With socially conscious missions and international outlooks, British Columbia independent publishers have a clear vision for the future. “B.C. has the second-biggest industry outside of Ontario, and in some ways is more diverse because everybody’s had to adapt, being so far from the center of the universe,” says Andrew Wooldridge, publisher of Orca Book Publishers and past board chair of Books BC. “People at Greystone, Arsenal, and other incredible publishers are making their own way and figuring things out.”
Books BC, formerly the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, reports 25 active member publishing companies and 29 industry affiliates. One of the association’s priorities is syncing with U.S. sales and distribution, and it’s talking to PubWest about these alignments. Books BC hosts BC Book Day at the legislature each spring, and partners with the Books for Schools and Read Local BC programs, according to executive director Matea Kuli´c. (Kuli´c is currently on leave, and interim executive director Leslie Bootle is serving until November 2024.)
Don Gorman, Books BC board chair and the publisher of outdoor recreation press Rocky Mountain Books, said that “publishers in British Columbia do local and regional topics well, but when you look at the books themselves, many deal with topics that are international in nature and scope. Whether it’s travel or environmental writing, history, health and wellness, or photography, our books transcend the Canadian border.”
B.C. also educates publishing professionals and advances research. The University of British Columbia maintains a scholarly publishing program, and although Simon Fraser University’s book publishing is on hiatus, SFU offers a master’s degree in publishing. According to SFU industry liaison Suzanne Norman, the school partners with the Indigenous Editors Association, has co-developed an Indigenous editing course with the IEA, and offers “Canada’s (and possibly North America’s) first undergraduate full-credit course on accessible publishing.” B.C. is also home to groundbreaking Indigenous publisher Theytus Books, whose former managing editor Greg Younging wrote the influential Elements of Indigenous Style.
Arsenal Pulp
At Arsenal Pulp Press, publisher Brian Lam looks for “books of interest to LGBTQ and BIPOC audiences” and work that is “more issue-oriented than just great stories.” For instance, “of books we’ve published in the last year, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Future Is Disabled has been our biggest seller in North America,” Lam says. “Disabled literature has exploded, so that’s an untapped market” ideal for Arsenal Pulp’s readership. Environmental literature represents another direction for the press, and This Book Is a Knife by Yukon-based queer activist Lori Fox, due out in 2024, promises to be “eye-opening,” Lam says.
This fall, Lam is betting on two nonfiction graphic narratives. One is Erdo˘gan (out now), a biography of authoritarian Turkish president Recep Tayipp Erdo˘gan by exiled Turkish journalist Can Dündar, illustrated by Egyptian Sudanese artist Anwar and translated by L.L. Kreider. In 2021, Dündar established ÖzgürüzPress in Germany to print titles censored in Turkey, and Arsenal Pulp acquired the rights to publish Erdo˘gan’s English-language edition. The second fall title is a graphic history, 40 Men and 12 Rifles: Indochina 1954 (out now), Arsenal Pulp’s third book with French Vietnamese comics artist Marcelino Truong, translated by David Homel.
Arsenal Pulp actively courts a global audience and sells foreign rights to its publications. “The U.S. market remains 55% of our total sales, and it’s been consistent over the last 10-plus years,” Lam says. “We have a great sales and distribution team at Consortium, and with individual titles, we work with some specific publicists” like David Hyde of Superfan Promotions and Nectar Literary.
Meanwhile, Lam does brisk business with London-based distributor Turn-
around Publisher Services, for U.K. and European accounts. “They represent 8% of our total, but that’s pretty significant compared to our Canadian and U.S. markets,” he says. “We also have distribution in Australia and New Zealand, and we just signed an agreement with Ingram to sell our print books internationally in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.”
Greystone Books
Independent publisher Greystone Books sees growth in and beyond North America, across its general nonfiction, Greystone Kids, and Aldana Libros lines. While “we’re one of the biggest independent publishers in Canada, about 70% of all our sales are in the United States,” publisher Jen Gauthier says. “That has flipped from a decade ago, when U.S. sales were about 30%.”
This fall, Greystone considers sustainability with The Summer Canada Burned, an “instant book” in collaboration with Postmedia (Nov.); Christopher Pollon’s mining exposé Pitfall; and Taras Grescoe’s foodways reporting in The Lost Supper. Top Greystone Kids titles include Suzy Lee’s picture book The Shade Tree, Gaëlle Alméras’s Science Adventure Club graphic narrative Super Space Weekend, and Andrea Warner’s social justice history Rise Up and Sing! Power and Activism in Music, illustrated by Louise Reimer.
Gauthier anticipates that “indie booksellers will be champions for” The Two-Headed Whale by Scottish author Sandy Winterbottom. Winterbottom’s history of whaling in Antarctica started as an adventure in explorer Ernest Shackleton’s footsteps, “but it’s chilling when you start seeing the parallels between whaling, the oil and gas industry, and other natural resource industries,” Gauthier says. Greystone is promoting an international hardcover edition in Australia and New Zealand, “another great market for us—our kids’ books have been doing really well there.”
“One of our strategic goals is expanding our international presence,” Gauthier says. “We’ve hired a head of Greystone U.K., Andrew Fuller, and we now have a children’s marketing director there too.” The U.K., where Greystone saw immense success with Peter Wohlleben’s 2016 The Hidden Life of Trees, “is one of our next markets to crack.”
New Society Publishers
Like Arsenal Pulp and Greystone, New Society Publishers foregrounds environmental justice. The press has been measuring its ecological footprint for 20 years and, with Toronto-based ECW Press and supply-chain study group Green Book Alliance, staffers are developing a calculator so publishers can conduct a “cradle-to-cradle life cycle analysis” of any book.
“Obviously we’re operating in a commercial context, and we live by what we sell,” says New Society acquisitions editor Rob West. “But we have a mission to provide tools for a more just, equitable, and sustainable world.” ECW and New Society are the only two certified B Corp publishers in Canada. Most of New Society’s books are trade paper originals, and recent years have seen a “big push” to do audiobooks in addition to their e-book editions.
West says that New Society takes a “two-pronged approach to acquisitions,” with practical books on small farms and food resiliency “that drive our bottom line” and critical books that “problematize systems and worldviews. Our idea books keep the conversation rolling, and our practical books help people make change on the ground.”
The Winter Market Gardener, by Jean-Martin Fortier and Catherine Sylvestre, translated by Laurie Bennett, is a primer on year-round market farming in cold northern climates. West hopes it benefits from the backlist success of Fortier’s The Market Gardener, which “has sold well over a quarter-million copies and become the bible for small-scale organic vegetable growers.” As a complement to this how-to approach, Osprey Orielle Lake’s The Story Is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Remake a World in Crisis (Jan. 2024) looks at extractive industries and the human disconnection from the natural world.
Orca Book Publishers
Books BC reports that children’s books do extraordinarily well across Canada and the U.S., notably in school and library markets. Orca Book Publishers is a fixture, publishing more than 80 books per year and distributing partner publishers’ books, including Cherie Dimaline’s bestselling The Marrow Thieves (Dancing Cat Books). In September, six Orca titles were shortlisted for prizes by the Canadian Children’s Book Centre, and Orca recently expanded warehouse space by 4,000 sq. ft. to accommodate inventory and expedite distribution.
Wooldridge calls Indigenous publishing “essential” to the Canadian industry and to Orca. “Reconciliation became a national conversation and changed so much about the way this country works,” he says. “Twenty years from now, we’ll see that it’s been a watershed moment.” Andrea Fritz’s Coast Salish tale, Otter Doesn’t Know, is a spotlight title for fall, and Orca’s biggest seller over the past year has been I Hope, by Monique Gray Smith and illustrator Gabrielle Grimard, published in English, Cree, and French.
Environmentally conscious work, like Rita Singh’s picture book Once, a Bird, illustrated by Nathalie Dion, is also central to Orca’s list. Orca has ditched dust jackets, which Wooldridge calls “wasteful and pointless, especially in the institutional market where they just toss them anyway. We’re using lighter paper, and our board books have gone down in weight because of cost, so that makes the book lighter and easier to ship.” Orca uses Forest Stewardship Council–certified papers and post-
consumer recycled resources as often as possible, he adds.
Although censorship in Canada has been minimal thus far, “you can see the American sentiment coming north for sure,” Wooldridge says. Further, “a number of our titles are embroiled in attempted book banning in the U.S.,” including Robin Stevenson and illustrator Julie McLaughlin’s picture book Pride Puppy! and Growing Up Trans, an own-voices collection edited by Lindsay Herriot and Kate Fry. “We are doing all we can to counter this by creating more content that matters,” Wooldridge says. Inclusive fall titles include The Antiracist Kitchen: 21 Stories (and Recipes), edited by Nadia Hohn and illustrated by Roza Nozari, and Lindsay Herriot’s It’s a They, a gender-neutral board book to welcome a new baby. Across British Columbia, social responsibility and outspokenness are integral to independent publishing.
Raincoast Book Distribution
Though it is seemingly remote from the publishing power center in Toronto, Raincoast Book Distribution enables many Canadian publishers to stay connected to the rest of the country and the world. “The majority of Canadian traffic, in terms of volume, flows east to west,” says Jamie Broadhurst, v-p of marketing, “so the majority of our customers are east of us. It will seem counterintuitive, but we’ve benefited from slightly more economical shipping rates because we’re going west to east. The companies we work with have become adept at winter shipping and giving us updates in real time” to make sure accounts receive orders. “If we get an independent bookstore order by 11 a.m., we ship it same-day. If you’re a West Coast account, we often function as an off-site warehouse.”
In terms of Canadian tastes and U.S. preferences, Broadhurst feels “we share a common North American market, but with a northern accent.” For instance, “our bestseller list is becoming more dominated by Indigenous authors, in their own words and on their own terms. It’s probably the most significant shift in Canadian publishing in the last 20 years.”
Broadhurst notes the influence of social media on sales of commercial titles like Rebecca Yarros’s The Fourth Wing. He’s seen strong interest in celebrity books, notably Canadian-born actor Matthew Perry’s memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. Raincoast distributes Suzette Mayr’s novel The Sleeping Car Porter (Coach House), which took off thanks to the Giller Prize, and Kate Beaton’s Ducks (Drawn & Quarterly), a selection of Canada Reads.
Despite this energy, “we have seen e-commerce settle back down,” Broadhurst says. “Canadian consumers like bricks-and-mortar bookstores, and we’ve seen double-digit growth” in that sector. “There’s so much about the Canadian publishing scene that’s a creature of the mid-’90s. Indigo’s first store opened in 1997. In some respects, the modern Canadian bookselling and publishing scene is a millennial.”
Talonbooks
At small B.C. indie press Talonbooks, which publishes eight titles per year in poetry, drama, and French translation, publisher Kevin Williams takes a measured approach to North American marketing and distribution. “Talon is not a regular trade publisher: 65%–70% of our sales are always backlist,” and many are course adoptions, Williams says. He estimates that “8% of our sales are direct-to-customer over our website, and 50% of those orders are from the U.S.”
Williams is “publishing a lot more e-books” with attention to accessibility and has “invested in a spiffier metadata system. We have about 800 books in print, so we’ve been working our way through keywords, which helps with discoverability.”
Talonbooks’ acquisition of drama diminished during the pandemic. “You can’t publish a play until it’s in professional production, because the first time it gets staged there’s often a lot of rewriting,” Williams says. He looks forward to poet Andrea Bennett’s The Berry Takes the Shape of the Bloom, Lorraine Weir and Chief Roger William’s Lha Yudit’ih: We Always Find a Way (“in the past few years, the Indigenous list is the one that has sold the best all over”), and A Dream in the Eye: The Complete Paintings and Collages of Phyllis Webb, a collection of art by the Canadian poet, edited by Stephen Collis and Gregory Gibson.
