HANNIBAL LECTER has beaten and eaten some tough competition in his lucrative career as the world’s favourite psychopath. This Christmas he may face his toughest enemy yet — a 63-year-old Python.

British booksellers rate Hannibal Rising, the latest instalment of Thomas Harris’s Lecter novels, and the first volume of Michael Palin’s diaries, The Python Years, as potential No 1 Christmas bestsellers.

By the time Harris hits the shelves on December 6, Lecter will be competing against one of the fiercest sets of new releases in years.

Among those with new titles in the pipeline are Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton, Charles Frazier, John Grisham, Robert Harris, Stephen King, John le Carré and Thomas Pynchon.

Despite sales of their huge back catalogues, publishers make a big chunk of their profits from current bestsellers. Record-breaking sales of the hardback edition of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince ensured that Bloomsbury banked profits of £20m last year. This month the publisher reported the paperback edition helped it to a 6.5% jump in revenues.

Most of the leading players in the book publishing market are now part of large media empires. Germany’s Bertelsmann owns Random House, Sunday Times owner News Corporation owns HarperCollins, Penguin Books is owned by Pearson, and the French house Hachette Livre is part of the publishing and aerospace group Lagardère. The market remains in a period of intense consolidation — Hachette Livre bought Time Warner’s book business for $537m (£282m) earlier this year.

The consolidation has brought greater focus on marketing and brands, said one publishing source. “Big books are now sold in the same way as films or TV shows,” he said, pointing to the success of the Potter books and Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.

The run-up to Christmas is always the most important season in the book business’s calendar, accounting for 25% of sales. This year more big-name authors than ever will be fighting for shelf space; and many of those releasing books have not published new works for years.

Pynchon has not brought out a book since 1997’s Mason & Dixon, Frazier’s last offering, Cold Mountain, was also published in 1997, and Hannibal last made an appearance in 1999.

The book trade is confident that readers will cope with the avalanche and publishing houses are now so large they can absorb the odd flop.

Hardback sales are healthy thanks in part to cut-throat pricing by booksellers and populist champions such as Richard and Judy on their Channel 4 Book Club.

Jonathan Burnham, publisher and senior vice-president at HarperCollins, said: “Release staging has become as complex as the Oscar nominees in the run-up to the Academy Awards.”

To avoid it being lost in all the noise, HarperCollins has just moved back the publication of mobster epic Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra, to January. Burnham described this autumn’s release schedule as “uniquely heavy”. “The really intense selling season is just about to begin,” he said. “We felt Sacred Games would do better with fewer releases.”