For authors whose books have been out of stock in the run up to the holidays, it can be hard to recover the lost royalties and sinking Amazon rankings. In a Facebook message, Ms. Makkai urged readers to shop at independent stores for her novel after Amazon listed it as out of stock and indicated it wouldn’t ship until after Christmas. “This whole situation is rotten, and my press is doing everything they can, but ugh, this is really, really bad timing,” she wrote.

Agents and authors say part of the problem is that publishers and retailers have become more risk averse. Publishers are printing smaller first runs, partly because retailers are ordering fewer copies initially, waiting to see which titles take off to avoid making the wrong bet and getting stuck storing unsold inventory. In the past, it was often easy to get another batch of books printed in a week or two if a title sold unexpectedly well, but these days some publishers say it can take one or two months.

On top of that, the seemingly bottomless appetite among readers for a handful of blockbuster titles has tightened the bottleneck at the printing presses, consuming what little slack there was in the system. Mr. Woodward’s “Fear” has sold nearly two million copies in all formats, while Mrs. Obama’s “Becoming,” which came out in November, has sold 3.8 million copies.

“The capacity is so tight that if you get a book that takes off like ‘Becoming,’ you have to stop what they were printing and print more ‘Becoming,’ then whatever they were printing is late,” said Dennis Abboud, the chief executive of ReaderLink, the main book distributor to Target, Walmart and other outlets. “Then the train is really off the rails.”