It's not often that currency exchange plays a role in a story on Canadian publishing, but the steady rise in the value of the Canadian dollar in the past three years to over 90¢ U.S. (after having been in the low 70s only a few years ago) is becoming a major factor on the book scene north of the border and in the economy as a whole.
For one thing, American books can now be brought in at much lower prices, which can spur new sales (see the story on Simon & Schuster below); for another, Canadian customers are beginning to complain that book prices have not been coming down as swiftly as they should, considering the declining gap between the two currencies' value.
According to Paul McNally, a Winnipeg bookseller who is head of the Canadian Booksellers Association, the formula for pricing the large numbers of U.S. books distributed in Canada has been to add roughly 10% for handling costs onto the exchange rate. This meant that, typically in the past, a book that sold for US$25 in America would sell for upwards of CN$37 in Canada; that price, say consumers, should now be much lower—and McNally has written to publishers asking them to reduce the prices on their new titles to 1.25 of the American price. He understands they are working on it and even has a few commitments: "I realize that on backlist titles it's tougher for them, and that American publishers already have books with dual prices at the old rate in their warehouses."
Jackie Hushion of the Canadian Publishers Council, which represents the larger, multinational publishing groups, agrees: "I think booksellers will be pleased when they see the new prices on the fall titles at the Book Expo Canada show next month." But prices can be brought down sooner than that. Publishers in Canada, she notes, only print suggested prices on their books, and booksellers can reduce the prices if they wish. She is anxious to keep Canadian book customers in Canada and not have them slip over the border, with their stronger dollars, to buy in the U.S. Another effort is under way that may also lower Canadian book prices. There is a sales tax on books in Canada, and the Booksellers Association has been lobbying recently in Ottawa to have it removed, as a kind of tax on culture; some have suggested removing it on Canadian books only, an idea that certainly appeals to publishers with strong Canadian lists.
For McNally, the Canadian book market has been "relatively stable," with no significant increase in the number of chain stores. Though the discount stores have taken some business away, this hasn't happened to an alarming extent. One factor that has made it more difficult lately for his independent members has been that the big multinationals have been closing down their Canadian warehouses, which means many titles, including some notable Canadian authors, are being shipped direct from U.S. warehouses with resultant delays. "This can be frustrating for stores a long way from Toronto."
It's been an active year for the CBA, which is launching a new survey (the first in 15 years) to measure bookstore profitability and will benchmark it regularly thereafter; it is also campaigning to get its members to make more use of the annual BEC show. (McNally himself spoke to PW from Washington, where he was attending BEA.)
Another odd wrinkle to the new dollar relationship is that under the Canadian Copyright Act, publishers that have bought rights from, say, U.K. or Australian publishers are restricted from selling those books at a price too far above the levels pertaining in the home country, and the continuing high level of Canadian prices now threatens the viability of some of those rights arrangements. This is an irony not lost on Jackie Hushion of the CPC, who had helped to work out provisions of the act some years ago, when Canada's dollar was very low. The agreement was hammered out in talks between publishers, booksellers and government officials, and Hushion recalls someone saying, "What shall we do when we wake up one day to find the Canadian dollar on a par with the American?" Hushion continues: "There was general laughter at that, for no one thought it could ever happen. So no provision was made for price volatility, to give publishers time to adjust before losing their rights. We need to offer a window of extra time."
The Canadian market, says Hushion, has been "pretty bland" in the past year, with some concern still being voiced about insufficient retailing competition, since Indigo and its acquired Chapters stores are making so much of the running. "Still, we have many more people selling books now outside the regular book channels—all kinds of specialty stores, mass merchandisers. It seems that now everyone is selling books."
BookNet Canada, the country's nonprofit supply chain agency, which launched its SalesData service last year to perform the same kind of function the Nielsen BookScan does in the U.S. and the U.K., has achieved, says Hushion, "a stunning success." It has a three-stage plan—to collect bibliographic data, to implement EDI and to analyze sales data—and in each case the plan is on track, with Indigo and a majority of the major publishers signed on. The result is that "really clean" data is at last being collected. The CPC has also just completed a business plan for the next three years that will consider new industry standards as well as Radio Frequency Identification technology that will help curtail book theft and shoplifting. Research is also beginning into a little studied potential market—the shopper who buys few books or none at all—to see what can be done to turn such people into customers.
"If we move outside the conundrum of the price relationships, there's a lot of room for optimism," says Hushion.
The Smaller Publishers' View
From the perspective of the mostly smaller, Canadian-owned houses (about 140 of them) represented by the Association of Canadian Publishers, it's been going "steadily" in the past few months, says executive director Margaret Eaton. In case that sounds like faint praise, she adds that the past few years have been "rough" for many of the smaller houses, with the collapse of a major distributor, General Publishing, the folding of the two major bookselling chains into one (Chapters Indigo) and the latter's struggles to get its SAP systems up and running efficiently and without glitches. All this is now on a much more level keel, says Eaton, and now that the challenges are over the ACP is turning its attention to trying to improve the "clout of its members with the big national retail chain.
At the time Chapters was taken over by Indigo, the ACP was among the parties that had to agree to the merger—which it did, under certain conditions. These conditions, according to Eaton, have not been met so far, and the association is currently meeting amicably with Indigo executives to work things out. Among the chain's original undertakings was to offer free display space for Canadian books, and this is being actively pursued. Efforts are also being made to ensure that the SAP system deals more equitably with the smaller and more distant publishers.
Surprisingly, Eaton reveals that Canadian-owned houses have done remarkably well in the past few years on exporting their books; they now sell into 120 foreign countries, up from only 40 at the start of the decade. Some houses, in fact, make as much as 50% of their sales overseas, and since they generally buy world rights to their authors' work, they have also done a brisk trade in rights. "Now we think it's time to focus more on our domestic business," says Eaton, who plans a campaign to increase recognition of Canadian houses for their homegrown qualities and sturdy independence.
Another question that looms for them is that of "succession." Many of the independent Canadian houses, like their counterparts in the States, were launched as part of the cultural revolution of the late '60s and early '70s, and their founders are now getting close to retirement. So who will carry on the companies they created? Since government investment helped get many of the publishers started, the ACP is now seeking further aid—such helping hands as tax relief and assistance in investment—to keep them going under the direction of a new generation.
As to the dollar question, Eaton notes that for some years the Canadian houses have been at a competitive advantage in terms of prices, but with the American books now cheaper, that may be ending. She is anxious that large numbers of low-priced American books not get "dumped" on the Canadian market, as has happened in the past: "It's crowded enough as it is."
HarperCollins: 'A Terrific Job'
The ever-ebullient David Kent at HarperCollins Canada joked that this year he was not, as usual, lamenting that he could not possibly achieve as strong a performance this year as last. In fact, he says, "We will end our fiscal year in June most happily and satisfactorily. Our books, our authors and our staff have all done a terrific job."
A particularly strong performance in nonfiction saw the company at one point with the first four titles on the bestseller list, including such U.S. hits as Marley & Meand Freakonomics, but adding a spectacular #1 position for The Weather Makers, a book on global warming by Australian science writer Tim Flannery that was bought from Grove Atlantic in the States. "I think we take the subject more seriously here than you do," says Kent, noting that the book had become a subject of discussion in high-level Canadian political circles. An inspirational self-help title, The Greatness Guideby Robin Sharma (The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari), just out in Canada, has now become a global Harper project, with editions to come from Thorsons in the U.K. and Collins in the U.S.
Notable titles on the way include a new novel by Dennis Bock (The Ash Garden; Olympia) called The Communist's Daughter; a biography of Alexander Graham Bell by noted Canadian biographer Charlotte Gray; a mammoth novel of 1,000 pages, set in Mumbai, India, called Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra; and a startling book about the relationship between the world-famous racehorse Secretariat and his black groom by Lawrence Scanlon, who gives the groom belated credit for much of the horse's success. There are also new novels by Canadian star Barbara Gowdy and Orange Prize winner Lionel Shriver, as well as a "brilliant" first novel by Stephen Hall, Raw Shark Text, bought from Canongate.
As in the States, Harper Canada re-launched the Perennial imprint last fall, and as part of its widespread promotion managed to put a 30-year-old classic, Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, back on the bestseller list. Another relaunch, scheduled for the fall, will be of Collins Canada (once a separate imprint of its own in the country), offering as its first title Make It Right, a book on home renovation by popular TV star Mike Holmes (his show, Holmes on Homes, has over a million Canadian viewers). A reissue of Barbara Coloroso's classic The Bully, the Bullied and the Bystander will also head the new Collins list. In another new venture, HC is taking over Canadian distribution for the manga publisher Tokyopop next month.
Sales of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, tied in with the recent movie, have soared in Canada, as they have in the U.S., rivaling those linked to the Tolkien movies in previous years. Harper Canada has always been strong on movie tie-in promotions, and even has a full-time staffer devoted to them. An innovation, recently noted in Newsweek, has been the development of book "trailers," designed by Steve Osgood, with animated visuals and music, on the publisher's Web page; at present HC is the only Canadian house offering such promotions, which will be distributed as TV advertising later this year. Tie-ins to E.B. White's Charlotte's Web are also upcoming.
A large number of award nominations (and wins) for Harper's children's list has focused attention on Lynne Missen, executive editor, children's books, who has herself been nominated for editor of the year, an unheard-of honor for a children's editor. A veteran of adult publishing at Stoddart who came to Harper four and a half years ago, Missen is solely responsible for a list of about 30 titles a year, 10 of them Canadian originals. Among her star authors are Kenneth Oppel, creator of the Silverwing Saga, whose latest, Airborn, carried off several prizes, and Susan Juby, whose latest is Miss Smithers and whose Alice, I Thinkis about to become a TV series. Missen will also preside over the conclusion of the enormously popular Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events (with a book appropriately titled The End). The pseudonymously mischievous author is edited in Canada by Susan Rich.
This year Missen went to the Bologna fair for the first time, but selling rights rather than buying them, and she makes an annual pilgrimage to New York to do the rounds there. "It's impressive to see the extraordinary range of children's books everywhere," says Missen, who contributes her share to their number.
McArthur & Co.: Stepping Up Promotion
At McArthur & Co., president and publisher Kim McArthur is enthusiastic. As a sales agent and distributor, McArthur & Co. is something of a U.K. specialist: clients include Hodder Headline, Hodder Children's, Orion and Weidenfeld & Nicholson (although in June Mitchell Beazley will move to consolidate its North American sales and distribution to the U.S.'s Sterling [dist. by Canadian Manda Group], and Hugh Johnson's strong-selling annual wine guide will be missed). Often, the breakout hits in Canada from McArthur's U.K. publishing stable (like Edeet Ravel and Louise Penny) are actually Canadian authors.
A phenomenon in Canada as much as in England, Jo Frost's Supernanny book sold over 40,000 copies last fall; the follow-up is due out this fall. Sales were equally strong for Andrea Levy's Small Island. Anne de Grace's debut novel, Treading Water, published last spring, made the top 10 first novels list at the Ontario Library Association (the largest in the country) and sold a strong 7,500 copies.
Several key media outlets went the way of the dodo last year (book-centric television shows like In Print and Gabereau), and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's late summer and early fall contract dispute led to a lockout (the public broadcaster's various radio and television programs provide significant literary coverage, not unlike NPR's). So McArthur, like other Canadian houses, has stepped up promotions and marketing and refocused on the major literary festivals and book events.
The Interpreter of Silences by Jean McNeil, a Canadian expat living in London, is a key McArthur title, a Cape Breton novel in the tradition of Alistair McLeod; although it's McNeil's fourth book, it's her first to be published by a Canadian house. McArthur made the bold move of publishing this spring, with a view to the fall touring season. McNeil will tour and hit the major literary festivals in Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto in the fall.
The rest of the fall is looking good, too. There's Chris Humphreys's Absolute Honour, a novel of redcoats and Regency England set in Canada; the author is moving back to Vancouver next month, which will increase his media profile and reading availability. Ian Rankin may be attending the International Festival of Authors in support of his upcoming Rebus installment, The Naming of the Dead, set during the G8 summit in Edinburgh. Chris Hope (who was up for the Booker) returns with My Mother's Lovers, and in August, kicking off fall, the release of Jasper Fforde's latest (from Hodder) will be coordinated with the Viking release in the U.S. Labyrinth (a novel of Carcassonne/Templar intrigue) comes out in mass market this fall.
Louise Penny's mystery novel Still Life, published in Canada last spring, also garnered praise when it was published south of the border, and McArthur is looking forward to Penny's follow-up, Dead Cold, while other expected strong titles will be The Burma Effect by Michael Rose, a former head of Interpol communications, and Michael Paver's Soul Eater, the third in his series. On the lighter side, humorist Marsha Boulton, the only woman to win the Stephen Leacock Award for Humor, offers up Wally's World, a sort of funnier Life with Morley for aficionados of Canada's trademark wit and dry humor.
Then there's Maeve Binchy, who has a new novel this fall, Whitehorn Woods. While The Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown have skewed the Canadian bestseller lists in the past couple of years, the last Binchy cracked the #1 spot for several weeks.
McClelland & Stewart: A Century Old
For president and publisher Doug Pepper, 2005 was a "transitional year," wherein lists (which had been well over 100) were trimmed by about 20% to level off at about 75—80 books per year. There have been physical changes, too. Echoing both the house's celebration of its heritage and renewed enthusiasm about the future, M&S moved into an aerie in a heritage building (a renovated Victorian-era piano factory) in Toronto's east end, on Sherbourne Street—all exposed duct work and gleaming original hardwood.
This year is also the venerable Canadian house's 100th anniversary. The house that Jack McClelland built unveiled a new logo, and this spring was honored with its own official Canada post stamp (released in an edition of three million). The celebrations don't stop with that: there's a gala party during BookExpo Canada next month, a PEN Canada benefit anthology, work with World Literacy and a special celebration at the IFOA in October. This spring, M&S also released limited-edition "modern classics" by four of its contemporary authors (four more will follow in the fall) to commemorate the centenary. Three of them, like Rohinton Mistry, Jane Urquart and Anne Michaels, were never originally published in hardcover so are enjoying the hardcover treatment, complete with ribbons and printed endpapers. The limited editions are also in a single printing of about 3,000 copies, so once they're gone, they're gone. "It's a way of recognizing our authors as being us, rather than patting our own backs—it's a direct and tangible, physical way of saying, 'This is who we are,' rather than just publishing a corporate history or something like that." The fall titles are The Handmaid's Tale, No Great Mischief, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and The Bookof Secrets.
The link to M&S's past is personified in Ellen Seligman, senior vice president and publisher of fiction, who worked with McClelland, and former president Doug Gibson, the 2005 Libris Award winner for Editor of the Year, whose Douglas Gibson Books imprint still runs on a parallel course with M&S. Considering that M&S's small profit in 2004 owed much to Alice Munro's Runaway, a Gibson-published title that has sold about 78,000 copies in hardcover, the company clearly has no wish to reinvent the wheel. It's worth noting, too, that some of M&S's top nonfiction titles in 2004 were also published under the Gibson imprint, including Sheila Copps's Worth Fighting For and Peter C. Newman's Here Be Dragons. It was also a Doug Gibson title, The Time in Between by David Bergen, that last year scooped the highly prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize (one of seven M&S titles to have done so). "We sold 40,000 of that, and also benefited from the press when it came out a month later [in December] with Random House in the U.S." Confessions of an Innocent Man, William Sampson's harrowing account of torture in Iraq, hit the nonfiction bestseller list, too.
"This spring, we've come out of the blocks very strong already," says Pepper enthusiastically, "what with Madeleine Thien's book, and now the graphic novel memoir about the Holocaust." Madeleine Thien's debut novel, Certainty, was sold to nearly a dozen markets before publication, including Faber & Faber UK; Little, Brown in the U.S.; and Luchterhand in Germany. Bernice Eisenstein's I Was a Child of HolocaustSurvivors, the memoir that mixes prose and illustration, also saw a flurry of foreign rights activity, as did publishing songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen's Book of Longing, his first book of poetry in two decades.
While there is a sense of renewed vigor, there is also fiscal restraint; in part to lower its overhead, M&S dismissed about half of its marketing department (three employees) this spring and has moved some of its publicity and marketing functions over to Random House of Canada, which owns a 25% stake in the publisher. Back when Avie Bennett, then owner of M&S, made the sale (and also gifted 75% of the company to the University of Toronto), "it was always part of the plan that M&S would make use of Random's back-door services," says Pepper, "and that sales and marketing were always going to be a function of Random House, eventually. Why it took as long as it did, who knows!" Although Tracey Turriff, v-p of communications at Random House, will oversee the McClelland marketing team and participate in strategic planning, editorial independence, says Pepper, is sacrosanct: "There will definitely be a Chinese wall." M&S can bid against Random Canada imprints for a title.
M&S will kick off the fall with A Literary Atlas of Canada by Noah Richler (son of Mordecai Richler), a cultural portrait/romp—cum—literary travelogue through contemporary Canada, as seen through the work of its celebrated writers. The rest of fall looks promising, with a collection of Margaret Atwood's short stories called Moral Disorder and, in a hockey-mad country, a major nonfiction title called Hockey: APeople's History, which will be accompanied by a 10-part CBC series. There's even a second hockey book, this time by journalist Shawna Richer, called The Rookie, wherein the reporter follows hockey prodigy and draft darling Sidney Crosby throughout his rookie year with the Pittsburgh Penguins and as he moves in with mentor (and living hockey legend) Mario Lemieux. A collection of classic cocktail recipes and social history written by philosophy professor and author Mark Kingwell (who is nothing if not Canada's answer to British intellectual heartthrob Alain de Botton) is designed and illustrated by renowned cartoonist Seth.
Each of those titles, says Pepper, will benefit from the house's renewed focus; "we'll concentrate on the quality, with better marketing for fewer books," rather than throwing them against the wall to see if they stick. "That's just the trend all over in publishing right now, and it makes sense. There are too many books." M&S will also look to publish more quirky commercial books and more narrative nonfiction (it will be publishing Alain de Botton's next two books, with the first, The Architecture of Happiness, coming out this fall).
"There's a certain percentage of nonfiction we're going to buy that's very specifically Canadian, but there's a grayer area where it can travel," says Pepper. For the latter, Pepper is applying his years of experience at Crown in New York and working with authors to create proposals that will also sell to other markets ("on certain titles, we are definitely buying world rights where we can—we're up around more than half a million in foreign rights on Bernice's book alone!"), like the new Leonard Cohen or Madeleine Thien. Pepper continues: "And I look at increasing our lead time so we can build an author and a book from the ground up, earlier in the process. I think, what would the proposal have to be like for me to have wanted it when it came across my desk in New York?"
Penguin Canada: Strong for Fall
At Penguin, David Davidar is particularly bullish about the coming season. Now entering his third year at the head of the large Canadian branch of the international group, he was just emerging from the fall sales conference when he spoke to PW,and it convinced him, he says, that "we have the strongest fall list in the country."
The books that had "tremendously charged" the Penguin team included a particularly strong group of nonfiction titles that he expected to be of strong interest internationally. These include Margaret Macmillan's Nixon in China: The Week That Changed the World, about the late president's effort to open a relationship with China; a study by Barbara Coloroso of the world's major genocides, called Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide; and an autobiography by Adrienne Clarkson, the recently retired governor general of Canada, the first nonwhite ever to have the post (she came as a Chinese-born refugee to Canada during WWII), who made a notable career as a journalist, broadcaster and filmmaker and even headed the publishing house of McClelland & Stewart for a time.
In fiction, the list includes John le Carré's latest, Mission Song,in which he has returned to the Africa of The Constant Gardener; a new book by historical novelist Jack White on the currently fashionable subject of the Knights Templar; and a new book of stories, Vinyl Café by Stuart McLean, the highly popular author/broadcaster who is the Canadian equivalent of Garrison Keillor. Davidar sees the "coolest book of the year" in Jason Logan's iGeneration,a cutting-edge study in pictures and text of today's urban tribal ways.
Davidar sees such a list as evidence of his effort to make Penguin Canada's books more international in scope and strong in rights sales. "I think a readership around the world is looking for big books on big themes, rather than small books of local interest."
On the Canadian book scene as a whole, Davidar sees the market "as always, tough—it's a small one trying to accommodate a huge range of books, and with very strong competitors. There's just not enough pie for all, so you have to fight very hard for your share. Everyone's books end up in Canada, and you have to struggle for shelf space."
As a result, returns tend to be higher—though Davidar is pleased to note that the systems at Indigo, Canada's biggest bookstore chain, have settled into a state of reliable performance after some upheavals in the past couple of years. "We feel much better about Indigo than we did before. Wholesaling is also stabilizing, and altogether, things on the retailing front look better than in some years."
Penguin is embracing the market with new sales and marketing chiefs: Yvonne Hunter, formerly at HarperCollins, has been brought in to head marketing, and Don Robinson has been promoted to lead sales.
As for Davidar's own new novel (he is that rare head of house who is also a novelist), it has taken longer than he hoped—it's now about two-thirds through, and he had hoped to have a manuscript ready for the fall. It's tentatively called The Rioterand is a study of a man who helps foment riots on behalf of Muslim fundamentalism. Nicole Aragi will be shopping it in the States, and several Canadian houses have already expressed interest. "It's nice to be taken to lunch by people interested in what you've written."
Simon & Schuster:A Question of Price
In 2005, Simon & Schuster's international divisions saw an increase of 21% in sales, and Canada played a key role in that. "We were a major contributor to the overall international picture, definitely," says Simon & Schuster Canadapresident Kevin Hanson, who joined the company last July. "We've had a really stellar first quarter, probably one of our strongest, and while that's still in some part driven by some of the backlist Dan Brown titles we have, it's also across a whole range." In the first quarter alone, S&S Canada has had 15 Globe & Mail bestsellers.
One of the core drivers in the Canadian marketplace is also the exchange rate, and one consequence of the strong Canadian dollar (aka the 90¢ loonie) is that prices are being driven down and will continue to go down through fall. "New hardcovers have fallen on average about 25%. That's before discounting or anything else," says Hanson, "and I think consumers are responding by buying more books in their original format."
Hanson attributes S&S's success in part to price elasticity and an aggressive pricing strategy for hardcovers. "We've been able to make a number of hardcovers bestsellers—Mary Higgins Clark, Frank McCourt, Stephen King—the latter hitting #1 in Canada for the first time in about 10 years." The lower (and still falling) prices of new titles—and especially, hardcovers—is one of the big stories in the Canadian publishing industry right now. "In Canada, it's kind of interesting that in the last five years a lot of new writers have been introduced into the marketplace, whether import titles or domestic, in the hardcover format for under $35"—like Spanish bestseller The Secret Supper by Javier Serra, which immediately landed on the bestseller list. "That same hardcover in the market two years ago would have been $37.95 or more on an import list. Ditto the Stephen King, which we did for $35, and it hadn't been under $40 before. So we're trying to be much more aggressive in our pricing." The Canadian reader's appetite for British fiction is more robust than its southern neighbor's, and continues unabated—e.g., U.K. author Monica Ali, sales of whose latest novel, Hanson says, has outperformed the U.S. by "a very substantial margin." For the U.S.-Canadian author Kathy Reichs, who divides her time between Montreal and North Carolina, readership is also on a "major upswing," in no small part to her commitment to marketing in Canada, as well as the pricing of her hardcovers.
Hanson also expects to see growth in the children's market, as well as the audio market, which hasn't yet taken hold in Canada the way it has in the U.S. Hanson says that S&S is still "very committed" to the Canadian marketplace, but while expansion continues in Canada (with staff added to the marketing department), there are still no plans to establish a trade publishing operation here, to do original titles like Harper, Random and Penguin do. For the Canadian marketing strategy, says Hanson, S&S Canada works extremely closely with publishers in New York, so that the marketing plan for each book is completely customized to the Canadian market. This is particularly evident in the past year, where S&S Canada elevated its marketing presence, including author tours and Web marketing, "pretty dramatically." For the first time last fall, Simon & Schuster Canada took out sponsorships at the major literary festivals, which it had not done before, and stepped up its advertising.
Random: Canadian Title Strength
"A terrific performance" by its Canadian list was hailed by Random Canada chairman John Neale and president Brad Martin, who noted that sales of its homegrown titles had been rising solidly for the past three years. The special imprints (like Doubleday's Bond Street) established at the various Random lines to publish and promote native talent, all part of an effort that began just 20 years ago, "and the extraordinary work of the editors," had really paid off, they asserted.
With two of those principal editors, executive v-p and Knopf head Louise Dennys and Doubleday publisher Maya Mavjee both overseas (in London and Australia, respectively), the reporting task was taken on by Neale in Toronto and Martin, attending BEA in Washington (where he had just emerged from a breakfast screening of TheDa Vinci Code, proclaiming it "not nearly as bad as some of the critics said"). In any case, both agreed that whatever the quality of the movie, it was hardly likely to rain on their parade with the book.
Canada, Neale noted, remains "a challenging marketplace" because of the extraordinary range of competition, and "we always have to be wary." Random, he declared, had performed exceptionally well at a time when it was hard to do so. In terms of the currency crunch, "we're adjusting as we can in our production schedules" to lower prices, "and we'll continue to do so as necessary. But we're not sticking to any specific percentage." Martin noted that in fact the constant escalation in the value of the Canadian dollar had already meant three previous price adjustments downward. Neale felt the greatest impact would be on hardcover titles, which have dropped in some cases from "very expensive" (nearly CN$40) to under $30. Paperbacks would be much less affected—and this is significant to Random, as its Seal Press imprint is the country's biggest mass market line.
Both execs felt that Chapters Indigo was now running strong, having just reported increased profits over last year; they also hailed the continuing viability of independent stores and rejoiced that their titles were also performing well in the price clubs and the mass market.
As for the books, a first novel called The Birth House by Nova Scotian Ami McKay, which has hit the top of some bestseller lists, is near the top of Neale's and Martin's list of books they're specially proud of, as is Camilla Gibb's Sweetness in the Belly, winner of this year's Trillium Prize; the paperback of Miriam Toews's prize-winning A Complicated Kindness and Lori Lansens's The Girls. In books from elsewhere, there's a new Peter Carey, Theft; a new Bill Bryson, The Thunderbolt Kid, about growing up in Iowa in the '60s; Douglas Coupland's ultra-hip Jpod; Mark Haddon's new novel, A Spot of Bother; the new Charles Frazier; and an admired first novel from the U.K., Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale, which was sold to S&S in the U.S. (and was being strongly promoted at BEA by its American publisher, as Martin noted).
Among the Independents
Thomas Allen is the publishing arm of a large distributor that offers, among many others, the books of Houghton Mifflin, Workman and Algonquin to the Canadian market, and has just hired a new publicity director, Lisa Zaritzky, from Harper. It is her unusual role to cope with authors large (Philip Roth, a current Canadian bestseller with Everyman) and small—the first-time author of a new book of short stories chosen by editorial director Patrick Crean, for example.
Crean himself, who is up for editor of the year in the Libris awards to be given out at BEC next month, is, like most Canadian publishers, in thrall to the many awards that are such a feature of the Canadian publishing scene. One of his boasts this year is that Allen authors were two out of the five candidates for the lustrous Governor General's award, and that one of them, David Gilbert, won it for his novel A Perfect Night to Go to China (the other candidate was Charlotte Gill for her debut story collection, Ladykiller).
Allen's list is a small one, and the house made a profit on it last year, says Crean, but only by keeping it small so that every book could get strongly focused attention. Occasionally Allen will enter the lists against the big houses for a book Crean really believes in, as with noted Canadian astrophysicist John Moffat's A Matter of Gravity, which posits, contra Einstein, that gravity as we know it ceases to exist at a certain range outside the solar system. A new book by Tom Harpur, whose The Pagan Christ was a big seller for Allen in 2004, offers a reading of the Gospels through his concept that Christ was essentially a construct. A memoir by another Toronto publisher, Scott Griffin's House of Anansi, achieved a deal of attention when the author (who describes in the book how he flew solo across the Atlantic to join the Flying Doctors of Africa) also flew himself from coast to coast of Canada on a book tour. An innovative move of which Crean is proud is the plan to reissue an inspirational look at Canada in Bruce Powe's Toward a Canada of Light this fall, with a special translation into French for the Quebec market; this is seldom done by Anglophone publishers.
Firefly Books, under the energetic direction of Lionel Koffler, has been a sturdy independent fixture for nearly 30 years, specializing in handsome, well-illustrated books on nature, science, astronomy and wildlife aimed equally at the library and the retail market—and still, surprisingly in view of widespread use of the Internet, strong in the former. "Many of our competitors don't make as much of the library market," says Koffler.
"It's been a very good year," adds Koffler. The children's side, once a significant part of the publishing program, is now less so, but the company is still strong in distribution of children's titles—and the U.S. is an important marketplace for Firefly, accounting for at least half of its business. Its purchase of Whitecap Books last year gave it a strong line of cookbooks and illustrated guides to American states and cities, and Firefly also expanded into a much larger warehouse, giving it more efficient distribution.
Among big books for the company are a new world atlas, of which it has already sold 20,000 copies, and an upcoming new edition of its astronomy title Nightwatch, which has already sold 50,000 copies. A new title of special interest to American readers is the first authorized book on the Kennedy Space Center in Florida by David West-Reynolds, a veteran Star Wars writer. As a house that produces books for the American market as well as the home one, Koffler has found that the stronger Canadian dollar has been hard on his profit margins. "We have to sell more books to keep up"—something he has accomplished so far.
Jordan Fenn has two significant developments to report for the Key Porter imprint, which he took over a couple of years ago and now runs from downtown offices a distance from the family H.B. Fenn company, famed as a distributor and as a franchised publisher of all-important hockey titles. First, Fenn has signed new long-term agreements with its two biggest U.S. customers, the Holtzbrinck group and Hachette, new owner of the Time Warner group, its other big customer. And he could point to sales up 20% at Key Porter for its annual mix of about 80 fiction and nonfiction titles, with an emphasis on "bigger books with bigger numbers." He has also focused the list more strongly on new titles than the reissues and updated editions that were once more common.
As for Anna Porter herself, now retired, she has, says Fenn, signed with Douglas and McIntyre for a big nonfiction book on World War II.
