Tomorrow is October 1st, time for a new year on the copyright page.
What?????
It would be reasonable to assume that the copyright date on a book matches the calendar year in which a book is published, wouldn’t it? Well, yes. However, this isn’t so. (Nor is this date the same as the release date.) Rather, a convention among publishers is to use the next year’s date in the copyright notice for any book published on or after October 1st.
This practice confuses many authors when first they encounter it but really the answer is simple. Moving books from one warehouse to another (or from printer to warehouse) can take weeks. Add to this the time to deliver a book from warehouse to bookshop – and for a customer to then come in, find and purchase that book – and, before you know it, more than two months have elapsed. Suddenly it’s January and that brand new book now looks like last year’s book.
Perceptions matter – as simple as that.
