If David Bergen’s The Matter with Morris wins the Giller Prize on Tuesday night, a novel published by a large press will have carried the day – again. The big publishers dominate the Gillers, which is why this year’s short list raised some eyebrows. Bergen’s novel, published by HarperCollins under its Phyllis Bruce imprint, was the only big-press title; the other nominees are published by two mid-sized publishers, House of Anansi and Thomas Allen, and two small presses, Biblioasis and Gaspereau. From a literary point of view, Canada’s smaller publishers are flourishing.
The story is not so rosy, however, if one asks about their financial outlook. After the recession, sales are down across the industry, Key Porter Books laid off two-thirds of its small staff last month, and publishers say the mid ranks, in particular, are a tough spot to be.
“If you are strictly relying on the Canadian market you can be small and arts and craftsy and rely on grants, or you can be huge and have economies of scale, but it’s very difficult to be in the mid range,” says Jack David of ECW Press, whose list of about 50 titles a year places it in the middle. David’s solution is to buy world rights to the Canadian and American titles he publishes, which include both literary novels and books about professional wrestling. International sales produce more than half ECW’s revenue.
At Thomas Allen, the strategy is to piggyback a small list of Canadian titles on a large distribution business for books published by others: Publisher Patrick Crean points out that the company is considered mid-sized because of its distribution resources not because of its list of a dozen titles: “It’s ideal: We are masters of our own destiny with a warehouse and excellent distribution,” he said.
This is a smaller version of how a big multinational publisher like HarperCollins operates. There, CEO David Kent says the 150-title publishing program of Canadian and foreign books turns a healthy profit, but it is the much larger distribution business of titles from other publishers, including HarperCollins’s American and British branches, that produces the volume to pay the bills.
That’s what is missing for most mid-sized publishers – volume.
“We are too big to truly benefit from the grant system but too small to benefit from sales,” says Marc Côté of Cormorant Books, a press with a 24-title list edging it into that awkward middle ground. He explains that as a small press succeeds, it attracts better manuscripts and so tends to publish more books. As its revenues rise, the federal government deducts a percentage of its sales from its grant. The trouble, he said, is that it takes big sales to make up the difference.
“We live and die on what we publish: We don’t have a huge distribution pillow on which to rest our publishing program,” says Sarah MacLachlan at House of Anansi, the literary press that publishes 30 to 40 adult titles a year, including Kathleen Winter’s Giller-nominated Annabel. Anansi has been owned since 2002 by philanthropist Scott Griffin, which gives its publisher some leeway: MacLachlan says the press has been in the black for two years now and, with 3 per cent profits elsewhere in the industry, that’s not bad.
Being smaller has its benefits: The mid-sized presses struggle to compete with the advances larger publishers can offer authors, but say their personal touch and their flexibility can give them an advantage.
At McArthur and Company, publisher Kim McArthur says she snagged rights to All Those Things We Never Said, the latest novel from the bestselling French author Marc Levy, because she could move fast enough to offer him publication this fall when she signed him in June.
And, whatever the economic challenges, the publishing successes of smaller presses and their increasing clout with authors mean the differences are eroding.
“The market [distinction] between the small presses and the big presses is not as demarcated as it used to be. It’s more fluid,” says Daniel Wells, the publisher at Biblioasis, where Alexander MacLeod’s short-story collection Light Lifting has been nominated for the Giller. “The playing field is far more level than it used to be.” Wells says he is increasingly approached by major authors or their agents.
It is a development that will be reinforced as the presses move to digital publishing – all the Giller titles are available as e-books – and economies of scale in printing and distribution become less important. Although e-books currently make up only a few percentage points of the publishers’ sales, they are optimistic about a development they see as a way to reach new readers – as long as the prices charged are high enough to compensate writers and turn profits for publishers.
“I think the e-book is going to save book publishing,” says Crean. “We just haven’t figured out the business model yet.”
