Ms. Messitte said that when Vintage editors published the paperback of “Swamplandia!,” they chose July to capitalize on sales to summer vacationers, who tend to prefer fiction.

“It felt to us like a perfect summer paperback,” she said of the book, which chronicles the fantastical adventures of a Florida family that fights alligators and works in a theme park. “Swamplandia!” sold more than 30,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which typically tracks 75 percent of retail printed sales.

The entire publishing life cycle has sped up in recent years. Hardcovers have less time to prove themselves in bookstores, since retailers tend to move them off the shelves more quickly than they used to. E-book sales are usually strong in the initial period after the publication date but do not spike again after the paperback comes out, said Terry Adams, the digital and paperback publisher for Little, Brown & Company.

Mr. Adams released the paperback of “Room,” the acclaimed novel by Emma Donoghue, eight months after the hardcover because hardcover sales had slowed but not stopped entirely. “The momentum was there, and we wanted to capture the momentum for the paperback,” he said. “For books that rise to a certain level of visibility, you really want to ride the wave.”

E-books have made price an issue for publishers who are weighing the timing of a paperback. While there is often a huge gap between the cost of a new hardcover (say, $25) and its e-book edition ($13), paperbacks and e-books tend to be within a few dollars of each other, leaving many publishers to wonder if cost-conscious shoppers are reading e-books right away rather than waiting for the paperback.

“I really do think that e-books are part of the reason for this trend of hurrying up that paperback,” said Carrie Kania, the publisher of Harper Perennial and It Books. “You don’t have to wait for a lower-priced version of that book now. I think we need to move more quickly in general.”

But there are still plenty of exceptions to the tighter paperback schedule. Several publishers said that the one-year window was still the rule for most books. And as long as a book is selling briskly in hardcover, publishers tend to hold off on releasing a paperback edition. Stieg Larsson’s third book in the Millennium series, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” has yet to be published in paperback in the United States, more than a year after its hardcover was released. (It has sold 2.5 million copies in hardcover and 1.1 million in e-book form.)