Preparing for a bump in book sales, post-Nobel win

The new Nobel laureate in literature, Jon Fosse, is known in much of the world, but has yet to become a household name in the US.

The 2023 Nobel for literature was awarded this week to Norwegian author Jon Fosse. While he’s known in much of the world, he hasn’t been a household name in the U.S., with only 12,000 copies of his work sold here since 2004, according to Circana.

Now, the book industry is preparing for a bump in sales. 

The North American publisher of several of Jon Fosse’s books is Transit Books. It’s less than a decade old and run by Adam Levy and his wife out of their home in the Bay Area.

When they learned this week that Fosse won the Nobel, “we quickly made coffee and got to work in our living room,” said Levy.

They’d already planned to release two of Fosse’s works in paperback later this month, including what’s been called his magnum opus, Septology. That’ll be 5,000 copies each. 

Now, however, they’re looking at printing at least 10,000 additional copies of each work. Levy notes that printing a book takes up two months.

“It’s slow,” he said. “And so one of the tasks for any publisher really — regardless of your size — is to figure out how you meet a huge surge in demand.”

There could also be demand for Fosse’s many other works that have yet to be released here.

“He’s very prolific. He does children’s books and poetry and essays and short stories and novels,” said Damion Searls, who has translated a number of Fosse’s books into English.

He expects that work to continue — “at perhaps a somewhat faster pace.”

Meanwhile, publisher Adam Levy hopes others in the industry take note of Transit’s success with its new Nobel laureate and are inspired to take chances on authors who’ve yet to find an audience in the U.S.