Calgary writer Andrew Nikiforuk won the $15,000 Governor-General's Award last December for Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig's War Against Big Oil; now he's seriously contemplating a career change.
"Trying to produce high-quality non-fiction that is reader-friendly is pretty much a losing game in Canada," Nikiforuk said in a telephone conversation. "My family doesn't need me to repeat that experience again."
Nikiforuk isn't feeling sorry for himself. He's just being realistic. So is Doug Gibson, publisher of McClelland & Stewart, when he says: "I've been as guilty as anybody, but a publisher who pays an advance that isn't going to earn out [in sales]is making a mistake." If that means a GG-winning writer such as Nikiforuk ends up publishing with a multinational, so be it.
That is the brutal bottom-line lesson emerging from the demise of Nikiforuk's publisher, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, a wholly owned M&S imprint. The boutique non-fiction publishing house, started 15 years ago by John Macfarlane, Jan Walter and Gary Ross foundered earlier this month when, after two months of trying, no buyer came forward with a concrete offer. MWR's offices will close at the end of April, with M&S absorbing the inventory, the debt and ongoing projects.
"This is part two of Stoddart," said Ben McNally, manager of Nicholas Hoare bookstore in Toronto, referring to the bankruptcy of General Publishing last summer. "I hope part three is not going to be M&S."
Gibson denied that his company is in trouble. "Publishing is next-year country," he joked. "We always have big books coming up." Nevertheless, he admits that M&S has trimmed its payroll, and he says "if you look around, most publishers are planning to cut back on their lists."
Many of the traits that writers and editors loved about MWR -- the editorial nurturing of writers, the refusal to publish junk titles for a quick profit -- are some of the very same factors that got the imprint into trouble and mitigated against a cutthroat salvage operation allowing a prospective buyer to cherry pick assets.
Here's what went wrong:
The business model
Back in the late 1980s, when Macfarlane was publisher of Saturday Night, he "kept seeing articles that we had published morph into books that other people published" and fantasized about setting up an imprint to publish Saturday Night books, much the way The Atlantic Monthly had done in the United States. "I naively thought you could make money in publishing," he says with a bitter chuckle.
Then, Conrad Black bought Saturday Night. Macfarlane was toast and the imprint was slated for the garbage. Macfarlane was running around the track at the Y one day when he suddenly thought: Why don't we do this anyway?
Jan Walter, a book editor, who had held senior editorial positions at Hurtig Publishers and M&S, and Gary Ross, a writer and senior editor from Saturday Night, were both game. The three of them hired entertainment lawyer and agent Michael Levine to shop the editorial concept around to a large publisher who could supply marketing, sales and distribution services. As Ross puts it, "We needed a partner who knew what they were doing and who had their own herd of goats that needed to be fed; we would be more fodder to feed the goats." Jack Stoddart, head of the then-profitable General Publishing conglomerate, bought the business model.
From the beginning MWR decided to publish only non-fiction, although they no no longer had a national magazine base from which to cull writers and try out ideas. "We had to have a niche," explains Macfarlane. "We thought fiction was trickier," says Ross.
Fiction may be trickier, but a novel has the potential to transcend its time and place. By their very nature, topical books such as Stevie Cameron's hugely successful volume about greed and corruption in the Mulroney era, On the Take, are locked into a specific era and mindset.
Finally, the partners agreed only to publish books they all loved. This is an admirable ambition, but it means every title has to be a winner. As Levine, who declined to speak specifically about MWR, says, "I work on a lot of books and films that are not my personal taste, but I recognize there is value in them."
Bad luck
The book business will never be easy, because the Canadian market is simply too small to make an indigenous cultural industry viable. "Publishers in Canada survive by the good graces of Mary Higgins Clark and Danielle Steel or Sheila Copps," says Ross. "You either have an agency business that supports you or you rely on the Canadian government."
Stoddart did have a fluorishing agency business when MWR signed on in 1988 and both companies qualified for government grants. By the end of that first five-year contract, General had invested a lot of money in MWR, and had seen little financial return. The next contract was organized, according to Walter, on "a different shareholding agreement."
MWR's sales hit the roof, primarily because of the phenomenal success of David Foot's and Daniel Stoffman's Boom Bust and Echo (which sold more than 300,000 copies) and On the Take. They wanted to renegotiate the contract with Stoddart, but "were unable to come to an agreement," says Walter discreetly. Like many large companies that invest in startup operations, General provided financing in bad times -- and took a large chunk of the profits in good times.
The relationship disintegrated, and finally the two parties agreed to a "divorce." MWR left Stoddart and went to M&S in 1999. By the terms of the settlement, MWR had to leave behind the rights to 10 of its most lucrative titles, including Boom Bust and Echo and On the Take.
Macfarlane learned some valuable business lessons from the association: "Be careful about the deal you make," and "it is always a very bad idea to have your controlling shareholder as your largest supplier of services, because they can charge you whatever they want."
By the time MWR arrived at M&S, the partners were back in startup mode.
The changed environment
Back when MWR set up shop, there was a network of independent booksellers across the country talking up new Canadian books to their customers. Book-loving Peter Gzowksi ruled the CBC Radio airwaves on Morningside, and magazines, if not thriving, provided markets for freelance writers to practise their craft, and to run excerpts from their non-fiction books.
All of this has changed. Morningside has been replaced by the dysfunctional Sounds Like Canada. Reviewing space for books in most newspapers has been drastically curtailed. And several major magazines have disappeared. (Nikiforuk is reduced to writing for two national magazines and a couple of regional ones.)
Where once it was easy to promote a book, the opposite is now true, especially for fiction's less glamorous cousin.
A series of governmental decisions in the mid-1990s allowed a venture capitalist named Larry Stevenson to merge two book chains into a big-box retailer called Chapters. Heather Reisman quickly entered the fray with her rival chain of Indigo superstores. The rapid expansion of these huge bookstores encouraged publishers to produce far too much product (for that is what books had become in this new grocery-store mentality) to fill the shelves in these glossy new stores. Many independent booksellers went out of business and there weren't enough customers to buy all of the books the publishers had produced.
The bookseller market constricted almost as rapidly as it had expanded. Unlike almost any other retail business, booksellers are allowed to return unsold books to publishers for full credit. Essentially that means that publishers work on consignment, forever fearful of the sound of a truck roaring up to the warehouse door with a shipment of returned books and a demand for re-payment.
"Were it not for government intervention," speculates independent bookseller McNally about the Chapters debacle, "every small press in the country would have gone down." Asked what he thought about book returns, M&S's Gibson laughed, likening it to a "deadly embrace between publisher and bookseller that means we both drown."
M&S could no longer cushion MWR after a particularly bad retail year. And so it became another statistic in the struggle to build and sustain an indigenous publishing industry in this country.
What's next
Macfarlane will continue working as editor of Toronto Life magazine, Walter and Ross will finish the substantive editing on the books they have commissioned. All talk about MWR as the best working relationship of their lives. They can all look proudly at shelves of award-winning books bearing the MWR imprint.
Besides, Ross, still believes in irony. That's why he's betting that tomorrow while Katherine Ashenburg will win Ontario's Trillium Prize for The Mourner's Dance, Daniel Stoffman will take the Donner Prize for Who Gets In: What's Wrong With Canada's Immigration Program -- and How to Fix It, and Dan Needles's With Axe and Flask: A History of Persephone Township from Pre-Cambrian Times to the Present with be awarded the Leacock Medal for humour -- all of them MWR titles. "Not that it will improve sales," he adds. "I can't believe how little winning the G-G did for Nikiforuk."
Neither can he.
Sandra Martin