Mysterious things publishers do...

Working at a major bookstore, I get to see the new releases come out every week, so I see publishing trends quite frequently. In March, however, I noticed an interesting peculiarity in the publishing field. Two pair of books came out, each pair within two weeks of each other, on very similar subjects. And I'm not talking about mundane subjects, like a couple new books on low carb dieting or on WWII. I'm talking about very unique specific subjects, ones that when a book is published on it, you'd say, " Wow, that's neat they wrote a book on this."

Of the first wave, one of the books is titled Robbing the Bee: A Biography of Honey. Written by Holley Bishop, who, according the jacket blurb just has a journalism degree and has written for a few magazines. Free press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) published the book. The second book is Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee, by Hattie Ellis, a British food writer. This one is published by Harmony books, an imprint of Random House.




A few weeks later another intriguing pair of very similar titles came out. Birdsong: A Natural History by Don Stap, a professor of English at the University of Central Florida was one. This was published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. The other one is Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song. This one was written by David Rothenberg, a professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and published by Basic books



Now the question that begs to asked is, "What caused these people to publish similar books at the same time?" I'm sure somewhere along the way it falls back to the publishers. They can have a manuscript for years before publishing it. Competition works in all areas of commerce and having Simon and Schuster imprints publish one from each subject makes one wonder who had the idea first.