On Monday, October 3, Penguin Random House launched its two-day transit shipping program for the holiday season, one month earlier than in previous years.

Orders for Penguin Random House physical books received in the company’s order system from independent booksellers by 3:00 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday, will ship no later than the following business day for arrival at stores within two days, weather and transport conditions permitting. The program will run for five months, through March 3, 2017.

“What we originally envisioned five years ago as a two-month sales-support effort, thanks to enormous enthusiasm and demand from our accounts, has evolved into an opportunity for our customers to take advantage of not just two, but five months of ‘holiday’ consumer promotions, including Columbus and Veterans Days, Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Valentine’s Day, and Presidents’ Day, as well as, of course, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s Day,” said Jaci Updike, president of the Penguin Random House Sales Group. “Our goal with Two-Day Transit always has been to enable our booksellers to worry less about the status of their reorders and focus more on selling our titles, thanks to their timely arrival.”

The program includes Penguin as well as Random House titles. All frontlist and backlist books from the imprints of the Crown and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Groups, Random House, Penguin Publishing Group, Random House Children’s Books, Penguin Young Readers, Penguin Random House Audio — together with Penguin Random House Publisher Services clients — are eligible.

Penguin Random House titles ship from the company’s Westminster, Maryland, and Crawfordsville, Indiana, operations centers. Both facilities have weekend shifts in place to enable orders received on Fridays and Saturdays to be shipped on the following Monday.