Three for two reasons not to celebrate that much ... Christmas books promotions. Photograph: Martin Argles

All the leaves are brown and the sky is blue - and if you're any sort of publisher, your Christmas deals with retailers will have been completed way before this lovely time of year, ready for the annual gamble of the bookshop Christmas offer list. Given that most high street sellers will most likely start their festive window offers this weekend, now seemed the right time to consider the whole question.

I suppose that one of the reasons for the current good health of the book industry (general UK revenue up 3-5%) is the fact that a book still makes such a damn good present: it's easy to wrap, and oh boy is there a vast list to choose from (way over 100,000 new titles will have been published in 2007 alone). And it's in December that every publishing sales manager starts checking their weekly stock levels to see if they've backed the right titles to succeed.

Small publishers like me may see little of this Christmas bonus. A few years ago I recall speaking to a friend of mine who is director of one of the big four UK publishers. Beware, he said, of the lure of high street Christmas deals. The discounts the shops will ask for are way off the charts, they'll demand enormous quantities to fill up their table tops, and in January, when the whole national is engaged in the pursuit of resolutions, abstinence or slimming, they will ship back 80% of what they took. Oh, and to add insult to injury, into the final returns invoice they'll add the fabled marketing fee charged to put your books in the right place on those heavily laden table tops - so any profit you might have made will be completely wiped out.

Since then, only one of our books has made it onto the high street for Christmas. Generally, we're told that they don't have the right profile. We still make hardback picture books (not cool, especially if they're priced at over £6.99) and publish titles that are deemed "too sophisticated" for the UK market. Thankfully, however, attitudes seem to be slowly shifting - and lo and behold last year the marvellous Foyles chose our book When We Lived in Uncle's Hat and put it in their window and catalogue. Cue frequent trips past the shop front on chilly December mornings, during which we would comment loudly on how lovely their windows looked.

This year we've entered the offers club with My House by Delphine Durand picked for the Blackwell/Heffers Christmas catalogue offers - and believe it or not, they've asked for a reasonable quantity, a doable discount and a very manageable marketing fee (as much as we'd spend on a small mailing). Just as important to us is the fact that they love the hardback edition and gave us wonderful feedback and praise for the story inside.

In the end, I suppose a reduced front-of-shop Christmas selection can end up hurting small publishers and authors as well as the giants.

Add to that the fact that having to wade through swathes of recommended selections before getting to something you might like to choose can turn a beloved bookshop experience into something on a par with the weekend supermarket run ("two Grishams, a Joan Collins and a pound of Irvine Welsh please ... "). In the end I'm in favour of selected promotion, but only when those selections are made on the content of the book that the staff have read. But I would say that, wouldn't I? What Christmas shoppers, as opposed to sellers, make of the annual bonanza of jingling offers is another question.