Canadian Publishing 2013

Canadian Publishing 2013

P u b l i s h e r s W e e k ly . c o m

A Special Report

Publishers in Canada are taking advantage of new ways to reach readers

A TIME OF OPPORTUNITY

Sowing new seeds in

Canadian publishing

Read with us. 166 King Street East, Suite 300 Toronto, ON Canada


Despite some trouble spots, Canadian publishers see chances for growth

Opportunity Knocks By Leigh Anne Williams

While the Canadian news headlines have painted a rather dark picture of the country’s publishing scene, those working in the market insist things are not as gloomy as the general media has portrayed. In fact, interviews with leading industry figures found a number of bright spots. Of course, the landscape of Canadian publishing, like that of publishing around the world, was changed by the Penguin–Random House merger. It’s too soon to say what aftershocks may follow or what the effects may be on publishing in this market of 34 million (20% of which is a mostly separate francophone market), but changes are sure to come at the country’s largest trade house.

T

he most troubling development over the past 12 months has been the demise of several prominent independent publishers—D&M Publishers, McArthur & Co., and Robert Kennedy Publishing. Further worry was caused when Thomas Allen & Son sold its Canadian boutique publishing arm, Thomas Allen Publishers, and as part of shifts in strategy at their parent companies, both John Wiley & Sons and Oxford University Press announced that they were closing their Canadian trade publishing divisions. According to BookNet Canada figures released in June, Canadian first-quarter

print sales were down last year by about 11%. Many publishers attribute the drop in their domestic sales to the dominant chain in Canada, Indigo Books & Music, having made a big leap last year to diversify into designer gift and lifestyle products, leaving significantly less room for books. Indigo CEO Heather Reisman described the move as a survival strategy, and many publishers acknowledge that an Indigo ordering fewer books is still better than having it go the way of Borders. Nevertheless, the cuts have gone deep and have hurt publishers, and there are fewer independent booksellers to step into the void. But looking beyond the headlines and talking with publishers, one finds many

views of the Canadian landscape are surprisingly sunlit. Noah Genner, CEO of BookNet, acknowledges that the firm’s quarterly numbers don’t tell the whole story. As both BookNet’s June report and the most recent quarterly report from Indigo reminded readers, 2012 sales figures included the large sales spikes from the Fifty Shades and Hunger Games trilogies. “When we look at the whole market . . . those big titles really can skew things,” Genner says. “So individual publishers, such as a Canadian-owned independent publisher, could be having a great year, and the market could still be down.” Indeed, most of the publishers who spoke to PW for this report were remarkably upbeat about sales that were as good as last year’s or in many cases better. Previous anxieties about e-books also seemed to be generally allayed as average e-book sales seem to be stable at about 17% or revenue. Although they are still growing, they are no longer tripling as they did at first. While the big story in retail is undoubtedly Indigo’s reduced book inventory and the ways publishers are coping with it, there has also been some good news in the form of Target migrating north and opening up stores and bookselling opportunities across the country. Target doesn’t take the place of independent booksellers, says ECW Press copublisher David Caron. “We can put our Taylor Swift book into Target, but that’s the not the fiction or poetry title that the independent would have sold well.” Nevertheless, Caron says ECW is adapting and building relationships with stores such as Costco, Wal-Mart, and Target, both in Canada and the U.S. “We’re learning more about what works there,” Caron says, along with what doesn’t. Costco Canada, in particular, does a good job of picking stores for a regional title, he says. “We’ve seen big sales through a small number of stores when they do that.” In spite of challenges, Caron says publishing in Canada is healthier than it is reported to be. “There’s a perception in mainstream media that the book publishing industry is ‘beleaguered’ because that’s what people have been writing for the past three years, so that’s what people think. I W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

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Canadian Publishing 2013 would say the only rough year was two years ago, and it wasn’t because of e-books, it was because of Borders.” For ECW, he says, sales are up over last year, and last year was up over the year before that. But even among the headlines there have been signs of growth—new players both big and small entering the market, publishers acquiring other houses or at least their lists, companies expanding in new directions, and even silver linings to the dark clouds of some of the closures. Of course, much of (new and established) publishers’ confidence is tied to their passionate belief in the books they are publishing, but they are also finding successful strategies—both innovative and old-fashioned—to bring those books to the attention of readers, even as the familiar ground of bookselling shifts beneath their feet in a digital and online world. Read on for a closer look at where Canadian confidence and optimism is coming from.

Penguin Random House

In spite of competing interests, the Canadian publishing community is a small and generally collegial one. That collegiality seemed apparent when PW met with the people at the top of the newly integrated Penguin Random House. President and CEO Brad Martin, executive v-p and executive publisher of the McClelland & Stewart/ Doubleday Canada Publishing Group Kristin Cochrane, and executive v-p and executive publisher of the Knopf Random House Canada Publishing Group Louise Dennys gathered in a conference room at the Random House offices at 1 Toronto Street, along with Nicole Winstanley, president and publisher of Penguin Group Canada, who had commuted downtown from Penguin’s office at Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue East. A theme of playful competition threaded its way through the conversation. “Nicole has the biggest book of the fall,” Martin announces early on. Orr: My Story, Bobby Orr’s memoir, Winstanley agrees, is going to be huge. Published jointly

in the U.S. with Putnam, the book “is everything that everybody has ever wanted to know about the hockey legend,” she says. “From his early days in Parry Sound, Ont., slapping a puck up against a stone wall, to losing everything—his ability to play because of a knee injury to the Eagleson scandal, which he has long declined to speak about—to his life as an agent and his views on the game and the way it is played today.” But later, when the conversation turns to the Knopf Canada list, Martin acknowledges that Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s book, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, might also be a contender to be the biggest book of the fall. “Who’s to say?” Dennys says with a laugh. “We might go up into a little bit of an arm wrestle.” She describes Hadfield as a rock star who captivated Canadians and the world while he was in space and will tour with his book coast to coast. “At one point, every [elementary] school in Canada stopped at the same hour to sing along with him and to have a conversation in space,” she adds, noting that the initial print run is 135,000 copies. That’s less than the Bobby Orr, which is 140,000, teases Martin. “I don’t want to know that,” says Dennys, shaking her head. “We’ve been clear we’re going to stay competitive. This is an example of it,” Cochrane says with a laugh. (Although

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she didn’t bring it up until later, Doubleday has its own contender for the big book of the year, MaddAddam, the third book in the apocalyptic trilogy by Margaret Atwood. Martin characterized Atwood’s book and Penguin’s The Orenda, Joseph Boyden’s account of the brutal conflict between the French and the Iroquois and Huron tribes in Canada’s early history, as the “two biggest literary events of the fall.”) Martin has the last conciliatory word on the competition: “It’s not about what we start with, it’s what we end with. We are just blessed to have both these books.” And therein lies the crux of concerns from authors and agents. All the competitive talk feels pretty friendly, and ultimately, Penguin and Random House are all on the same, very big team now. “We’re competitive within and without as long as there’s someone else involved. As soon as there are only our own divisions involved, then it distills down to ‘We’re not going to bid against each other,’ ” Martin says. “But in terms of editorial diversity and identities, they are going to remain. Hamish Hamilton is different from Bond Street is different from Knopf. Random House is different from Doubleday.” Cochrane says that she doesn’t believe the merger will change much in the way books come to Penguin Random House: “Agents don’t come to each project uninformed. They have an informed opinion of the editors, the lists, the positioning that they want for the book.” Dennys agrees, saying, “On a working basis, one hasn’t seen the change. The agents are still coming to us, or we are commissioning and going to agents exactly the same way as we ever did.” Agents who spoke to PW said it is too soon to see the effects of the merger in the market, and they are waiting to see how things develop. They agreed that they will still approach Penguin and Random House as they always have, but they also noted that the merger does mean that at a certain point in the process one more piece of competition has disappeared from the market. One agent described it as contributing to “an increasingly con6

The Launch of ‘Hazlitt’


Last fall, Random House of Canada took a big leap, launching its own online magazine, Hazlitt. When he announced the launch, CEO Brad Martin wrote, “While traditionally many book publishers have been primarily using their Web sites for sales and marketing purposes, we want to also use ours to publish original content.” Random hired prominent Toronto journalist Christopher Frey as Hazlitt’s editor-in-chief. Hazlitt was intended to cover a broad range of cultural topics and current affairs, and one year later has celebrated critical success, being Brad Martin nominated for four National Magazine Awards and winning three—magazine Web site of the year, best magazine Web site design, and best online video. Random reports that monthly traffic has reached as high as 130,000 unique visitors, and that almost half the traffic on the site is from outside Canada. “We did a piece on [Oscar] Pistorius.... We have a piece coming up on the Bikram Yoga scandal. We’re trying to be of the moment,” says Martin. Hazlitt has also had good success with its original e-books, particularly Ivor Tossell’s The Gift of Ford, about Toronto’s notoriously controversial mayor. Martin tells PW that both Penguin and Random have been finding ways to bring their authors closer to readers for years. Louise Dennys also notes that Hazlitt has provided writers with an outlet for their nonfiction and creative ideas when they’re between books. Penguin authors will now benefit from their ties to Hazlitt. “This is just an opportunity for us to pool our resources, to be even more aggressive about our relationship with readers,” says Martin.

stricted ecology” for book publishing in the country. When asked if the merging of Penguin and Random’s Web sites would involve direct sales and e-commerce, Martin says, “Those discussions haven’t taken place.”

Simon & Schuster Canada

Even though it didn’t acknowledge the proposed Penguin–Random House merger as a factor in its decision, this spring the Canadian government granted Simon & Schuster Canada permission to launch a domestic publishing program and thus introduced a new multinational publisher into the Canadian mix just before the merger was approved. The move excepted S&S from a foreign ownership rule that had limited its operations in Canada to distributing international titles since it bought Distican and entered the Canadian market in 2002. (Random, Penguin, and HarperCollins were all established in Canada early enough to be grandfathered out of the restriction.) It was something that S&S Canada

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president and now publisher Kevin Hanson had wanted to do for a long time. In 2010, when the government opened up a review of its foreign investment policy for publishing and asked for input from the industry, Hanson says he made it clear that “not only did we want to invest in Canada and Canadian authors and in our own team here at Simon & Schuster Canada, but it was good for the marketplace itself to give authors choice as to who they could be published by.” The inaugural fall list is small, just three books, but Hanson says that’s a good start on a list that will grow organically, and he’s convinced the three pack a powerful punch. “We have this little book by the prime minister [Stephen Harper] on hockey that’s coming out in November,” says Hanson with a grin. Whatever Canadians think of the Toronto Maple Leafs team or of Stephen Harper as a politician, publishing A Great Game:

Canadian Publishing 2013 The Forgotten Leafs & the Rise of Professional Hockey, a hockey book in a hockey-crazed country by the sitting prime minister is, as Hanson says, “an auspicious start.” Hanson also has great expectations for journalist Amanda Lindhout’s account (with Sarah Corbett) of her 15 months as a hostage in Somalia. A House in the Sky has already attracted lots of media attention and is bound to be a bestseller and the kind of book people will read and talk about for many years, not only for the story of how Lindhout survived her captivity and torture but also her remarkable refusal to let the experience define the rest of her life, and her commitment to become a better person and help the people of Somalia, Hanson says. The third book, which Hanson describes as a Don Quixote–style novel he fell in love with as soon as he read it, is a debut from Toronto writer Ian Thornton, The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms: How One Man Scorched the Twentieth Century But Didn’t Mean To. “What we want to do is publish fine new voices or work with authors who need a new home to be published with and have a new plan and a new vision,” explains Hanson. Canadian agents describe the decision to let Simon & Schuster publish domestically as a refreshing turn of events, and although the publishing program is starting small, they are pleased that it is a new, open list, not already filled by commitments to authors with multibook contracts.

president with her own imprint before she left the company and later joined S&S.) The fact that HarperCollins Canada’s Canadian publishing program is more profitable than any other part of the fully integrated publishing and distribution company might surprise many in the industry. Most publishers talk about how

tough it is to produce books for the Canadian market. The English-language Canadian market is “the single most crowded book market on the face of the earth,” says Kent. “There are more new books and new titles available here than in any other book market in the world. All the English books come, all the American books come, and there’s 12,000

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Canadian Publishing 2013 to 15,000 Canadian books” published each year. As a publisher and distributor, HarperCollins Canada is bringing many of those books in from the U.S., the U.K., and Australia, and will soon be bringing them in from India as well. HarperCollins’s ownership of Zondervan makes the house the largest Christian publisher in North America, and Kent says that HarperCollins is the largest reference publisher in Canada. “What sets us apart is that we have the most diverse product list of anybody, and we are a totally integrated fullscale publishing company that controls its own distribution,” says Kent. Although the distribution side of the business took some hits in the past year when clients McArthur & Co. and D&M Publishers closed and some booksellers continue to circumvent Canadian law by buying directly from U.S. distributors, Kent says distribution is still a good business in Canada “if you do it right. . . . We price our own books as we ship them, so we can adjust prices. We sticker everything. We can also do our own shrinkwrapping, create our own special pricing, so if Costco wants a package with three

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books combined… we do it.” Thomas Nelson and Usborne Publishing are new clients. This fall two of HarperCollins’s distribution titles may get big boosts from upcoming movie releases—the third book in Veronica Roth’s Divergent series, Allegiant, and the latest in the film trilogy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. So what makes the Canadian publishing program the most profitable part of HarperCollins Canada’s sales? “It is riskreward. It is a much greater risk to be originating books than it is to just distribute,” Kent says, but some of the company’s risks in recent years have been very rewarding both in terms of sales and satisfaction. Lawrence Hill’s Book of Negroes has sold more than 700,000 copies. Shilipi Somaya Gowda’s Secret Daughter has sold almost 500,000 copies in Canada. This fall, marketing director Cory Beatty says they are particularly excited about two books from editor Patrick Crean’s

HarperCollins Canada’s marketing creatively combines the latest in social media and oldfashioned personal touches. HarperCollins Canada has more than 110,000 Facebook friends, but marketing director Cory Beatty says, “One reason why our marketing and social media has been so successful compared to almost every other publisher Cory Beatty in the world is because it’s not about connecting with 110,000 people at once. It’s about trying to get to one person and then expanding that.” That approach was vividly illustrated in August when the company threw a party in its Toronto offices for avid reader Mary Tutsh’s 100th birthday. Beatty and Tutsh became friends after Tutsh wrote a letter to Jonas Jonasson, author of The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out a Window and Disappeared, and asked if someone at HarperCollins Canada could direct it to him. Her letter, which talked about her own wish to escape her 100th birthday, so touched staff at HarperCollins that they asked for permission to reprint it in an advertisement for the book, which subsequently became a bestseller in Canada. Beatty kept in touch with Tutsh, often asking for her opinion of new books, and as Tutsh’s 100th birthday approached, the company decided to throw her a party. Her gifts included a special edition of Jonasson’s book with her own letter and a letter from the author thanking her for her interest in his book.

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Canadian Publishing 2013 new eponymous imprint: David Gilmour’s novel Extraordinary, which takes on the thorny issue of assisted suicide, and Shaena Lambert’s collection of short stories, Oh, My Darling. (Prior to joining HarperCollins in 2012, Crean ran Thomas Allen Publishers as a boutique publisher and edited several Giller Prize-winning novels.) On the nonfiction side, there is a memoir from boxer George Chuvalo, whose career included famous bouts with Muhammad Ali and whose family tragedies required even more remarkable strength. HarperCollins acquired Wiley’s Canadian list when Wiley shut down its trade publishing arm, and expects to do well reprinting backlist books such as Jerry Langton’s true crime books, which examine gangs and organized crime, and Ken Dryden’s The Game, “one of the greatest hockey books ever written,” says Beatty.

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The Perilous Middle Ground

After the fall of D&M, its cofounder Scott McIntyre talked with PW about the factors that contributed to the company’s problems. Some of them were particular to D&M—being too leveraged and losing money on its BookRiff Media venture—but McIntyre made some general observations about the industry. “My own view is that there is room for the smaller, niche players at the bottom, and there’s room for the majors, but the middle ground is a very uncomfortable place,” McIntyre said. “But that’s the case in all the cultural industries and for book publishers everywhere in the English-speaking world, because you are up against people with deep pockets.” So how do Canada’s remaining midsize independents make it work? Toronto’s Dundurn Press says it is not only surviving, it is thriving and growing. In August, Dundurn acquired Thomas Allen Publishers, which had been run as a boutique Canadian publisher by Patrick Crean as a part of Thomas Allen & Son. Vice-president Beth Bruder says, “Things are good for Dundurn,” and adds that the acquisition “indicates our positive feeling about the market.” Dundurn currently publishes about 100 books each year, and Bruder notes that hiring Diane Young as the company’s new editorial director is part of Dundurn’s focus on increasing editorial quality and being more competitive commercially. The addition of 126 frontlist and backlist titles from Thomas Allen will add luster to Dundurn’s list with many acclaimed literary titles, including two Giller Prize winners, Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe (2002) and Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues (2011). Dundurn president Kirk Howard says one of the lead titles for fall will be one acquired from Thomas Allen, Ted Barris’s The Great Escape, a World War II story, “which in fact is a Canadian story,” says Howard. “And Ted

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Canadian Publishing 2013 Barris has written 17 other protection in late 2012. Buying books on military history, so the Douglas & McIntyre imprint that will be a good fit with our meant that Madeira Park, B.C.’s military list,” says Howard, Harbour Publishing, which who began his career as a colhad been almost exclusively a lege instructor frustrated by the regional publisher, expanded its lack of books on Canadian hislist to embrace a national scope. tory and who remains devoted Harbour co-owner Howard to publishing books on both White says the company sucCanadian and international his- Kirk Howard ceeded in reviving the Douglas & tory, current affairs, politics, McIntyre imprint quickly, puband biography as well as adult and YA lishing seven titles in the spring and 14 this fiction. fall. “It’s not quite the size of a normal D&M The Thomas Allen acquisition is only year, but it’s two-thirds of it.” the latest in a string for Dundurn. It Greystone Books found new life in bought Natural Heritage Books and Vancouver when Rodger Touchie, presiBeach Holme Publishing in 2007, the dent of Victoria-based Heritage House English-language publishing arm of Publishing, invested and became a partner XYZ Publishing in 2008, and Napoleon with former Greystone publisher Rob & Co. in 2011. Dundurn also merged Sanders, who says the new arrangement of with Patrick Boyer’s company, Blue Butbeing a separate company, not owned by terfly Books, in 2011. but affiliated with Heritage, is working Thomas Allen & Son president and out well. “We are able to take advantage CEO Jim Allen says he decided to sell the of some joint services . . . [such as] producCanadian publishing part of the business tion management, overall Canadian sales because it was increasingly difficult to management, and then in turn we’re conoperate a boutique publishing company tributing U.S. sales involvement through that produced only a small number of our relationship with Perseus PGW, titles of high editorial quality each season. which Heritage didn’t have before,” as well “It’s the economics of having a very small as Greystone’s international connections literary list like we had and being able to and rights sales experience, says Sanders. get enough support for it each season to Rebuilding has been hard work, conreally give some of these somewhat tinues Sanders, but it’s paying off now. unknown books a strong emphasis.” “We’ve had a big job of getting back out But Allen notes that the Markham, there and getting books back into stores and Ont., company’s international agency building confidence, but it’s been workbusiness is growing. “It’s always been ing very well.” Although the list is not as strong, but since 2011, we’ve taken on an big as it will be next fall, Sanders says he’s additional 14 lines from the United States. pleased that their fall 2013 books cover Four or five of those lines came from H.B. the key areas that they want to work in. Fenn and their bankruptcy. We represent Firefly Books president Lionel Koffler 29 publishers here.” Allen says he has also says business at the Richmond Hill, Ont., been investing in a fledgling software house in the past year was up almost 11%. company called Book Connect, which has What’s the secret to Firefly’s survival and grown out of Thomas Allen’s own syssuccess? “It’s our backlist,” Koffler says. tems, including a bibliographic data sys“In any given week when we look at our tem. Some of Thomas Allen’s distribution top 100 books sold in Canada or America clients, including Workman Publishing, or both, 95 out of 100 are backlist books,” the Taunton Press, Square One Publishhe says. “It takes a lot of time and money ers, and Canadian indie press Coach to develop our books, either the illusHouse Books are now using the system. trated ones or the science-based or foodThe ending of D&M Publishers was also based ones. They all have an unusually much happier than it looked like it would high degree of editorial effort in them, so be when the company filed for bankruptcy we have to go to reprints to make any 12 P U B L I S H E R S W E E K L Y ■ S E P T E M B E R 2 3 , 2 0 1 3

money from them, so we keep our books in print for a long time, and we have an unusually high degree of commitment to backlist and also success with backlist because of that.” In order to help market those backlist titles, which in turn pay for new frontlist titles, Firefly refreshes covers and advertises in targeted consumer markets, and lives by the rule “Never, ever surrender.” As mentioned in the introduction, ECW Press, in Toronto, also reports that business is good. Although Canadian sales are down somewhat, U.S. sales are up, which means that the year overall is up so far. “We’ve always been very wary of the Canadian market,” says copublisher Jack David. And that strategy has helped them weather the changes at Indigo better. “Less than 10% of our sales are Indigo/ Chapter sales now,” he says. David agrees with McIntyre’s assessment that it is tough to be a midsize independent publisher these days, but, he says, “Big, small, medium, I think the key word is niche, and if you are selling into the popular science market, the pop culture market, the wrestling market, that’s a niche publisher. It doesn’t matter if you are big or small.” Hockey books are so popular in Canada, they perhaps can’t be considered niche, but one of ECW’s big books for fall is Don’t Call Me Goon: Hockey’s Greatest Enforcers, Gunslingers, and Bad Boys by Greg Oliver and Richard Kamchen. Several midsize and small publishers have noted that consolidation among the large houses may be sending more authors their way. David notes that some authors who left ECW for bigger houses, such as Dr. Joe Schwarcz, have returned. “We’ve seen more midlist authors come our way. I’ve seen more agent submissions than I’ve seen before, and from our point of view, it’s great,” says David. “We’re seeing better and better stuff, and we’re seeing it at advance rates that we consider reasonable, that is, an advance that is commensurate with whatever the first printing is going to be.” House of Anansi Press president and publisher Sarah MacLachlan agrees that it is tough terrain for independent midsize

Canadian Publishing 2013 publishers, but “it was ever thus,” she says philosophically. “We don’t have the market heft of the multinationals, and now Random House is the big gorilla. You are always battling for attention, but that’s not different than it ever was.” Even though Toronto’s Anansi has a reputation for publishing critically acclaimed and award-winning books, MacLachlan says that doesn’t guarantee sales. “Every season you’ve got to prove it all again,” she says. “You’ve always got to be loud, and you’ve always got to be working hard to create media opportunities for your writers and books.” A couple of Anansi’s titles seem destined for lots of media exposure this fall. Lawrence Hill, author of the bestseller The Book of Negroes, is this year’s speaker for the CBC Massey Lecture series, for which an author delivers a lecture in five

parts, each to an audience in a different city across the country. Each part is also broadcast nationally on CBC Radio and in North America on Sirius Satellite Radio. Hill’s lecture will be based on his ninth and latest book, Blood: The Stuff of Life. While the scientific study of blood has advanced medical knowledge and treatments, Hill will also focus on the ways in which the cultural and social representations of blood have divided humans. Blood: The Stuff of Life is published by Anansi this month. Activist Maude Barlow’s book Blue Future, about the deepening global water crisis and her prescription for what must be done, is also likely to attract the media spotlight. Anansi also launched two new imprints this past spring. Astoria is devoted to short stories, both Canadian and international, and Arachnide Editions is devoted

to French Canadian literature in translation. “We’ve always done both of those things, but I felt that creating an imprint for each would focus our marketing energy and people’s attention to it as distinct categories that we publish,” explains MacLachlan.

Small Presses

Some small presses say that more authors are coming to them too, but Cormorant Books publisher Marc Côté says that has been happening for some time. “Since the merging started a while ago, there are authors who feel they are not getting enough attention, editorially, marketingwise” at the larger houses, and so there are big-name authors who are looking for alternatives, he says. “Over the years we’ve picked up Neil Bissoondath and Susan Swan....Everybody tells me Cormorant is first choice for the editing. They just wish they could get bigger advances,” he says wryly. One of the Toronto house’s

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Another year of

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SCotiabank giller prize

hilarY WeSton WriterS’ truSt prize for nonfiCtion

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Canadian Publishing 2013 lead titles, Island: How Islands Transform the World, is by J. Edward Chamberlin, whose book If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? was published by Knopf Canada. Côté is thrilled to have this one. “It is like having a conversation with the most erudite uncle you can imagine. It’s beautifully written and very informative.” Coach House Books editor Alana Wilcox says she too has seen “way more agent submissions than I ever have before....Some authors that I would have thought would have a home at a bigger house are being shopped around to places like Coach House.” Small presses are also reporting good news that runs counter to the perception of a struggling industry. Wilcox says 2012 was Coach House’s best year ever. Tamara Faith Berger’s novel Maidenhead, which Toronto-based Coach House marketed as an edgier, more intellectual, and literary alternative to Fifty Shades, “had a lot to do with it,” says Wilcox, “but it wasn’t just that. There was just a nice confluence of good things.” NeWest Press general manager Paul Matwychuk says sales were also up in the company’s fiscal year that ended in June. “We came off a year that I think was one of our best years creatively,” he says, mentioning that seven of the Edmonton house’s 10 books for the year were nominated for or won awards. The highlight of the year critically and in terms of sales was Cassie Stocks’s book, Dance, Gladys, Dance, which won the national Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. “That one feels like it is just getting started with word of mouth. It is a really winning, charming book” that is still getting attention in the media, Matwychuk says. NeWest’s fall list includes a debut collection of short fiction from Thea Bowering, Love at Last Sight, which is already getting some critical praise. There also seems to be a trend to experiment with form, particularly shorterform fiction and nonfiction. Anansi Digital is a home for fiction and nonfiction from 5,000 to 10,000 words. And among the small presses, Linda Leith

Coach House is launching a nonfiction series called Exploded Views, “shortish books on cultural subjects,” that Wilcox says allow for long form and more lyrical journalism. One of the first titles this fall, In Love with Art, is Jeet Heer’s tribute to Françoise Mouly, who has spent more than 20 years as art editor of the New Yorker and ran the influential RAW Books with her husband, Art Spiegelman. And although Coach House doesn’t usually do much graphic novel publishing, it is reissuing a book that its predecessor Coach House Press published in the 1970s, Martin Vaughn-James’s The Cage, which was a graphic novel before the term was invented. “It reads like an acid trip, although it was not,” says Wilcox. “We wanted to get it back into print, we get so many requests for it.” Arsenal Pulp Press’s big book for fall is also a graphic novel. Publisher Brian Lam bought Blue Is the Warmest Color, a French lesbian drama, by Julie Maroh from a Belgian publisher last year. The book was then turned into a feature film that won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Lam expects the book, which Arsenal holds world English rights for, to get another boost when the film is released in the U.S. at the end of October. Arsenal is releasing its own edition of the book in the U.K. and Australia as well. Lam says Vancouver-based Arsenal has been having good success with the international titles it imports. “Earlier this year, we published the North American edition of a British gay novel called London Triptych [by Jonathan Kemp], and that’s been our number one bestseller in the U.S. for the last three months.” He looks especially for titles that are midrange, “not something that a large publisher would be interested in but something that would fit our program,” Lam says. Linda Leith Publishing, in Westmount, Quebec, is a relatively new house, launched in June 2011, but publisher Leith is wellknown in the Canadian literary world as the founder of

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Canadian Publishing 2013 Quebec’s Blue Metropolis literary festival. After leaving the festival in 2010 and taking some time to travel, she decided to launch her own house specializing in literary fiction and what she calls “singles essays,” short nonfiction books published both digitally and in print. “You need a diversity of editorial taste, and then some of the unusual, very original voices get heard,” Leith says of her literary publishing. She thought the essays would be a “really good format because I think people like to read a short argument, a short sort of polemical essay both on a device and in print.” Success with singles such as Wade Rowland’s Saving the CBC, which has been reprinted three times, is a good sign that she was right. This fall, Stephen Henighan, usually known for his literary writing, is publishing a nonfiction single, A Green Reef: The Impact of Climate Change, with Leith. B.C.’s Talon Books, on the other hand has been publishing since the 1970s, and is just completing a five-year renewal plan with a new editorial team, led by publisher Kevin Williams. An old infrastructure was limiting Talon’s potential for growth, says Williams, but with a new Web site and computer system in place, Talon is forging a new future for itself, complete with a social media presence. The house will remain focused on drama, poetry, ethnography (books about First Nations peoples) and books in translation, particularly fiction and drama from Quebec. Talon has now published two new editions (volumes 1 and 2) of Modern Canadian Plays with about 40% new content. Williams describes them as “the cornerstones of our drama list,” which are mainstream texts in university drama courses in Canada. “Our biggest book right now is They Called Me Number One, which is basically secrets of survival in an Indian Residential School, and it’s been a bestseller for us,” says Williams. Its author, Chief Bev Sellars, will be touring in Canada and the U.S. this fall and next spring. Lots of people are also looking forward to The (Post) Mistress, from prominent aboriginal playwright Tom-

son Highway, he adds Victoria, B.C.’s Rocky Mountain Books has been in business for more than 30 years. It started strictly as a guidebook publisher of very utilitarian map books about the Rocky Mountains but has expanded. “I took it over eight years ago and reimagined what an established publishing company can do,” says publisher Don Gorman. RMB now has a much broader scope, though it still focuses on the outdoors. “Our tagline is ‘Think outside.’ We’re trying to tie everything we do to the landscape and natural environment, whether that’s spirituality, climate change, travel, photography— everything is about a place and about how we impact the landscape,” says Gorman. RMB began experimenting with short nonfiction in 2008. The format became its Manifesto series of small hardcover books limited to 20,000 words, the most successful of which has been The Incomparable Honeybee and the Economics of Pollination by Dr. Reese Halter. “That one has gone to a second printing, and Margaret Atwood tweeted about it. It was on MSNBC and CBC. It came out just at the right time, when people were really starting to talk about honeybees in 2009. “Some people were surprised by how passionate and judgmental the Manifestos were, but that’s what they are supposed to be,” says Gorman. One of the new titles for fall is Saving Lake Winnipeg by Robert William Sandford. “It is a massive lake, and it is about to die as a result of pollution and climate change and huge inaction on the part of government and society at large to fix the problem,” Gorman says. The book is “truly is a manifesto. It is absolutely biased and populist, it is not academic, it’s meant to take a side.” Contradicting those dire headlines, Gorman says, “It’s a great time to be in publishing.” Why? “There aren’t any rules anymore. We are competing with e-books, so our format has to change. Not every book can be five and a half, eight and a half, and $19.95. Now we can start changing that stuff, having more fun, and controlling what we create.” ■


Where’s Wigrum?

Spotlighting the big, the brave and the musical

Children’s Publishing in Fall 2013 By Leigh Anne Williams

Not unlike the adult side of the business, children’s publishing in Canada looks to be headed for a pretty good 2013 overall, despite limited school and library budgets and reduced inventory and heavy return rates at Indigo Books and Music stores. Rick Wilks, director of Annick Press, points to gains in the nontraditional market that have helped make up for some of what would’ve been lost. “We’ve been really successful at getting books into Target. They’ve got a good selection of a number of titles. And we’ve done some special packages for Costco.” Publishers that emphasize U.S. and international sales have also felt less impact from the cuts at Indigo. Owlkids Books publisher Karen Boersma says that efforts to promote the company’s books in the U.S are paying off, with double-digit growth in sales there.

S

ales to the school and library market, however tough, are more important than retail sales for many publishers. “There is fierce competition for dollars because a) there are fewer of them b) there’s more competition in terms of acquisitions for those dollars,” says Wilks, who notes that there is a big demand for digital products in addition to books. Good reviews are essential, he says. “Even if they are ordering in general fewer titles because of com-

petition for their budgets, if your title gets noticed there’s still a good market.” All publishers have sales and marketing strategies, but what they really want to talk about is what they consider the most powerful asset—great books. This year, PW highlights big books, brave books, and books that keep the beat.

If I believe all the stories I am told, so can you

Wigrum

Daniel Canty Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei

It’s October 1944. During a brief respite from the aerial bombardment of London, Sebastian Wigrum leaves his small flat and disappears into the fog for a walk in the Unreal City. This is our first, and last, encounter with the enigmatic man we come to discover decades later through the more than one hundred everyday objects he has left behind. Wigrum’s bequest is a meticulously catalogued collection of ordinary items that once belonged to writers, artists, and inventors. Moving through the inventory, artifact to artifact, story to story, we become immersed in a dreamlike narrative bricolage determined as much by the objects’ museological presentation as by the tender and idiosyncratic mania of Wigrum’s impulse to collect them. Introducing readers to a new form of fiction – an inventory! – Wigrum explores the limits of the postmodern novel. Having absorbed the logic of lists and the principles of classification systems, the Wigrumian narrative teeters on the boundary between fact and fiction, on the uncertain edge of the real and the unreal. A book for both the bibliophile and design lover, Wigrum appeals to the latent collector in all of us. $14.95 / 200 pp / Fiction / 978-0-88922-778-1

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Big

The names, especially in Canada, speak largely for themselves—Kenneth Oppel, Robert Munsch, Barbara Reid—but it W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

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also piques curiosity about what these stars have been up to. Scholastic Canada is publishing the

latest story from Robert Munsch called Swamp Water along with a new anthology, Munsch Mania. Author illustrator Barbara Reid, whose unique Plasticine-sculpted illustrations are instantly recognizable, has taken on another big name— Clement Moore’s The Night Before Christmas, told with a mousy twist. HarperCollins Canada has an new novel from one of the biggest names in Canadian children’s literature. Kenneth Oppel’s The Boundless is set in the late 1800s just as the dream of a railroad crossing and uniting all of Canada was being completed. “It is historical fiction, but, of course, it is Kenneth Oppel, so there is a healthy dose of fantasy and magic in it. ‘The Boundless’ is the name of the world’s largest train, it’s like the Titanic of trains, many kilometers long,” says Hadley

Dyer, executive editor of children’s books at HarperCollins Canada. When young Will Everett witnesses something he shouldn’t, he has to race from the end of the train to the very front with a nefarious character on his heels. “It is a pressure cooker and full of imagination,” says Dyer. B.C.’s Orca Book Publishers’ Seven series, tailored particularly to entice boys to read, turned out to be big in a number of ways. Seven authors writing seven interconnected novels released simultaneously was an ambitious project for all involved, from the writing through the complicated editing process and the coordinated cross-country author tours. It also paid off in a big way with 80,000 copies sold, and rights sales that stretch all the way to India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan, says publisher Andrew Wooldridge. The sequel series by the same authors writing stories with the same characters will be out in fall 2014.

Canadian Publishing 2013 And in 2015, Orca plans to release a series of seven linked novels by seven female authors, including some wellknown names like Marthe Jocelyn, Kathy Kacer, and Kelly Armstrong.

Brave

Many Canadian children’s publishers have been recognized for going where few others dare to go—into the delicate, the provocative, and the really tough or thorny issues of the day—and going there in intelligent and sensitive ways.

Annick Press, shortlisted as one of five publishers considered for the best children’s publisher of the year award at the Bologna Book Fair, knows this territory well. Rick Wilks says the 2012 graphic novel War Brothers, by Sharon McKay and Daniel Lafrance, about child soldiers in Uganda, received starred reviews and enjoyed great sales. “No matter how worthy the subject, it has to be great storytelling,” says Wilks. Second Story Press is publishing Until Today, a debut novel by Pam Fluttert about 13-year old Kat, who is devastated when her journal goes missing. It holds the secret she has told no one—the only record of the sexual abuse she has suffered—at the hands of a friend of her father’s. “There’s nothing graphic, there are no scenes of the abuse, but there are scenes between her and

him where he tells her, ‘You can’t tell anybody, it will be your fault,’ ” says Second Story marketing and promotions manager Emma Rodgers. “Obviously, it’s a difficult subject,” says Rogers, the kind of book teachers and librarians will want to handle carefully. Rodgers also says she’s been amazed by the overwhelmingly positive responses to the book from the ALA’s teen review group. One of Owlkids Books lead titles this fall is Why do we Fight?: Conflict, War and Peace by Niki Walker. Publisher Karen Boersma says the book, released in September, attracted a lot of attention at the Bologna fair. “She uses real-world examples, but she’s been really careful not to wade into any debates about current conflicts,” Boersma says. “Her intent is to teach kids to recognize the shared structures, the factors, and the history that create both personal conflicts and global conflicts, so she does a great job of bringing it back for kids to conflicts that they

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might experience in their own lives, with a sibling, with someone at school.” Scholastic Canada’s The Road to Afghanistan, written by Linda Granfield, is narrated by a soldier home from two tours of duty in Afghanistan. Using stories from the narrator’s family history, the book also honors soldiers who have fought for Canada in previous wars. Deborah Ellis traveled to Afghanistan, as well as to Iraq, Israel, and Palestine in order to tell the stories of children in those troubled places. Her new book, Looks Like Daylight: Voices of Indigenous Kids, tells the stories of aboriginal children from Alaska and Canada’s North

Lisa L yons (below) of Kids Can Press reports “tremendous interest,” especially in relation to the Common Core curriculum, in the Citizen Kid series.

and as far south as Florida. The result of her interviews with them is “remarkable,” says Groundwood Books publisher Sheila Barry. Although there are positive stories, there are also many stories of despair and heartbreak. Ellis tells PW that what stayed with her most from her two years of traveling the continent were the stories she heard from the children about white adults going out of their way on the streets or in a shop “just to say racist things right to their face. I’d hear those things over and over.” Profits from the project are going to the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society, which is a group in Canada that advocates for the rights of native children in foster care. HarperCollins Canada is publishing Rabbit Ears by Maggie de Vries. This novel for teens “is a very personal story for her,” says HarperCollins’s Dyer. In addition to publishing several other children’s books, de Vries has published an adult memoir, Missing Sarah, which was nominated for a Governor-General’s award for nonfiction. Canadians know Sarah de Vries, Maggie’s adopted sister, as one of the many women who went missing from the rough streets of Vancouver’s downtown East Side and who was later discovered to have been the victim of serial killer Robert Pickton. Rabbit Ears is a fictionalization of Sarah’s story as a young woman. “It is the story of two sisters, one who runs away and one who stays home, and how the character who was inspired by Sarah, Kaya, does end up on the streets, does end up in prostitution to support her drug habit,” says Dyer. “And it explores the question how can this happen to a kid who comes from a very loving home, as many of these women did. It is a really brave


book.” Razia’s Ray of Hope is the 12th book in Kids Can Press’s Citizen Kid series, which president Lisa Lyons says has been attracting tremendous interest, particularly in relation to Common Core curriculum. The series, written by multiple authors, features books that aim to make complex global issues accessible for children ages 8–12, covering topics such as water conservation, biodiversity, food security, and microlending. More than 700,000 copies of the first 11 books in the series have sold worldwide and have been translated into 20 languages. Razia’s Ray of Hope is about an Afghan girl who dreams of going to school. The book was inspired by an Afghan woman, Razia Jan, who worked as a tailor outside of Boston and decided after 9/11 that she wanted to build schools for girls in Afghanistan, and founded the Zabuli Education Centre in rural Afghanistan that provides free education to 400 girls. “She is actually a character in the book,” says Lyons. “The young girl in the book is called Razia, but one of the things Razia does is go to homes and sit down, particularly with the fathers and brothers, and tell them it’s really important that the girls are educated, and she does that in the book.” This spring Orca launched its nonfiction Orca Footprints series. According to publisher Andrew Wooldridge, the first two books, Pedal It: How Bicycles Are Changing the World and Down to Earth: How Kids Help Feed the World, have both done well. Pedal It has already been reprinted, and he’s sold rights for both in Korea. The new title for fall is Brilliant: Shining a Light on Sustainable Energy. “We’re choosing a very specific niche for our nonfiction. The books are environmentally themed but they won’t beat you over the head or make you feel bad about how we are treating the planet,” says Wooldridge. “They’re more positive.”


With a Beat

Books that mix with music in creative ways are highlights for several publishers this fall. The Man with the Violin by Kathy Stinson, published by Annick, is based on the true story of the renowned violinist Joshua Bell playing his Stradivarius in a Washington Metro station and observing that the people who paid the most attention to his music were children. Annick’s Wilks says Stinson’s book highlights that theme. “It’s about how kids really pay attention and are connected to the world in a way that adults often forget.” Sony music has created a Web site where readers can listen to Bell playing two Mozart pieces. There are also plans for a children’s album and Annick is discussing co-marketing opportunities with Sony. Groundwood’s Northwest Passage uses haunting paintings of the Arctic from author and illustrator Matt James interspersed with the lyrics of Stan Rogers’s iconic folk song “Northwest Passage” to bring alive the story of the historic search for the Arctic passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. “Groundwood does these kind of nonfiction picture books that take that information to a whole new level. But this one I think is in a class of its own,” says publisher Sheila Barry. Montreal’s Secret Mountain specializes in books for children that are paired with music CDs, and, more specifically,

music that adults can enjoy. As publisher Roland Stringer explains: “A child can listen to the same album in the car for hundreds of miles. And it can drive a parent off the deep end, having to listen for hours to a basement recording produced with a midi keyboard and a singing puppet on steroids. Let’s just say we believe in public safety.” So Secret Mountain produces books with a broad range of music from around the world as well as different musical genres. This fall’s title, A Gift for Sophie, was written by the beloved Quebeçois poet and songwriter Gilles Vigneault and published first in French in 2007 and has now been translated into English. It is accompanied by popular singers Martha Wainwright, Thomas Hellman, Jessica Vigneault, Paul Compagne, and David Francis. The book is illustrated by Stéphane Jorisch. The cross-generational appeal of great music was also the inspiration for Tundra Books’ lead fall title, from Robbie Robertson, a member of The Band. Robertson’s Legends, Icon’s & Rebels: Music That Changed the World was written as a book (with two CDs) that parents could read and listen to with their children, introducing them to musical innovators from Louis Armstrong to Bob Dylan. Kristin Cochrane, executive v-p and executive publisher of the McClelland & Stewart Doubleday Canada Publishing Group, says Robertson “talked about the intrinsic taste in music that children have that we don’t give them credit for. There are very few children in the world who don’t respond immediately to the Beatles or Ella Fitzgerald.” Tundra expects the large and stylishly illustrated book will be an adult crossover gift book. “It’s very much a celebration of music, a historical document of music in a particular time,” adds Cochrane. “But as the design and as the material came in, and as the song list that Robbie compiled with his co-writers evolved, our numbers kept getting bigger and bigger, and our vision for the book kept getting bigger and bigger.” That’s big and brave and surely will have a beat.■

THIS FALL FROM Coach House Books

IN LOVE WITH ART FRANÇOISE MOULY’S ADVENTURES IN COMICS WITH ART SPIEGELMAN JEET HEER $13.95 (print) 978-1-55245-278-3 $6.95 (ebook) 978-1-77056-351-3 Françoise Mouly, art director of the New Yorker, co-creator and editor of RAW and publisher of TOON Books, has spent nearly four decades transforming comics. With her husband, Art Spiegelman, she brought an avant-garde sensibility to the popular art form. Since 1993, Mouly has remade the face of the venerable New Yorker. In Love With Art is both the first book-length portrait of a female pioneer in a maledominated industry and a rare, behind-the-scenes look at some of today’s most iconic images.

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

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TD Bank Makes Children’s Literacy a Priority By Leigh Anne Williams

Each year in October, TD Bank Group adds glamour to the Canadian children’s literature scene, sponsoring the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Awards gala in Toronto and a parallel event in Montreal for literature in French, including the premiere prizes of C$30,000 for the most distinguished book of the year in each language. But more important for Canadian children is the bank’s ongoing commitment to providing essential funds to promote children’s literacy throughout the year.

T

his year, TD is devoting C$3.9 million to prog r a m s designed to nurture literacy and a love of reading, including putting books into the hands of children. Beyond that, it will spend more than C$1 million in marketing dollars, according to Alan Convery, TD’s national manager of community relations, who directs all of the bank’s sponsorship of children’s literature, literacy, and reading programs. Each fall, TD also sponsors the Canadian Children’s Book Centre’s TD Grade One Book Giveaway program that gives a book to every child in grade one across the country. It amounts to about 550,000 books each year, but Convery says this

year’s printing of Boy Soup (La soupe de garçons), written by Loris Lesynski, illustrated by Michael Martchenko, and published by Annick Press, was closer to 650,000, so that there would be extras to give away beyond the school program. TD in Canada and in the U.S. also partner with First Book, which has distributed more than 100 million new, donated books to children in need throughout North America. This year, TD is also providing a $61,000 grant to First Book Canada’s Marketplace initiative, which provides funds to schools and organizations to buy the books of their choice, which publishers provide at deeply discounted rates. (An additional $50,000 went to schools in the U.S.) “TD Bank Group stepped up


right away when the First Book Canada Marketplace was established and gave 50 high-needs groups significant grants,” Tom Best, First Book Canada’s executive director, tells PW. “I can’t begin to tell you how meaningful those grants were for the children from low income families in those groups. Teachers and community organizers were able to select the very best books for these children and allowed them to take them home. For many, these are the very first books they have ever owned.” Next spring, TD employees in both Canada and the U.S. will be visiting schools with First Book and reading to the children. TD is also the lead sponsor of the National Reading Campaign, which is just launching in Canada this fall. The campaign is aimed at cultivating a love of reading throughout the whole of Canadian society, but TD’s sponsorship is focused at portions of the campaign aimed at children. Patsy Aldana, one of the cofounders of the campaign and the founder of Groundwood Books, tells PW that TD’s funding and sponsorship of reading promotion projects for children is “exceptional…. The National Reading Campaign has been extremely lucky to have such a good partner in our work aimed at ensuring that Canada is and remains a nation of readers. Both the NRC and TD understand that if children do not learn to love to read, we will have problems of adult literacy and reading in the future. People I meet around the world are astonished to discover that there is such a forward-looking bank in Canada.” Each spring, TD also sponsors the TD Canadian Children’s Book Week, which sends 30 authors and illustrators out to schools and community centers across the country, particularly in remote areas such as Canada’s North, to inspire Canadian children to read. In his travels with the bank, Convery has opportunities to see the magic that happens when the authors and illustrators, who he says are generally great storytellers, meet the children. “If you could capture that and bottle it and put it in the libraries and the bookstores, it would make a big difference,” he says. ■


The Giller Prize at 20 On September 16, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, in its 20th year, released the longlist for this year’s prize. Jurors Esi Edugyan, Jonathan Lethem, and Margaret Atwood selected 13 titles from a field of 147. Among the authors on the list: Clare Messud, Joseph Boyden, Lynn Coady, Lisa Moore, Dennis Bock, and Michael Winter. (For the full list, visit www.scotiabank.com/gillerprize.) year, the live presentation will again be on CBC, on November 5. The prize’s cachet also grew as the spikes in sales of shortlisted and winning

hot pulp Now a major motion picture

The film adaptation of Blue Is the Warmest Color, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche and starring Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos, won the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival.

Clementine is a junior in high school who seems “normal” enough: she has friends, family, and even a boyfriend. But she can’t reciprocate his feelings toward her, so she breaks up with him. When her openly gay best friend takes her to a gay bar, she becomes captivated by Emma, a punkish, confident girl with blue hair, an event that leads Clementine to discover new aspects of herself, both passionate and tragic.

Blue Is the Warmest Color is a tender,

bittersweet, full-color graphic novel about the elusive, reckless magic of love: a lesbian love story for the ages that bristles with the energy of youth, rebellion, and the eternal light of desire. First published in French by Belgium’s Glénat, the book has won several awards, including the Audience Prize at the Angoulême International Comics Festival, Europe’s largest.

Graphic Novels ISBN 978-1-55152-514-3 $19.95 Canada & USA ARSENAL PULP PRESS arsenalpulp.com

julie maroh

“A hymn to love.” ―Le Figaro

nnes

e d’Or Palm er Winn

l

Blue is the warmest color

“A story of deep love And deep heArtbreAk.”

—Steven Spielberg, Cannes Film Festival jury president

Ca

Fi

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L

ooking back 20 years and reflecting on the success of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, I am mindful of the many finger prints that created this literary prize,” its founder Jack Rabinovitch wrote to PW. “Foremost was my late friend Mordecai Richler, who also served as a juror for the first two years. Mordecai convinced David Staines to join the founding group and David in turn convinced Alice Munro. However, the real founder was my late wife Doris Giller, an outstanding literary journalist, well-known for her audacious (read: in your face) manner and forthright honesty. She set the standard and Canadian fiction writers did the rest.” Rabinovitch created the award in Giller’s honor the year after she died of cancer. The prize quickly gained prestige and the awards gala became a glamorous televised event attended not only by the literary and publishing community but also by celebrities from Canada’s arts and media world. In 2005, Scotiabank became a partner, and the prize increased from C$25,000 to C$50,000. In 2008, $5,000 awards to the four other finalists increased the total purse to $70,000. CBC’s live national broadcast in 2012 was watched by 347,000 people. This

© KRISTIN SKIBSRUD ROSS

By Leigh Anne Williams

books were tracked. It became known in the publishing industry as “the Giller effect.” According to figures from BookNet Canada, the average jump in sales after a Giller win is 543%. Last year’s spike for Will Ferguson’s novel 419, published by Penguin Canada, was 497% up from the week before the shortlist was announced to the week after, and then 803% from the week before it was announced as the winner to the next. The biggest spike ever, which BookNet does not include in the average because it skews it too much, was when Joanna Skibsrud’s novel The Sentimentalists won in 2010. Published by the small artisanal Gaspereau Press in Joanna Skibsrud

lm Fest

iv

Blue is warmest color the

julie maroh

BLUE IS THE WARMEST COLOR

UNIVERSAL HUNKS

Julie Maroh

David L. Chapman with Douglas Brown

The controversial graphic novel, adapted into the Palme d’Orwinning film released this fall.

A lively, wideranging visual history of muscular men from around the world.

THE SIMPLYRAW KITCHEN

Natasha Kyssa Plant-powered, gluten-free recipes from this former fashion model turned raw vegan advocate.

arsenal pulp press • arsenalpulp.com Distributed in the US by Consortium / Distributed in Canada by UTP W W W . P U B L I S H E R S W E E K LY. C O M

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Nova Scotia, it spiked by 450% after it was announced as the winner and the available books quickly sold out. Once the books became available a couple weeks later, it spiked again: 4906% from one week to the next. Those figures have to be satisfying to Rabinovitch, who always encourages those at the gala to buy the shortlisted books. “For the price of a dinner out in this town, you can have all five books,” he q u i p s . “ We o w e t h e growth of the prize these last 20 years to the remarkably talented writers working in Canada today,” he said. ■

Toronto’s P-Shift


University of Toronto Press has developed a comprehensive e-publishing system that can take a scholarly book through its whole lifespan, from the author’s raw manuscript all the way to its digital distribution. John Yates, president, publisher, and CEO at University of Toronto Press, says the press developed its P-Shift system over three years to serve its own publishing needs, but it is now also being used by client publishers, including the University Press of Colorado and Purdue University Press. The first part of the P-Shift system can take a raw manuscript and convert it into a high quality XML file, a “data neutral” format, which is easily converted into other formats. “Today, it’s ePub2, but five years from now it could be ePub15 or something entirely new,” says Yates. Along the way, he says, the P-Shift system can also save publishers copy-editing costs, by automatically doing tasks such as cleaning up the Word document, checking URLs and references within the manuscript with the bibliography. It can also reduce a publisher’s typesetting costs, says Yates, explaining that UTP sent out a file to about 20 typesetters in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. The cost of typesetting a Word document was about $4–$6 per page, but the cost for P-Shift’s XML files was $2.75 a page. Another benefit of the system is that the ePub files and the print editions can be produced at the same time, so that publishers don’t need to separately prepare files for post-production conversion. P-Shift also includes a digital asset management system that gives publishers the ability to archive and protect their files; it also makes it easy for non-technical people to send books to distributors such as Kobo. Yates adds that there is much interest in the system from scholarly presses in North America and that he thinks it will build to become an important revenue source for UTP. “We’re continually working at enhancing it and making sure that we are adopting leading technology,” he says.


Exploring Global Issues with New Nonfiction Razia’s Ray of Hope is based on the true stories of the students of the Zabuli Education Center for Girls, just outside Kabul, founded by a generous and resourceful woman named Razia Jan, a “CNN 2012 Hero,” who also appears in the story.

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CANADIAN CHILDREN’S BOOK CENTRE AWARDS

TD Bank Group anD The CanaDian ChilDren’s Book CenTre are pleaseD To announCe The finalisTs of The

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written by Susin Nielsen Tundra Books, 2012 978-1-77049-372-8 (hc) $19.99 978-1-77049-373-5 (ebook) $10.99

The Stamp Collector

written by Jennifer Lanthier illustrated by François Thisdale Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2012 978-1-55455-218-4 (hc) $18.95

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written and illustrated by Élise Gravel Éditions La courte échelle, 2012 978-2-89695-182-6 (hc) $14.95

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The TD CanaDian ChilDren’s liTeraTure awarD is aDminisTereD By The CanaDian ChilDren’s Book CenTre. for more informaTion anD for jury CommenTs, visiT www.bookCenTre.CA or www.TDreADs.Com

Canadian Publishing 2013

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