At a time when sales are declining everywhere, the Canadian book market is the envy of other countries. Canadian book sales are up, according to BookNet, which tracks them in approximately 75 per cent of our market. In New York and London, lists and imprints have been trimmed or eliminated and there have been layoffs, but Canadian publishers are not cutting back their lists and staff.
So why is it, when books are selling better than ever, that the perception is that Canadian publishers are getting worse at selling Canadian-authored titles? (See James Adams's feature article in last Saturday's Globe and Mail, "Publish, And Your Book Will Probably Perish.") If Canadian-authored titles are selling worse today than 20 years ago (I would agree they are), do we need to pin the tail on the nearest "donkey," or is the situation more complex?
For the media, the term "Canadian publisher" invariably means "Canadian-owned," with overtones of incompetence, including the canards of poor editing, ineffective marketing and an inability to sell books. Such is the lot of a noble industry in a market dominated by foreign-owned and foreign-controlled publishing houses, with capital and expertise built up over the last two centuries through colonialism, protectionist laws and tariffs, inexpensive labour and a unified market.
Canadian bookstore and library shelves are filled by approximately 80-per-cent foreign-authored and -published books. These are promoted by U.S. television programs and magazines such as 60 Minutes and People, which have, respectively, more viewers in Canada than The Fifth Estate and more readers than Maclean's. Canadian books occupy some 20 per cent of shelf space. Their greatest promotional vehicles are CBC's Canada Reads and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Authors lucky enough to be selected for glory will see their sales climb to an average 10,000 copies for a nomination and 30,000 for a win — numbers an Oprah selection can match in days.
Even without the benefit of the U.S. taste-setting machinery, certain popular American authors sell 6,000 to 8,000 copies a week in the first months of their release here; the average Canadian book will sell no more than 1,500 copies in its short and brutal life. Does this mean that Canadian authors are inferior, or that Canadian publishers are delinquent when it comes to publicity and sales?
The obstacle Canadian publishers must overcome in their own markets isn't Indigo Books, or Costco, or amazon.ca, or any of the large retailers that account for probably 75 per cent of the book market. It isn't the staggering geography, the two official languages, the small population or the millions of immigrants. It's the simple fact that our English-language media is dominated by U.S. and British culture.
This cultural colonialism is so pervasive as to seem normal. Recently on the CBC, a woman complained about the loss of Canadian symbols from schools. "They've taken everything away from us," she said. "First it was the pledge of allegiance." There is no pledge of allegiance in Canada. But the U.S. version has been heard and seen so often that she has come to think of it as her normal, her Canada.
Many Canadians expect the setting for a great novel to be somewhere else: London and New York, not Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal. Not St. John's, Prince Albert or Terrace. These cultural assumptions are symptomatic.
