“So we could get lucky and see that it really works in our favor,” she added.

Grand Central is enjoying strong sales of titles by the novelists Nelson DeMille and Nicholas Sparks, as well as of “Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World,” but it also is waiting to see how Ted Turner’s “Call Me Ted,” for which it spent more than $5 million, will sell. Ms. Raab said the company had printed 625,000 copies and had shipped more than 500,000.

With several publishers reporting that booksellers were cutting orders for January, Ms. Raab acknowledged that she was concerned about a post-New Year’s downturn. “You know to a certain extent people will be in the stores during the holidays,” she said. “What will happen once there is no reason to be in the stores?”

Booksellers are trying new tactics to help ring up sales. At Book Passage, an independent bookseller in San Francisco and Corte Madera, Calif., Elaine Petrocelli, an owner, said she recently instituted a policy giving priority seating at book readings to those who purchase the book. Last month she sold 160 copies at a reading by Katherine Neville, author of “The Fire,” a thriller about a chess prodigy.

Still, Ms. Petrocelli said she had noticed an overall decline in foot traffic at her two stores compared with this time last year. As a result, she said, she has decided not to hire holiday-season help. Usually she hires three or four people part time.

Not surprisingly, publishers, too, are looking for ways to cut costs. Print runs are being scrutinized, and companies are trying to reduce the number of unsold copies that are returned by booksellers, a painful practice in the best of times.

Some publishers are also looking at their (famously generous) travel and entertainment budgets. Steve Ross, publisher of Collins, a division of HarperCollins, said he recently took a job candidate for a drink at a Midtown hotel and was shocked by the $22 price for cocktails. “I think it will be awhile before I will have the pleasure of meeting anybody there,” Mr. Ross said.

For now, both publishers and agents said the penny pinching was not yet sinking seven-figure book deals. Although some might be cautious about signing a debut novelist, most publishers said they were still aggressively pursuing deals for celebrity books and others with natural best-seller prospects. Last month Little, Brown & Company signed a deal with the comedian Tina Fey for a sum reported as more than $5 million, and Jerry Seinfeld was out with a book proposal this week that some publishers suggested could go for a high seven-figure advance.