual date, written somewhere you'll see it.

That's genuinely it for this week. There's a heatwave on here and I'm not convinced anybody is capable of more than one decision at a time right now. 🥵

Then, when it cools down, be honest with yourself about where the book stands, because those months go very differently depending on what's missing.

For most authors I see it's the list, though that's a long way from universal. Of the 457 who've taken the launch readiness quiz so far, positioning scores 79% of the available marks while email list growth scores 10%. Most know who their reader is. They simply have no reliable way to reach them.

Yours might be the other way round entirely.

If you're not sure, the quiz will tell you in about two minutes. It scores you across the five things that decide a launch and shows you which one to fix first, which is a far more useful thing to know in August than in December.

Take the launch readiness quiz →

Don't let Christmas choose your launch date just because it's the one coming next. Choose it because it gives your book the best chance of finding readers.

Sometimes that'll be November. Quite often it'll be January. Occasionally it'll be February.

Whichever it is, pick it on purpose.

Sources

• Aerio, Holiday book-buying trends and tactics you can use to grow your sales

• NielsenIQ, UK Christmas book trends (UK data)

• Linden Gross, Timing your book launch, October 2025

• The Book Designer, Do this, not that: launching your book during the holidays

• Alliance of Independent Authors, Timing for book launches

• Alliance of Independent Authors, The ultimate guide to pre-orders for indie authors

• Publishers Weekly / NPD BookScan, Self-improvement boom sets book sales off on fast start in 2021

• bookfluence launch readiness quiz, June to August 2026