Toronto's newest fall literary festival appears to be on shaky ground even before it holds its debut edition after the country's largest trade publisher, Random House of Canada, and another big player, Penguin Group (Canada), announced Wednesday Jan. 28 that they won't participate.
The Toronto Book Fair is scheduled for Oct. 2-4 at the Direct Energy Centre, a large indoor exhibition space on the city's Canadian National Exhibition grounds.
Its organizer, Reed Exhibitions (Canada), has been hoping at least 200 exhibitors – publishers, booksellers and distributors, among them – will participate in its inauguration.
However, Tracey Turriff, Random House senior vice-president responsible for marketing and corporate communications, said in a statement that the planned book fair poses “a number of challenges, including basic elements like the venue and timing.” (The book fair is set for the weekend after Toronto's outdoor Word on the Street books and magazine festival and three weeks before the city's 30th International Festival of Authors.)
Turriff said Random – whose imprints include Knopf, Doubleday, Vintage and Anchor – was “concerned” about the success of the new fair, “given these challenges.” The company would have had “to commit extensive resources for our involvement to be successful,” and it's already at work on, among other projects, its own new weekend event, The Globe and Mail Open House Festival, set for May. “Our efforts are better spent on them,” she said.
Yvonne Hunter, Penguin vice-president (publicity and marketing), also stressed that her firm “has a lot of public events scheduled … [so] we don't plan to be there.”
Reed unveiled plans for the Toronto Book Fair earlier this month. The fair is its response to long-standing complaints, especially from publishers, that its other big book event, BookExpo Canada, held each June, was too expensive and lacked a public component to drive sales.
Random has already bowed out of this year's BookExpo as have several other publishers, including such large firms as Penguin and HarperCollins. Expectations are high that Reed will soon announce it is shuttering BookExpo.
With the Random and Penguin exits yesterday, a cancellation of its book fair wouldn't be unexpected. The two other big Canadian publishers – HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster – are said to be “reviewing [their] options.”
Calls to Reed's Canadian marketing department were not returned by deadline Wednesday.
