Publish Horror Year Round
Right now, horror is reaching new heights and new readers. So why do we have to act like it only exists for one month a year?
October is gone. Spooky Season has ended. Only the hoarders still have their candy stash left. Costumes are back in the closet. One other thing that will change with the seasons is the displays at bookstores and libraries, which will switch from the seasonal horror offerings to whatever they’ve chosen for November.
Will we stop reading horror novels? Of course not! But the way publishing calendars have worked in the last few years, you’d think readers only remember horror exists in October. There were so many horror novels released in October 2026 that a bookstore display trying to show them all wouldn’t have fit on a single table.
Horror has always been a popular genre, and right now it’s reaching new heights and new readers. So why do we have to act like it only exists for one month a year? Emily and Jessica consider the problem.
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Emily: Oh boy, where to start? To start, I understand why this happens. I worked in Big Five publishing for a dozen years, mostly in sales and marketing, and I’ve seen firsthand the way the publishing and media industries have changed over the last two decades. First, you have the erosion of the publishing workforce: years of layoffs and corporate downsizing and consolidation have led to a situation where there simply aren’t enough workers, and each individual employee is doing the job of, conservatively, 3-5 people.
Second, and I know this is going to sound strange to readers younger than 40: we did actually used to have a thriving culture journalism industry in this country! I know, I know, what a concept. The hollowing-out of media and journalism has had ramifications in every direction, but it’s been particularly dire for the book world. The number of publications that have dedicated books coverage is rapidly diminishing, so publishers and authors are competing for these precious promotional opportunities.
There are other factors at play here as well, but what I’m getting at is this: publishers are increasingly desperate for any publicity hook that will help them get books in front of readers’ eyes, and as those hooks continue to vanish, we’re left with the kind of big immovable seasonal opportunities. For horror, obviously that’s the spooky season leading up to Halloween. And it makes sense, of course—“hey, people are thinking about horror right now, let’s publish some horror books for them.” But when every single publisher has that same thought, the volume of books published in September and October becomes overwhelming, and it’s hard for readers to find any signal in the noise.
Jessica: Thank you for hitting the nail on the head so accurately. It definitely isn’t as simple as October = Horror. Film likes to have horror spaced out nice and regularly all year, but there’s a handful of new movies each week where there’s hundreds of new books. TV marketing is, well, all over the place, so I guess it’s not surprising that we’ve had a definite uptick in horror television in the August-October window. (Carrie, Crystal Lake, Yaga, for starters.) It is the easy way to go. But a handful of TV shows is one thing, whereas there are just SO MANY novels.
I’ve always seen a little boost in horror novels puslibhsed during October. For a few years my complaint was that Spooky Season isn’t just October and you can also release horror in August and September, too, so they’re already out when bookstores start putting out their horror displays. That has gotten better, there’s an increase in horror novels during that whole 3-month period. But still the vast majority are all out in October.
With those causes understood, let’s look a little bit at the effects. Emily, your Jump Scares list is one of the most definitive sources. I took a look at Jump Scares for three months of 2026 to do a basic comparison. I chose March and June as comparison points, as those tend to be relatively big release months for genre fiction. March had 52 horror books, June had 38. October had 98. NINETY-EIGHT.
My reading this year follows a similar pattern. I read a lot of horror, but that’s not the only genre I read. I also read a lot of books every year, finishing the ones I like best. I have 20-40 advance copies to consider each month, and I try to get as many horror novels in as I can. In March I had 35 total advance copies to consider, and 26% were horror. June I had 37 books, with 24% horror. But October had 29 total books and 90% were horror. Only three books were NOT horror, which is bananas. Not only did horror take over, but it seems to have pushed out almost everything else. October used to be full of big buzzy releases, part of the big Fall season, even if it wasn’t quite as big as September. It’s a massive shift.
Emily: Well, October is definitely still Big Book Season—traditionally, this is when publishers release the books they expect to hit that sweet spot of critical darling and commercial success. Just as one example, I’m seeing a ton of coverage of Chad Harbach’s long-awaited new novel The Brightness this week. I don’t think horror has replaced the publishing industry’s existing September-October playbook, but the groundswell of horror has, at the very least, pushed basically every non-horror book out of my sphere of awareness.
I suspect that for your average reader who’s not in publishing or media and doesn’t necessarily pay attention to publication dates when they’re picking books, this doesn’t make a lot of difference. If you’re not somebody who has reason to be attuned to publishing schedules and trends, you’re going to pick up a book when it happens to cross your path, or when your library hold comes in, or when something reminds you you have a copy sitting on your shelf. A super stacked October publication schedule isn’t going to have a huge direct impact on your reading.
But for those of us who read and review professionally, this creates a real bind. Do you have any idea how hard it was to narrow down the landscape of September and October horror titles to just four books for my NYTBR column? My god, I almost had a panic attack.
Jessica: I feel you. I knew I could only get to so many so I had to bail on a lot more books than I would have liked. But I think this does have an impact on the average reader. Because when those 98 horror books all come out in a rush, it really impacts discoverability. Even with more spooky chatter in October, we don’t get a lot more books coverage. With so many books fighting for attention, the big names and the big budgets will be the winners. And while that happens much of the year, there will be a lot more books not getting the attention they deserve and struggling to break through the chaos in October.
It puts the onus on readers to know that there were so many horror novels released in October that they definitely missed some no matter how closely they paid attention, and then to figure out how to find the ones that are interesting to you. It shouldn’t have to be this hard. If it’s a struggle for me, someone who has pretty good access to horror pre-publication, it’s a bigger struggle for the typical horror reader.
The big October push caters to the occasional-horror-reader, the person who says, “Hey it’s almost Halloween; maybe I should read a horror novel.” But is that who we should be catering to? I say that as if I don’t already know the answer, that pretty much the entire publishing industry is built on getting the casual reader to buy that book everyone is buying.
Emily: Isn’t that the (utterly depressing) truth. I don’t even have a solution to propose, since I think getting ourselves out of this bind would require a pretty seismic reordering of the entire publishing industry. My best advice is for horror readers to keep buying (and talking about!) books year-round, which I know most of you already are. There are authors with books coming out in December, February, April, and they deserve just as much attention as the big October pubs.
So how do you find new books in a landscape crowded with them? Well, you’re here, which is a great start.
As Jessica mentioned above, I run my own website, Read Jump Scares, where I catalog the new horror books published each year. It’s as comprehensive as I can possibly make it—I trawl publisher sites, retailer sites, social media, and more to pull together titles, and there’s also a form for authors and publishing professionals to let me know about books I missed. If you’re curious, I wrote about how I compile these lists for Becky Spratford’s blog a few years ago.
And speaking of horror librarian extraordinaire Becky Spratford: her blog has a ton of resources and is also a great resource itself. Spratford also helps run the Summer Scares program with the HWA and some other partners, which recommends adult, YA, and middle grade horror books for libraries every year. (And this year’s spokesperson is friend of the site Ally Russell!)
I also can’t recommend this highly enough: talk to the booksellers and librarians at your local stores and libraries! Ask for recommendations, get a sense of their taste, and then, when you find someone whose taste resonates with yours, maintain that relationship! Some of the very best evangelists for the horror genre can be found right down the street. And if your local store doesn’t have a horror enthusiast, find one online! A few suggestions: Ryan Clark, the Queen of Scream at Gibson’s Bookstore in New Hampshire. Lisa, who leads the horror book club at Barnes & Noble in Hingham, MA. Tiffany Gonzalez, a bookseller-turned-publishing pro who still posts all the time about what she’s reading and loving.
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