According to industry analyst Neilsen Bookscan, 404 books are being published today, twice as many as in a normal week, leading to a busy period for printers as book shops stock up on titles they hope will be big sellers for Christmas.

Super Thursday also marks the day that weekly book sales start to rise as we head towards December 25.

The term 'Super Thursday' was coined by an editor at trade title The Bookseller, who, in 2008, noticed a rush of releases on the same Thursday each year. It was a phenomenon which had been steadily building for some years, and a cause of complaint for publicists. The Super Thursday moniker has since then meant more publicity for the published books and for books in general.

As Britain’s biggest book printer St Ives Clays, which prints more than 140m books a year, tweeted this morning “It's that time of year....#SuperThursday is here!” 

The day has launched a rash of signing events, including the three finalists of The Great British Bake Off, Nadiya Hussain, Tamal Ray and Ian Cumming, who are attending a signing of the book of the same name this lunchtime at Waterstones’ Piccadilly, London store and F1 champion Nigel Mansell who is signing copies of his autobiography Staying On Track at Waterstones’ Cribbs Causeway shop in Bristol.

Authors are also sharing their Super Thursday experiences on Twitter.

Crime novelist Ian Rankin yesterday tweeted a picture of his new Clays-published novel, writing “My first sighting of finished copies of Even Dogs In The Wild, prior to signing 2,700 of them.”

Around 1,800 bookshops in both the UK and Ireland are taking part in a three-day campaign coordinated by the Booksellers Association (BA) Books Are My Bag (BAMB), which has its own cloth bag for shoppers designed by Grayson Perry.

The event will reach a peak on Saturday with a series of ‘Big Bookshop Parties’.

Titles published today include Get Even by Martina Cole, Happy! (a children’s book based on the hit song) by Pharrell Williams, Little Stars by Jacqueline Wilson, and Bill Bryson’s latest musings on British Life, The Road to Little Dribbling, alongside the usual rush of celebrity titles, such as Steve Coogan’s memoir Easily Distracted, Chris Evans’ Call the Midwife and Tom Jones’ Over The Top and Back. 

Cookery books by Gordon Ramsay, Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Nigella Lawson.

Super Thursday has been covered extensively in the nationals and on broadcast news. And this evening’s The BBC’s One Show will feature a sofa made out of today’s newly published titles.