canadian publishing 2011: change and challenge

Canadian Publishing 2011

A Special Report

CHANGEAND

CHALLENGE

Publishers in Canada readyfor a wave of e-books and an altered

retail landscape.

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ®

D O U B L E D A Y C A N A D A • K N O P F C A N A D A • R A N D O M H O U S E C A N A D A

www RandomHouse.caRandom House Inc., Distribution Center, 400 Hahn Road, Westminster, MD 21157

Phone: 1-800-733-3000 • Fax: 1-800-659-2436 • 8:30am-5:00pm EST Mon-FriRandom House Inc., Distribution Center, 400 Hahn Road, Westminster, MD 21157

E-BOOK A

V A I L A B LE

From Canada To You.

W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 1

C a n a d i a n P u b l i s h i n g 2 0 1 1

CHALLENGES AND CHANGESE-books, economic stress, and a big shift at Indigo concern publishers.

By Leigh Anne Williams

This year Canadian publishers face a triple challenge—tough economic conditions, the first big surge of e-book sales, and a dramatic shift in strategy at Indigo Books & Music, Cana-da’s largest book retailer. But, as is often said, no one goes into publishing unless he or she is an optimist, so PW is devoting these pages to looking at these challenges for pub-lishers north of the border, and the innovations and strategies they are employing to turn that optimism into results.

So far in 2011, the sales numbers tracked by BookNet Canada have been pretty bleak. In the first quarter of 2011, the number of print books sold in Canada

dropped by 10.9%, and by 10.8% in the dollar value of the sales. BookNet CEO Noah Genner attributes the drop to a combination of factors, including the jump in the sale of digital books, diffi-cult economic conditions, and the lack of blockbuster hits that have buoyed sales in recent years. Sales picked up a bit over the summer, with George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series and Kathryn Stockett’s The Help both doing very well and boosting sales figures somewhat. But Genner says, “We’re still seeing the year trending down a little bit over the year before. And 2010 was down from 2009.” As for e-book sales offsetting the decline in print, Genner says he cannot say for sure

what the proportions are, as BookNet is still developing a panel to measure digi-tal sales, and he doesn’t expect that to be in place for a year or so.

ECONOMIC ELEMENTSStill, the big fall season is just beginning, and Canada has a few things going for it. Amid the global economic turbulence, the Canadian economy, relatively speak-ing, has been an island of stability. In an August article, the Economist concluded that most of the strengths that helped Canada through the recession that hit the U.S. and Europe hard in 2008—tightly regulated banks, a stable housing mar-ket, sound public finances, and a strong Asian demand for Canadian commodity exports—would help it through a dou-ble-dip recession that some analysts fear is looming. However, there is a downside to that success: the Canadian dollar has

soared, to as high as $1.06 U.S. this sum-mer, its highest level since 2007. Although it has come down since, close to par, those heights put pressure on pub-lishers who received a lot of bad press in 2007 when the media and even the fed-eral finance minister used books printed with both U.S. and Canadian prices as an easy target for stories about prices not keeping up with the dollar’s climbing value.

“Pricing is a big issue for us,” says Ali-son Morgan, managing director of Tun-dra Books. Because of economies of scale in the much larger U.S. market, prices there are expected to be lower, but since 2007, publishers have been trying to keep Canadian prices close to the U.S. price. “So where we used to have an $8 spread, we’re now trying to do it with one or two dollars and even that meets with some resistance,” says Morgan. “We’re los-ing margin on both sides of the border.”

Jack David, copublisher of ECW Press, says, “It’s a killer. I wake up in the middle of the night [after dreaming that] the dollar is at 72 cents again.” But he says ECW has found ways to soften the blow, making the new exchange reality work by printing more in the U.S. And because ECW’s books are shipped out of Chicago, the company pays its distribu-tor IPG in American dollars. “So, between printing and sales and distribu-tion, we’re spending a lot of money in U.S. dollars with our Canadian dollars.”

The Economist article also warned that one weakness in the Canadian economy is “its intrinsic vulnerability to the out-side world, in particular its American neighbor and biggest trading partner,” and trouble for the U.S. is trouble in Canada.

Some Canadian publishers, such as Firefly Books, sell more books in the U.S. than they do in Canada, and thus feel the impact of events in the U.S. most directly. “There are loads of challenges for us because we have to replace our sales that we used to make to Borders,” says Firefly publisher and owner Lionel Koffler. “And we have both adult illustrated books and children’s titles that sell to


One year ago, Mike Bryan arrived in Toronto to take up his new position as president of Penguin Group Canada. It was far from an ideal circumstance to begin a new job. He was stepping into the company in the wake of star president David Davidar’s dismissal amid allegations of sexual harassment. But in spite of that turbulent starting point, Bryan says Penguin Canada had its best year ever in 2010 and hopes that success will continue this year.

What made 2010 such a good year for Penguin when book sales in Canada were down generally? “We had everything going for us,” acknowledges Bryan. “We had the three Larsson books, the Millennium trilogy, selling like mad. We had Neil Pasricha’s The Book of Awesome, selling like mad, and we had Eat, Pray, Love on the bestseller lists.”

It’s a tough year to follow, he admits. But he says 2011 had a “storming start,” partly because the titles of the previous year carried on, but the list also included The King’s Speech by Mark Logue, which got a big boost when the film won the Oscar for Best Picture. Penguin also has a hit in commercial fiction with Canadian author D J MacIntosh’s Witch of Babylon. “The author is being hailed everywhere as the Canadian Dan Brown, which is fantastic. And we are seeing great physical sales and e-book sales on her book,” says Bryan. A debut Canadian novel, The Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers, was another highlight of the spring.

Bryan’s expectations for a good fall season are similarly based on the books. “We’re very excited on the literary side of things—we’ve got [2010 Giller winner] Johanna Skibsrud coming [This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories]. We’ve got Amitav Ghosh’s [River of Smoke] coming out. Amitav will be coming up to Can-ada and promoting it.” Penguin can also look forward to the last of Larsson’s trilogy coming out in paperback and a film of the first book being released before Christ-mas. The company is also benefiting from another movie tie-in. Kathryn Stockett’s The Help sold more than 550,000 copies over the summer and 30,000 a week after the film came out. “We think that’s going to be the book of the fall, really,” he says.

Bryan also had to steer the Penguin Canada ship for most of his first year without the assistance of publisher Nicole Winstanley, who was on a year’s maternity leave. Now that the two have been working together for the past month, Winstanley says, “It is already clear that he brings a fresh and international perspective to Canadian publishing. And his international sales background is invaluable as we watch the market change and shift with each passing day.”

Having worked with Bryan throughout the year, Yvonne Hunter, vice-president, publicity and marketing, says, “Mike has become part of the Canadian company—and indeed the Canadian industry— with remarkable ease, and he brings us 30 years of experience with Penguin in various parts of the world. He is genuinely one of the company’s greatest brand ambassadors, and his enthusiasm for the brand is infec-tious.”

A Great First YearMike Bryan: An Englishman At Penguin Canada

Mike Bryan

EXCELOVATE

Publishing A full-service Canadian

publishing house dedicated to helping

people and enriching lives

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

PROMOTING NEW &

EXCITING URBAN VOICES

Joyce Robinson Desmond McLennon II Claudette McGowan

Andre Short II

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

416.619.5309 http://www.excelovate.com

[email protected]

Lizzy? Beth? Liz? Betsy?

“This debut picture-book offering from Dunklee and Forsythe is close enough to perfect in its tone, pacing and interplay between words and pictures: Wonderful.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review

KirKus

Three words:

Wordless. Comic. Adventure.

Hocus PocusHC 978-1-55453-577-4 $16.95 Ages 3 to 7

My Name Is Elizabeth!HC 978-1-55453-560-6 $14.95

Ages 3 to 7 www.kidscanpress.com

www.kidscanpress.com

PW_ElizabethhocusPocus_Sep6.indd 1 30/08/11 9:30 AM


school and high school libraries that are missing a lot of their historic funding in the U.S. and Canada. So we have to be very clever and diligent to make more sales out of fewer customers or fewer dol-lars around.”

Several publishers observed that the market is tougher in Canada than abroad. Rick Wilks, director of Annick Press, says it is “daunting.” The U.S. market is “really tough and getting tougher,” but he says sales in the U.S. “make all the difference” for Annick, along with important international sales, rights, and film sales.

The view from HarperCollins Canada is different. President and CEO David Kent says that the Canadian publishing program remains the most profitable part of HarperCollins Canada’s business. The company just closed a fiscal year with a happy ending that included such highlights as Emma Donoghue’s Room selling more than 100,000 copies and Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants selling more than 405,000 copies. Perhaps inspired by a series of good years, Kent takes a philosophical approach to the challenges of publishing. He says years ago he told people in the finance depart-ment, “ ‘You want predictable. Don’t be in books…. Be in aspirin, be in Band-Aids. You want to be consistent, open funeral homes. Don’t go into books.’ ”

THE E-BOOK HAS ARRIVEDFor a few years, publishers in Canada have been busily digitizing their lists and backlists preparing for the digital revolution to cross the border. There was a time lag, partially because many of the e-reading devices like the Kindle launched first in the U.S. while Canadian consumers waited impatiently. But now, all the e-readers are here. Many Canadi-ans got them for Christmas and they have been enthusiastically buying and reading on them since. E-book sales in Canada still have a way to go to catch up with sales levels in the U.S., but publishers are watching the e-book portion of their sales rise. “As we pass into 2012, we anticipate more e-book devices being

sold,” says Kevin Hanson, president of Simon & Schuster Canada. “We think 2012 will be the year that e-books really have a full impact on the business broadly speaking.”

BookNet Canada is in the process of assembling a panel to track digital sales, so hard statistics are not available yet, but anecdotally publishers surveyed gen-erally believe that e-book sales are about 5%–7% of sales, with higher figures of 10%–12% on some titles. A few houses, such as House of Anansi Press and ECW, report e-book sales are already between 10% and12%. “On certain bestsellers [e-book sales] can be anywhere,” says Leo MacDonald, v-p of sales and marketing at HarperCollins Canada. “It depends on who takes it. If Costco doesn’t take it, it can be a higher percentage. If Costco takes it, it drops. I’ve seen some books up to 50%.” He notes, however, that e-books have a very short shelf-life. “We find that e-books sell like crazy when they are on [an e-retailer’s] home page; once they are off the home page they drop dramati-cally.”

“E-books are mass market books,” says Kent. “If you look at the categories that do well in e-books they are the categories that do well in mass market—romance, mystery, thrillers. Mass market existed because it was inexpensive and dispos-able.”

Other publishers make similar obser-vations. Kevin Hanson notes that e-book purchasing is especially high for com-mercial authors. ”I think in that context we’re actually finding new readers in e-book formats,” he says, noting that the cheaper price encourages people to sam-ple work from authors they haven’t read.

So far, most Canadian publishers tell PW that e-book sales do not seem to be noticeably cannibalizing their print sales, but they acknowledge that it’s nearly impossible to know whether the e-book readers are additions to the mar-ket or if they previously would have bought a print copy. Sarah MacLachlan, president of House of Anansi Press, says that there was a huge spike in e-book sales for three of Anansi’s books—Alison ANANSI PUBLISHES VERY GOOD BOOKS

WWW.ANANSI.CA

THE BOOK

of the SEASON

WINTERWINTERWINTERFive Windows on the Season

A D A M G O P N I K

International bestselling author Adam Gopnik

delivers the 50th anniversary edition of the CBC Massey Lectures, a stunningly beautiful and

enchanting homage to a season.


Pick’s Far to Go, Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, and Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English—when they made the Man Booker Prize’s longlist. (DeWitt’s and Kelman’s books also made it to the shortlist, announced Sept. 6.) MacLachlan says she doesn’t know if the e-book spike was bigger because consumers couldn’t find print copies, but “they could cer-tainly find them easily as e-books.”

Annick’s Wilks says “the economic model associated with e-books is not hugely encouraging,” observing that so far the sales aren’t sufficient, and even when you do have sales the margins are even worse than print. “A huge misconception the public has is that e-books will work well for us because we don’t have printing costs and paper costs and all the rest. For us, when it takes us a year and a half to develop a book, the printing and paper is a really small piece of that. Yes, there is some saving, but on the other hand, it’s not all that substantial, and the thing about e-books is that they are going to take colossal marketing efforts.”

At Orca Books in Victoria, B.C., publisher Andrew Wooldridge says, “People still need physical books, so I’m not concerned yet that it is going to be cannibalizing print sales. People are buy-ing them more in conjunction with print sales.” Orca sells extensively in the library and school market and is experimenting with a digital subscription model.

“Teachers and librarians don’t like buying one e-book for one student. They want to buy multiple-user, buildingwide access to books,” says Wooldridge. “It’s slow to start but we’re seeing good interest from both the individual schools looking at a single series to an entire library system taking every book that we have.” Sub-scriptions are a way for publishers and creators to be compensated and a way to protect copyright. Says Wooldridge: “As far as digital content goes, we see a lot of opportunity—ways of using our content in different ways and having access to a much wider market than we were able to before.”

Many children’s publishers are still holding back production of e-books, waiting for the technology to be better able to handle heavily illustrated books, but Kids Can Press is experimenting and testing the market. As part of the cele-bration of the 25th anniversary of the

Franklin the Turtle books, Kids Can partnered with Open Road Integrated Media in New York to pub-lish and distribute Franklin e-books, sold as single titles or in bundles of three. Some of the titles are also audio enhanced. It’s still too early to measure the response, but Kids Can president Lisa Lyons says the launch of the read-and-listen version of Franklin and the Thunder-storm “was well beyond our expectations for sales in both Canada and the U.S., so based on that, we’re going to be adding more audio-enabled titles. This is very much what digital is about right now—it’s experiment-ing and getting that market-place feedback to know what consumers respond to,” she says. “As there are more

capabilities and more tablets, there’s no question. They are going to flood the market. It will be a significant area of growth down the road.”

“We’re going to be adding more audio-enabled titles.” —Lisa Lyons, Kids Can Press

GREAT CANADIAN BOOKS for TEENS

FIRST DESCENT Pam Withers

978 1 77049 257 8 HCAlso available in ebook “…vivid and thrilling.”

– Kirkus Reviews

THE DRAGON TURNThe Boy Sherlock Holmes, His 5th Case

Shane Peacock978 1 77049 231 8 HC

“…[a] spell-binding series.” – School Library Journal

Available in hardcover, trade, and ebook formats

Available in hardcover, trade, Available in hardcover, trade, Available in hardcover, trade, Available in hardcover, trade, Available in hardcover, trade,

THE DRAGON TURNTHE DRAGON TURN

FIRST DESCENT FIRST DESCENT

TUNDRA BOOKSwww.TundraBooks .com


WATCHING INDIGO“We’re seeing retailers brace themselves for what they see as an e-book tsunami, so retailers are contracting their invento-ries,” says Hanson. “So that’s affecting us in terms of the number of books, particu-larly backlist, that we can carry in the marketplace. And then we’re not there yet specifi-cally with the usage and sales of online [e-books], so there’s a bit of a transition we’re experiencing.”

Some might call that an understatement. “The whole industry is in a big transi-tional moment and how you come through the transition is the ticket, and I don’t think we’re through it yet,” says Anansi’s MacLachlan.

All retailers may be brac-ing themselves for that tsu-nami, but when one retailer represents about 50% of business for many publishers and that retailer shifts its product mix dramatically and reduces the space for books and the time they will have on the shelves, it makes a big wave of its own. Indigo Books and Music has been Canada’s dominant book retail chain since it merged with Chapters in 2001. Its size and dominance has sometimes been its own challenge in publishers’ dealings with it (and is one of the reasons why they generally avoid criticizing the chain publicly), but CEO Heather Reis-man and the company have also been recognized for their promotion and sup-port of Canadian literature and publish-ing over the years.

Part of Indigo’s bracing for the e-book

tsunami was to dive into the water with the creation of Shortcovers, which grew and was spun off into a separate company, Kobo, in late 2009. Indigo maintains a controlling interest in Kobo and contin-ues to invest heavily in it. The new Kobo eReader Touch was launched this sum-mer at BookExpo America. Kobo is Indi-go’s reach into the digital market, but the second prong of Indigo’s strategy is the diversification of products in its bricks and mortar stores, which is what worries publishers most. This fall it launches its own line of home decor and lifestyle products—desk lamps, book

ends, candles and candle snuffers, throws, cushions, scarves. But that means there is less room for books. Reisman has insisted that books remain “the heart and soul” of Indigo. She was not available to comment for this article, but she answered questions from PW about the new product line at the launch of Indigo’s new Plum rewards loyalty program in the spring and spoke about it as a survival strategy. “In order to continue to be in the physical book business, we must add other product which feels like it fits with our journey because if you don’t and you lose 20%, 30% of your business to digital, you can’t stay in business.” Indigo has invested heavily in this strategy. When its first-

quarter figures were released the net loss attributable to shareholders was C$18 million compared to C$5 million last year. But, Reisman says, “The results were expected as we invest both in the growth of our digital business and in pre-paring to launch our proprietary gift and lifestyle business in the fall.”

A new line of products is understand-able, but publishers were already dis-turbed by some of the changes Indigo imposed on its dealings with them this

Is your printer dancing to his own tune?

WC_StepFWD_Bookends_090911.indd 1 9/9/11 1:25:50 PM

“We must add other product which feels like it fits with our journey.” —Indigo’s Heather Reisman


ders. We want them to be successful and a healthy retailer,” says Hanson. “[Their health] for the last number of years has been good for all publishers.”

“If you try to stay still and hope that things are going to return to what they were, you are almost doomed to failure,” says Bob Dees, president of culinary pub-lisher Robert Rose. “Although I as a pub-lisher might look at the changes going on with some retail partners and wish they were doing something else, I am supportive of people trying to do new things to bring customers in.”

Other publishers expressed confi-dence that Indigo will maintain its com-mitment to books and to working closely with them. Kristin Cochrane, publisher of the Doubleday Canada Publishing Group within Random House of Can-ada, says Indigo’s support for its fall list is “strong and thoughtful.” For example, she says, Heather Reisman recently chose Roberta Rich’s The Midwife of Ven-ice as a Heather’s Pick. It’s a first novel, trade paperback original. Indigo is also supporting a book called The Grandest Challenge by Dr. Abdallah Daar and Dr. Peter Singer, which focuses on ways to bring new health research and treat-ments to the developing world. “It’s important for us as publishers, but it isn’t the most obvious book” for Indigo to get behind, says Cochrane. “It’s not cautious.”

But if Indigo has less space for books and less time on the shelves to sell them, one other possible silver lining is that it might present opportunities for indepen-dent booksellers. Mark LeFebvre, presi-dent of the Canadian Booksellers Asso-ciation, says there are incredible oppor-tunities for independent booksellers. But referring to entrepreneur and author Seth Godin’s ideas, LeFebvre says bookstores can’t make the mistake of trying to carry everything. It’s impossible and too costly. LeFebvre likes Godin’s idea that the bookstore of the future is likely to be a bookstore that carries 1,000 titles that the staff are all absolutely passionate about and that has the ability to access everything else. ■

year. One irritant has been that Indigo changed a co-op program, in which pub-lishers paid to have particular titles prominently displayed, to a 4% discount Indigo charges publishers on all books sold. “They call that a co-op? We have no control over where our books are placed at all,” says one frustrated publisher.

Another change in policy that pub-lishers are very concerned about is a shortening of the amount of time books are allowed on the shelves before they are returned to the publisher from a typical 90 days to 45 days. In that time frame, a book intended for the Christmas holiday season could be returned before Christ-mas. The Association of Canadian Pub-lishers took up the issue with Indigo and managed to win a temporary reprieve. “They are suspending the short turn-around time for the fall and holiday sea-son,” says ACP president Margie Wolfe. “However, we are very concerned that as of January 2012, books will only have 45 days on Indigo/Chapter shelves.”

Janet Eger, Indigo’s v-p, public rela-tions, tells PW, “changes to our process do not have any effect on assortment. What our team has communicated to our vendor partners is that after 45 days we will look at product performance and make decisions about the level of inven-tory to carry at each store. If one store is selling a book fantastically and another is not, we will first look to determine whether there is something we should be doing to better merchandise or promote the title to bring performance up. But if after 45 days we see that a title is truly underperforming, we may choose to thin down our stock appropriately on a store-by-store basis.”

Eger also emphasizes that books remain a strong presence in Indigo stores. “Our new exclusive products for the home often allow us to integrate and amplify the presentation of books in our stores—for example, cookbooks along-side entertaining essentials or great new fiction between bookends.”

Publishers also express support for Indigo’s need to adapt to survive. “We don’t want to see them go the way of Bor- 1 800 665 9322

[email protected]/BookFwd

It’s time for a more

supportive partner.Webcom’s BookFWD™ program has three models that tailor publishing programs to suit your needs. One such model is STEPfwd, which redefi nes the concept of ‘short-run’ from 100s to 1,000s of copies.

Satisfy tight budgets for one or two colour printing as well as four colour Order only what is needed when it is needed Get consistent quality, pricing and service from one source, with seamless integration to offset

STEPfwd gives you plenty of great reasons to

kick up your heels.

WC_StepFWD_Bookends_090911.indd 2 9/9/11 1:26:25 PM

C a n a d i a n P u b l i s h i n g 2 0 1 1 t h eat l a n t i c c oa s t

Harry Thurston

a natural history

P h o t o g r a P h y by Wayne Barrett

“A wonderful portrait of a key region of our world.” r o n a l d W r i g h t

Great LakesWayne Grady

978-1-55365-804-7

AvAilAble

PrairieCandace Savage

978-1-55365-588-6

AvAilAble

t h e

g r e a tl a k e s

W a y n e g r a d y

t h e N a t u r a l h i s t o r y

o f a C h a N g i N g r e g i o N

A N A t u r A l H i s t o r y

P r a i r i eu P d a t e d , w i t h a n e w P r e f a c e

“Lucid and thorough—a fantastic guide to North America’s largest ecosystem.”P u b l i s H e r s W e e k l y

C A N d A C e s A v A g e

www.greystonebooks.com

atLantic coast A NAturAl History

Harry Thurston

Photographs by Wayne Barrett

978-1-55365-446-9

Pub dAte: MArcH 2012

“With evocative writing and scientific rigor,

Harry Thurston takes us from

the deep time of drifting continents to the

environmental challenges of today.”

roNAld WrigHt

t h eat l a n t i c c oa s t

Harry Thurston

a natural history




978-1-55365-804-7

AvAilAble


978-1-55365-588-6

AvAilAble

t h e

g r e a tl a k e s

W a y n e g r a d y





“Lucid and thorough—a fantastic guide to North America’s largest ecosystem.”




Harry Thurston


978-1-55365-446-9






roNAld WrigHt


Harry Thurston

a natural history




978-1-55365-804-7

AvAilAble


978-1-55365-588-6

AvAilAble

t h e

g r e a tl a k e s

W a y n e g r a d y









Harry Thurston


978-1-55365-446-9






roNAld WrigHt

DISTRIBUTION THE FALL OF FENNCan distribution survive in Canada?


February’s news that the distributor H.B. Fenn and Company had filed for bankruptcy sent shock waves throughout the industry, and while the fallout has dissipated some, the industry is still examining what lessons can be drawn from Fenn’s demise. Although Fenn had few Canadian clients, its problems called into question the viability of independent distributors and further deepened concerns about how pub-lishers might get their books to market.

Jordan Fenn, son of Fenn and Com-pany founder Harold, was publisherof Key Porter (partially owned bythe distributor)and Fenn Publish-ing, an imprint that produced sports

books for H.B. Fenn. Jordan could notcomment on the fate of either Key Porteror Fenn Publishing—neither hasdeclared bankruptcy, but both have beenin legal limbo since the bankruptcy ofH.B. Fenn. He described the end of H.B.Fenn as sudden and completely unex-pected. “My dad created H.B. Fenn whenhe was my age. He was in his late 30s andhe was the vice president of Coles. He leftand he started distributing Coles Notesout of an 800-sq.-ft warehouse.” Gradu-ally, H.B. Fenn attracted more and morepublishers for distribution, includinglarge clients like Warner and Disney, andeventually had 250,000 sq. ft. of ware-house space and a staff of 300. But, saysFenn, “When you are representing otherpublishers, you are only as strong as thelists that they produce, and if they deter-mine that they no longer want to use adistributor to enter the Canadian mar-ket, there’s really nothing you can do

about it. The demise of H.B. Fenn wasseeing our distribution partners elect toenter Canada directly.”

That’s what happened two years agowhen Hachette Book Group decided tomove its sales and distribution for itsnational accounts from Fenn to the U.S.Others were rumored to be planning asimilar move. In the past, foreign-ownedpublishers needed to have a Canadiandistributor in order to comply with Can-ada’s foreign investment rules intendedto protect Canadian cultural industries.However, in recent years, the Conserva-tive government in Canada has notenforced the rules with much zeal. Inaddition to allowing Hachette to distrib-ute directly into Canada, the governmenthas approved an application from Ama-zon to set up a physical distribution facil-ity in Canada, and is currently reviewingCanada’s foreign investment policy inbook publishing and distribution. Fol-lowing the bankruptcy of Fenn, the U.S.division of Macmillan, which was owedC$10 million at the time of the bank-ruptcy, took over distribution directly tonational accounts such as Amazon and


DISTRIBUTION t h eat l a n t i c c oa s t

Harry Thurston

a natural history




978-1-55365-804-7

AvAilAble


978-1-55365-588-6

AvAilAble

t h e

g r e a tl a k e s

W a y n e g r a d y





“Lucid and thorough—a fantastic guide to North America’s largest ecosystem.”P u b l i s H e r s W e e k l y




Harry Thurston


978-1-55365-446-9






roNAld WrigHt


Harry Thurston

a natural history




978-1-55365-804-7

AvAilAble


978-1-55365-588-6

AvAilAble

t h e

g r e a tl a k e s

W a y n e g r a d y









Harry Thurston


978-1-55365-446-9






roNAld WrigHt


Harry Thurston

a natural history




978-1-55365-804-7

AvAilAble


978-1-55365-588-6

AvAilAble

t h e

g r e a tl a k e s

W a y n e g r a d y









Harry Thurston


978-1-55365-446-9






roNAld WrigHt

W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M 9

Indigo, while Raincoast Book Distribution in Vancouver took over distribution to independent bookstores, library and specialty markets, and Costco Canada. HarperCollins Canada began doing sales, marketing, and distributing for Pan Macmillan U.K. on June 1.

Among H.B. Fenn’s Canadian publisher clients was B.C.-based Whitecap Books. Whitecap was owed C$1.35 mil-lion at the time of the bankruptcy. “It wasn’t easy to take a hit like that,” says owner and president Michael Burch. “And who knows what the future might hold in terms of when the whole situation has been resolved as to whether there is anything left at Fenn with the receivers, but with or without that, we’re doing quite well.” Burch said White-cap’s new distributor, Fitzhenry & Whiteside, moved “with lightning speed” to get its billings out by the end of Febru-ary. “Without the assistance of Fitzhenry & Whiteside and particularly Friesen printers, who have been a great friend of all Canadian publishers, it would have been a little harder,” Burch says.

Another large company, General Distribution, crashed in 2002. The fall of Fenn has inspired some thinking on how to remain a viable distributor/publisher. Most publishers who are also in the distribution business say that it helps to be distributing their own books in addition to those of other publishers. HarperCollins Canada president and CEO David Kent says volume makes distribution work for his house. “Distributing our own books, distributing other people’s books, gives us volume and gives them stability.” One of the challenges for any business in Canada, he says, is that the relatively small population means that there are no economies of scale. HarperCollins Canada provides distribution for such clients as House of Anansi Press and D&M Publishers. “It is not only economical for them, it is very efficient, so they can focus on what they do best and be very comfortable with the fact that the books are going to be distributed well and han-dled well,” Kent says. It is also advantageous to have a ware-house in Canada, he adds. “If our customers are buying in tighter cycles all the time because they don’t want to carry the inventory, then what they need is quick turnaround.”

Mike Bryan, president of Penguin Group Canada, agrees that this kind of volume is an advantage, and in Penguin Canada’s case, he notes that its distribution center also serves the Pearson Education part of the business. Efficiency is the other key. Yvonne Hunter, Penguin Canada’s vice-president of publicity and marketing, adds that their distributor cli-ents, such as Norton, Bloomsbury, Faber and Faber, and Canongate, fit very well with Penguin Canada’s own pub-lishing program.

On a smaller scale, distribution works for Orca Books in Victoria, B.C., on a similar principle of volume and because the company doesn’t rely entirely on distribution. “There are 11 other publishers, but the bulk of our titles are Orca titles,” says publisher Andrew Wooldridge. “We started

Watch the Trailer–Read the Book!

Trailers for these titles and more at www.annickpress.com/trailers.html

THE HANGMAN IN THE MIRRORby Kate Cayley“There are several themes run-ning through this gripping novel:… the disparity between … thewealthy and the poor. Another isthe power of words.” —Quill & Quire

Ages 12+ | 232 pages 978-155451-356-7 | $12.95 pb

annick press EXCELLENCE & INNOVATIONannick press EXCELLENCE & INNOVATIONdistributed by Firefly Books www.fireflybooks.com

1-800-387-5085

Watch the Trailer–Read the Book!

THUNDER OVER KANDAHARby Sharon E. McKayphotographs by Rafal Gerszak� Amelia Bloomer Project List,ALA � USBBY Outstanding International Books Honor List� Notable Books for a Global Society

Ages 12+ | 264 pages 978-155451-266-9 | $12.95 pb

A SWORD IN HER HANDby Jean-Claude van Rijckeghemand Pat van Beirs“Marguerite’s fearless spirit, thefast pace, and the setting’s grittyauthenticity all elevate this noblehistorical novel above the rabble.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Ages 12+ | 288 pages 978-155451-290-4 | $12.95 pb

HELDby Edeet Ravel“There is a sense of desperationand emergency that fills everycorner of Held, bestselling novelist Edeet Ravel’s novel ofsuspense and exploration of theStockholm Syndrome.”

—January MagazineAges 13+ | 248 pages 978-155451-282-9 | $12.95 pb

New

Publishing ExcEllEncE

Winner of the 2010Governor General’s award

for fiction

Longlisted for the 2010scotiabank Giller Prize

A Phyllis Bruce Book

Winner of the 2011canadian library association

book of the year for children award & younG adult

canadian book award

Finalist for the 2010scotiabank Giller Prize

A Phyllis Bruce Book

Winner of the 2011international iMPac dublin literary award

Winner of the 2009national book award

Another year of

@HarperCollinsCA HarperCollins Canada

Winner of the 2011coMMonwealth writers’ Prize

for best book

(canada & caribbean reGion)

Winner of the 2011canadian booksellers

association libris award for fiction book of the year &

author of the year

Finalist for the 2011oranGe Prize for fiction

Winner of the 2010roGers writers’ trust fiction

Prize

Finalist for the 2010Governor General’s award

for fiction

Finalist for the 2010Man booker Prize for fiction


American rights, so are not confined to just Canada, and it gives us quite a bit more potential, margin breathing room, and ability to react and respond to chang-ing market conditions.”

Raincoast Book Distribution in Van-couver is one of the few pure distribution companies still standing in Canada. And in a move that seems counterintuitive, given the growth of the e-book market, Raincoast moved in December to a ware-house facility that is 40% bigger than its previous facility. “We’re confident that print is going to be around for a good long time,” says CEO John Sawyer. He explains that Raincoast believes that digital books will find some new readers but that they will also take a bite out of the print market in different genres, price points, and formats. “It all depends on which chunk of the print market you are talking about,” he says. “So our strat-egy is that we had better sell more dif-ferent print books—more volume and variety. That was part of what inspired us to move the way we did, and it has paid off.” Sawyer adds that Raincoast knows that when it promotes a print book, it is also helping the digital ver-sion get attention. For that reason, Rain-coast has arrangements with some pub-lishers to earn a share of some of their digital revenues.

In addition to picking up some of Macmillan U.S.’s business, Raincoast’s Publishers Group Canada arm will be handling the independent bookseller accounts for the Canadian branch of Oxford University Press. Last year, Raincoast also took on Sourcebooks as a client. That fits in well with its strategy for more volume and variety. “One of the strengths that we have is that we have a multitude of different publishers,” says Sawyer. “We’re not reliant on any one or two publishers, so that lends more sta-bility.” Sawyer says he has seen client publishers sold to someone else who is already distributed by another company, and as a result Raincoast lost the line. “It’s important not to have all your eggs in a very small number of baskets and we don’t,” he says. ■

doing it years ago when it made sense in the U. S. to have a larger list to have more to offer, and we’ve continued doing it because, for the most part, the publishers we distribute fit well with what we’re publishing,” he says. Companies that are distributors only are more vulnerable, he says. “I think every time you see someone fail, it’s because one of their large clients jumped ship. It’s pretty hard to replace that revenue,” observes Wooldridge.

He, along with many others in the industry, awaits the results of the govern-ment’s foreign investment policy review for book publishing. That the current rules on foreign ownership are not being enforced and some foreign-owned com-panies have begun to distribute directly into Canada is a big danger to the whole industry, he says. “If more people start doing that, it’s not just the distributors in danger, it’s all the multinationals who are going to have serious problems main-taining a publishing program if they start losing the distribution arm of it. They’ve got active and vibrant publish-ing programs, which I think are sup-ported in part by that distribution. If you lose that distribution, I hate to think what it would mean for Canadian pub-lishing.”

Lionel Koffler, president and owner of Firefly Books, spelled out the dangers of only distributing other companies’ books. “The margins are small and you own no intellectual property so your biggest cus-tomers can buy around you if they wish. You are subject to the pricing of the peo-ple who are creating the books, and also I think that most of what Fenn distributed was bestseller fiction and nonfiction that was heavily eroded by e-book selling.” Firefly, which distributes books from Annick Press and Robert Rose but largely its own books, tries to move in the oppo-site direction, says Koffler. “Most of what we publish, or get as co-editions, or dis-tribute, is four-color, not easily down-loadable. We publish most of it so no one can buy the content around our porous distribution rights. We are selling most of our production in the United States, so we have world rights or at least North

An imprint of Penguin Canada

launching in Canada in 2012


STRATEGIES SUCCESS

A guide to moving ahead


2011 may have had a slow start, but Canadian publishers and companies are finding creative and innovative strategies to move ahead. Here’s the Canadian guide to success in tough times.

HAVE GREAT TIMINGDundurn Press produced Young Royals on Tour: William & Catherine in Canada by Christina Blizzard in time to benefit from the celebrity fever around the new-lywed couple. “We printed 9,000 and we sold out about a week after getting the book and had to go back to print,” says publisher Kirk Howard.

Simon & Schuster Canada released Sylvia Nasar’s book Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius just as economists and governments everywhere needed a little inspiration.

TARGETED EXPANSIONBucking the trend of cutting and con-traction, Dundurn Press is growing. This year, the Toronto-based publisher bought two smaller houses, Napoleon & Co. and Blue Butterfly Books. Publisher Howard says this brings Dundurn’s number of acquisitions, since 1993 to 11. “I think content is important, and I think you need a certain bulk of titles to compete with the multinationals operat-ing in Canada. We’re trying to acquire companies that are publishing in fields we’re already publishing in. Napoleon was specializing in mysteries and YA, and add quite a bit to our list that way.” Blue Butterfly has focused on publishing

“If you read no other book thisyear, read this one.”

lesbian news

“Taking My Life conveys theconfusion, poignancy, defiantrebellions and historical realitiesof [Rule]’s first footsteps towardwomanhood, toward becoming alesbian, toward her destiny asone of our great writers.”

katherine v. forrest

“A beautiful piece of dryly ironicwriting, deeply thought out andintellectually honest, almost tothe point of pain. Morra hasedited this volume with loving,

scholarly care.”quill & quire

Taking My LifeJane Rule

Afterword by Linda M. MorraAutobiography

978-0-88922-673-9288 pages$19.95

Talonbookswww.talonbooks.com

fresh voices and perspectives in fiction, nonfiction, and biography.

McClelland & Stewart launched its new nonfiction imprint, Signal, in the spring as a home for provocative “big idea” books. And its first list this fall is stacked with big names—Christopher Hitchens’s collection of essays, Arguably; Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination; and Dr. Samantha Nutt’s Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid. Though she’s cer-tainly not as well-known as Hitchens and Atwood, M&S president and publisher Doug Pepper says this first book from Dr. Nutt, the founder and executive director of War Child North America, will be huge. “I think it’s something that can change policy, and that was the whole hope of Signal—that we publish books that make a difference when it comes to politics and religion and culture.”

Random House of Canada is expand-ing its culinary horizons, creating a new, as yet unnamed imprint that is expected to publish 15–20 food and lifestyle titles a year. Robert McCullough, formerly the publisher at Whitecap Books in Vancou-ver, will be the publisher of the new imprint.

ECW Press is venturing into YA for the first time with a series called the

P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY ■ S E P T E M B E R 1 9 , 2 0 1 114


Dead Kid Detective Agency, written by Evan Munday, who also happens to be a publicist for Coach House Books. ECW says that the series’ 13-year-old heroine, October Schwartz, is “like Nancy Drew, if she’d hung out with corpses.”

BUILD ON SUCCESSKids Can Press celebrates the 25th anniversary of Franklin with an anniver-sary edition of Franklin in the Dark, which includes extra content, and reis-sues of the top 12 bestselling classics with refreshed covers. A new 3G version of Franklin and Friends launched on YTV in Canada, and it will be rolling out around the world followed by a huge merchandise program, says Kids Can president Lisa Lyons. Storybook spin-outs from the television show are in the works.

YTV has also launched a television show based on Melanie Watt’s Scaredy Squirrel books. “Now, it looks different

from the Scaredy Squir-rel books,” warns Lyons. “They’ve aged him up because the YTV audi-ence is a little bit older. He now has a job, but the response has been tremendous.” Kids Can has also launched a You-Tube channel that has book trailers for Scaredy Squirrel and a Facebook fan page. This fall, a game-based app, Scaredy SOS, is also coming, the p r emi s e be ing tha t Scaredy has lost his emergency kit and play-ers have to collect all the items in the kit to help him defeat germs, poison ivy, angry unicorns, and all of the things he’s afraid of in the books.

Annick Press has sold the rights for a live-action feature film of Robert

Munsch’s beloved classic The Paper Bag Princess. Cookie Jar, the Toronto–Los Angeles production company that is making the film, plans to follow with a television series.

Second Story Press’ bestseller Hana’s Suitcase by Karen Levine will be made into a feature film in 2012, but this year, a new book in the publish-er’s Holocaust Remem-brance series, To Hope and Back: The Journey of the St. Louis by award-winning author Kathy Kacer, will

be released. The book is based on the true story of the ship carrying Jewish refugees from Germany who were turned away from Canada, the U.S., and Cuba. It is told from the perspective of two people who were children on the ship and sur-vived.

Coach House Press – takes Suzette Mayr’s acclaimed novel Monoceros, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in Canada, to the U.S. market in October.

OWLKids adds Learn to Speak Dance (Ann-Marie Williams) to its Learn to Speak Music series, created and edited by Broken Social Scene musician turned edi-tor John Crossingham. The series demys-tifies music and dance for kids and encourages them to explore their own creativity. Learn to Speak Fashion and Film are yet to come.

MAKE FRIENDS IN ALL KINDS OF PLACESPenguin and YA readers: Penguin Canada launched a Canadian edition of the successful YA imprint Razorbill. Lynne Missen, the new publishing direc-tor for Penguin Canada’s children’s and young adults program, is guiding the launch of a Razorbill social media Web site. “We want to be the ‘go to’ list. These are the books that teens will want to read and want to talk about,” says Mis-sen, mentioning authors Hiromi Goto;

WWW.GROUNDWOODBOOKS.COM

Hardcover $18.95ISBN: 978-0-88899-995-5

★ “Exceptional . . .”PUBLISHERS WEEKLY starred review

“Beautifully illustrated . . .a gloriously imaginative meander.” NEW YORK TIMES

★ “David Wiesner fans should give this a try . . . Amazing.”KIRKUSstarred review

A FEW BLOCKSWritten and illustrated by Cybèle Young

Illustrator Brenda Clarke (front) and writer Paulette Bourgeois greet fans at an Indigo event to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Franklin series (Kids Can Press).

WWW.GROUNDWOODBOOKS.COM

Hardcover $18.95ISBN: 978-0-88899-995-5

★ “Exceptional . . .”PUBLISHERS WEEKLY starred review

“Beautifully illustrated . . .a gloriously imaginative meander.” NEW YORK TIMES

★ “David Wiesner fans should give this a try . . . Amazing.”KIRKUSstarred review

A FEW BLOCKSWritten and illustrated by Cybèle Young

Making your own bookThe long awaited launch of BookRiff, the system that promises to let people mix and match content from various sources to create their own book, is now slated for the end of September.

“It’s been a long journey, but part of that has also primarily been dealing with the changes in the mar-ketplace,” CEO Rochelle Grayson tells PW. When BookRiff was first created, as a part of D&M Publish-ers in Vancouver, the idea was that the personal compi-lations, or “riffs,” as the company calls them, would be print-on-demand books. In the meanwhile, however, company officials realized they needed to create an e-version as well, and BookRiff was spun off as a separate entity.

“We’ve spent the last year focusing on the whole digital space and creating the tool that allows people to mix and match these e-pubs while maintaining all of the licensing and attribution for the original content owners,” says Grayson. Now, the system is almost ready for its debut. It will start with the digital files. The system to make print-on-demand books, with partner Ingram, will launch later this year or early in the spring, Grayson says.

She added that BookRiff is leveraging social networks so that people can pro-mote their personal riffs, but BookRiff will also have a marketplace where they can sell their creations to others. “The biggest reason we’re finding people are interested in this is that it is a way to monetize your content.”

BookRiff expects that the system will be popular for people creating from various sources their own cookbooks, fitness and training manuals, and par-enting guides. “We’ve already partnered with a very large technology publisher that wants to allow technologists and people in the technology field to pick and choose basic reference content from books but also perhaps add their own content that would be for sale,” says Grayson. Users will be able to add their own comments and chapters, and Gray-son says that one of the biggest markets is expected to be the educational field. Instructors and professors could create their own course packages, with chapters from various books combined with their

own original materials. So far, however, BookRiff is still only in discussions with several STM publishers.

Grayson says BookRiff could also be used by people to self-publish. “We’re also getting interest from liter-ary agents who have authors they are representing that have manuscripts that have not been assigned to a pub-lisher, maybe even previous manuscripts, and they’re saying, ‘maybe we could get this distributed through BookRiff.’ ”

So far, the company has agreements with 10 publish-ers in North America, who will make their content available to BookRiff users, and Grayson says the

company has had a good response and interest from many more publishers. “The way that we’re structured is the agency model, so prices are set by the publishers and they set all the permissions and regulations and regions where that content can be purchased. We were asking publishers to sign a publisher agreement but we’re not asking for minimum guarantees in terms of number of books.” That allows publishers to test out the system with a few books as a pilot, she says.


BookRiff Set for Launch

Rochelle Grayson



Charles de Lint, who has a new Wildlings series; Carrie Mac; and Mariko Tamaki.

Scholastic Canada and TD Bank: Barbara Reid (author of The Subway Mouse who sculpts all the illustrations in her books in plasticine) has created, with Jo Ellen Bogart, the book Gifts, which has been selected as the Toronto-Domin-ion Grade 1 Book giveaway. The bank is giving more than 500,000 copies of the book to children across Canada.

McArthur & Company Publishing and CBC: McArthur created an enhanced e-book for Kate Pullinger’s Mistress of Nothing, which won a Governor General’s award for fiction in 2009, using audio from CBC radio broadcasts of a dramatic reading of the book. McArthur’s enhanced e-book includes the full text, CBC audio and abridged text, and video with Pullinger reading and discussing what it is like to write a historical novel, plus a slide show of what Egypt was like at the time.

Robert Kennedy and President Bill Clinton: Robert Kennedy Publishing, that is, home of Oxygen and other fitness magazines and the Eat Clean Diet series of books. Weight loss coach Charles D’Angelo’s book Think and Grow Thin has been endorsed by Clinton.

Excelovate and the Rogers Cup: Excelovate, which began publishing in 2008, was invited to the U.S. Open for Arthur Ashe Day to promote tennis to kids from across the U.S. with its book Strings and Grips by Desmond McLen-non. Hurricane Irene washed out the event, but Excelovate still managed to find 160,000 tennis enthusiasts at the Rogers Cup in Toronto.

TAKE SHELTER IN CANADA’S RELIGION Penguin’s Mike Bryan says that he real-ized soon after arriving in Canada that hockey is not a game here, it is a religion. And when times are tough, publishers

can still count on hockey fans to read about their game and the players. Pen-guin is publishing 30 Years of Hockey Canada, Back to the Bigs (about the return of the Winnipeg Jets), and a memoir from Georges Laraque. Jordan Fenn has joined McClelland & Stewart as publisher of a new sports imprint that will publish Hockey Talk with Sports Illustrated, Records Forever with the National Hockey League, and a biography of Conn Smythe. Fenn will also do a series of hockey board books for young children with Tundra Books as well as a series of chapter books with Hockey Canada’s mascot Puckster, the polar bear. Firefly Books will have Hockey Hall of Fame Treasures, and Harper will have a Ron MacLean memoir.

MIX TECHNOLOGY AND CREATIVITYHarperCollins Canada will launch an augmented reality campaign for Ken-neth Oppel’s new YA novel, This Dark Endeavor. Holding a cellphone up to a banner in Indigo stores with an image of an antique bookcase will unlock a 3D animation on the phone. A book will fly off the shelf and an interactive trailer with sound effects will play.

DIVERSIFYGroundwood Books – “We can sell a lot of books in the chain,… but we don’t depend on them for our living. Ground-wood Publisher Patsy Aldana says there is stability in diversification: the library market, the school market, export, inter-national and special sales such as HIPPY Canada, an organization that buys a huge bunch of books from Groundwood every year for their literacy program.

INVEST IN TECHNOLOGYWebcom invested C$12 million in high-speed inkjet technology – threee new binding lines, two new digital presses and a change in workflow. “Our objective is to get the cost of a few hun-dred copies to equal the cost of a few thousand copies,” to allow publishers to choose smaller print runs, said president Mike Collinge.

Visit us on Facebookto watch a video

about the making of The Vole Brothers!

The Vole BrothersBy Roslyn Schwartz 978-1-926818-83-2 HC • $15.95

From the creator of The Mole Sisters comes an irresistible tale about a different pair of rodent siblings — with a HUGE appetite for food and life!

www.owlkids.comDistributed through PGW

1-800-788-3123

Connect with us on

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council.

SIMON GIRTYWilderness WarriorQuest Biographies

Was the frontiersman a monster as painted by his enemies in the Revolutionary War or a hero of Native Americans?

9781554889495 NOW AVAILABLE!

ONE MORE RIVER TO CROSS

The dramatic escape of Isaac Brown, a slave accused of attempted murder in Maryland in the early 1800s.

9781459701533JANUARY 2012

TILTED Second EditionThe Trials of Conrad Black

A thorough, in-depth account of the controversial businessman’s legal difficulties.

9781554889341OCTOBER

LOVE YOU, HATE YOUBallet School Confidential series

Follows four teen dancers in their first semester at an elite private ballet school.

9781554889617NOVEMBER

Book 2: YOU’RE SO SWEET9781459704176JULY 2012

REBELS ON THE GREAT LAKESConfederate Naval Commando Operations Launched from Canada, 1863-1864

9781554889860OCTOBER

Distributed by Ingram Publisher Services as of October 30th.

& Fiction

FACT

books available

e

GIRL IN THE BOX

One to Watch: The protagonist’s dark past...professional jealousy and journalistic crusading, is akin to Larsson’s Lizbet Salander.” —Quill and Quire

9781926607269 NOVEMBER

THE TIME THIEF

After 12-year-old Mika rescues a cat from an abandoned house, strange things begin to happen. Someone seems to be watching her, and a dark presence stalks her in the woods.

9781926607276DECEMBER

HOWL

Can a 12-year-old make a difference for animals? When her pregnant dog plunges into the frozen lake, Robin saves the dog and hence the puppies. Soon she’s running an illegal animal shelter.

9781926607252NOVEMBER

PICASSO BLUES A Ray Tate and Djuna Brown Mystery

“Lamothe has an undeniable facility when it comes to describing the unsavoury world of career criminals.”— Quill & Quire on Free Form Jazz

9781554889662NOVEMBER

LAKE ON THE MOUNTAINA Dan Sharp Mystery

When Dan Sharp, a gay missing persons investigator, accepts an invitation to a wedding on a yacht, the event doesn’t go as planned.

9781459700017JANUARY 2012



It is, in many ways, a world away from Canada’s book publishing center in Toronto. But even three time zones, several mountain ranges, and vast forests away, the West Coast is home

to Canada’s second-largest concentration of English-language publishers.

“We have a pretty vibrant industry out here,” says Andrew Wooldridge, pub-lisher of Orca Books in Victoria. “I think it is an interesting thing in these times to have such a concentration in one place so far from the center of anything. It’s a difficult spot to publish but it’s a place that seems to produce such a variety of publishing.” It’s difficult, he says, because 85% of the customers are within a couple hours of Toronto, so shipping and distribution are always problems for B.C. publishers.

And in spite of the pressures that the whole publishing industry is facing in tough economic times and the transition into the digital era, Michael Burch, pres-ident and owner of Whitecap Books, describes the B.C. publishing industry as “healthy.”

A number of the publishers are cele-brating their 40th anniversaries, includ-ing D&M Publishers, Arsenal Pulp Press, and Talon Books, having all sprung up around the same time in the early ’70s during the small press revolution. Mar-garet Reynolds, executive director of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, says that at that time “there was a confluence of very good booksell-

ers, high circulation in libraries, which is still the case, and a number of people who were willing to go out on a limb and pro-duce books about this place,” she says. “I think there was a real cultural flourish-ing at that time that was also part of the interest in Canadian culture that came out of the mid-’60s,” she adds. “In some ways there was a unique West Coast char-acter, which is maybe personified by Arsenal, which was just called Pulp Press in those days,” she says.

Publisher Brian Lam says Pulp Press in the 1970s was “very much an alterna-tive political press with literary roots in the community, so we’re still very dedi-cated to books about the art and politics of the time.” These days Arsenal special-izes in gay and lesbian literature and vegan and health cookbooks. Arsenal has also recently developed a line of alterna-tive craft books, such as yarn bombing, the practice of people knitting an item and leaving it in a public place such as on a sign or fence. Yarn bombing, says Lam, has “become a worldwide phenomenon,

and there was a feature in the style sec-tion of the New York Times a couple of months ago about our book. We’ve sub-sequently had huge interest. We were in a Time magazine blog and the Today Show,” says Lam. “We’re doing a follow-up this fall called Hoopla: The Art of Unexpected Embroidery [also by author Leanne Prain]. There’s also a political element to their art. For example, in Yarn Bombing there’s a picture of someone who has completely knitted cosy over a mili-tary tank. So there’s a subversive element to it, taking a very traditional craft and using it in unexpected ways.”

Back in the ’70s, Scott McIntyre, founder and chairman of D&M [Douglas & McIntyre] Publishing, now the largest independent English-language publisher in Canada, turned down good job offers from the big houses in Toronto to return to his home province at the time. “It was all brand new,” he says. Up until that time, “You couldn’t get a Canadian novel taught in a university because the profs were all Brits and Americans and com-pletely disdained Canadian writing. And the librarians were all Brits and com-pletely disdained ugly, badly manufac-tured Canadian books. But there was a strong loyalty to regional history, good bookstores, and a lot of energy,” he says.

The present industry evolved from there, McIntyre says. “A bunch of people who were passionate about books, stub-born, and wanted to stay here. Logic would have dictated that I go back to Toronto years ago, and I love Toronto and the game, but I think most of the publishers here really value their lifestyle and it is a glori-ous place to live and to raise kids.” One of Douglas & McIntyre’s lead titles for fall is

a collection of Fred Her-zog’s urban photography, primarily of Vancouver.

T h e p u b l i s h e r s describe the scene in B.C. as a connected com-munity with active and vocal members in the provincial association. Kevin Williams and his wife, Vicki, bought

THE BRITISH COLUMBIA ALTERNATIVEA connected community



Talon Books f rom Karl Siegler, but Williams and Siegler have been working together until Siegler retires this month. Talon specializes in drama and poetry, but also does some brave nonfiction. This fall, Talon plans to pub-lish Alain Deneault’s Imperial Canada, which examines the mining industry in Canada, in spite of early warnings of potential law-suits from mining giant Barrick Gold. ”It became a bit of a cause célèbre for the freedom of speech stuff, but there were a lot of people involved in the book and some of them got queasy and pulled out, so it took a while to complete it,” says Williams, who built his career at Raincoast Books for 20 years before making the move to Talon.

Export markets are vital for many B.C. publishers. Lam says

55% of Arsenal’s sales are in the U.S., and both McIntyre and Wooldridge talk about the importance of their U.S. mar-kets. And B.C. publishers are looking further afield for export markets as well. Orca distributes books in Singapore and is working on sales to China. “We continue to go to the Beijing Book Fair every

year,” says Wooldridge. “We go there more often than Frankfurt because I think as a publisher publishing books in English, especially for school-age kids learning to

read, it’s a natural market. It is going to become more and more important.”

Simply Read, which publishes both children’s and adult books, is a relative newcomer after only 10 years in business, but it, too, has important export markets in the U.S., Europe, and Australia, and sells rights in Japan and Korea. Publisher Dimiter Savof has a diverse list for fall that includes Thomas Aquinas Maguire’s retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Wild Swans fairy tale in a 104-panel accordion book, and Portland photogra-pher Lisa Bauso’s book Bella’s Pockets, a photo record of all that she found in her

daughter’s pocket over the course of a year. Savof says he sometimes wonders if he needs to have a presence in the East. “We are so far away, at the end of the world. On the other hand, I always felt that this gives us freedom and a lot less pressure [so we can] do what we want.”■

Find and Be Found at www.PubMatch.com

Showcase Your Available Rights to Thousands of Publishing Professionals Around the World

Search Available Rights by Language, Territory, Subject and More

Create Rights Catalogs Quickly and Easily in a Variety of Formats and Styles with Just a Few Clicks

And So Much MoreAnd So Much More

The FIRST Comprehensive International

Rights Network For the Publishing Industry

Kevin Willimas

McArthur & Company TORONTO

www.mcarthur-co.com


www.mcarthur-co.com


www.mcarthur-co.com

Made in Canadafor around the world.

www.McClelland.comRandom House Inc., Distribution Center, 400 Hahn Road, Westminster, MD 21157

Phone: 1-800-733-3000 • Fax: 1-800-659-2436 • 8:30am-5:00pm EST Mon-Fri

McClelland & Stewart

canadian publishing 2011: change and challenge

Documents

canadian dollars

year canadian publishers

canadian prices

canadian economy

ly canadian publishing

i s h e r s w e e

booknet canada

digital sales