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Canadian publishing industry reacts to Douglas & McIntyre news

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More from Mark Medley | @itsmarkmedley

The finalists for this year’s Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language fiction read at the International Festival of Authors in Toronto on Monday night. At the event, Scott McIntyre was scheduled to be presented with the inaugural Ivy Award, a new annual prize given to “a person who has made a substantial contribution to Canadian publishing.”

McIntyre, co-founder, CEO and chairman of D&M Publishers, was not on-hand to accept the award; according to literary agent Martha Magor Webb, the audience was informed he had returned to Vancouver to attend to urgent business matters.

“Literally five minutes later I looked at my BlackBerry and there was the announcement,” she says.

According to the press release, D&M Publishers, one of the country’s largest independent publishing houses, is seeking creditor protection under Canada’s Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. Marketing Director Emiko Morita confirmed that “sadly, yes, there have been layoffs. D&M has reduced its staff across all departments yet remains operational while it seeks a buyer for its assets.”

“It’s a real shame, because this represents a real icon of the Canadian publishing industry,” says Scott Griffin, owner of Toronto’s House of Anansi Press, now the largest remaining independent publisher in the country. “To see it in this kind of trouble is really discouraging. Hopefully something will come out of it that allows it, or some remnants of it, to survive. But I’m not sure what that could be at the moment.”

Neither is anyone else.

In an e-mail to authors sent out Monday night, Mark Scott, the company’s executive director and principal shareholder, wrote the company “intends to carry on its operations during this restructuring process.”

“Over forty-one years of publishing, we have discovered and worked with Canada’s finest writers, and we are deeply honoured to have published each of you,” the letter concludes. “We look forward to continuing that tradition.”

That tradition dates back to 1970 and includes authors such as Anna Porter, Wade Davis, David Suzuki, Lorna Crozier, Kevin Chong, Dany Laferriere, Adam Lewis Schroeder, Robert J. Wiersema, Rudyard Griffiths, and Wayson Choy. The Vancouver-based company, which includes Greystone Books and Douglas & McIntyre, has enjoyed recent success with Charlotte Gill’s tree-planting tome Eating Dirt, which won the British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction earlier this year; Carmen Aguirre’s Canada Reads-winning memoir Something Fierce; and The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud, which the company obtained from Gaspereau Press after it won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2010.

“I think it’s a national tragedy,” says Patrick Crean, an editor at HarperCollins Canada and the former publisher of Thomas Allen. “They’re an iconic publisher. I think Scott McIntyre is one of the very best publishers in Canada. It’s a terrible loss.”

Yet not entirely unexpected. Several agents and editors I spoke to admitted they’d heard news that all was not well on the west coast.

“I heard rumblings, but the D&M team was performing so well,” says Samantha Haywood, a Toronto literary agent. “They were approaching my authors with new book ideas, offering on projects, being very proactive up until last week or so.”

Last week at the Vancouver International Writers’ Festival, the company canceled its annual party with less than 24 hours notice. “There was a lot of speculation then that something must be amiss,” says Anne McDermid, a Toronto agent who was in B.C. for the festival. “But nevertheless, this announcement is a bit distressing and rather sudden for us.”

“We knew that there was a worry,” says Jackie Kaiser, another Toronto agent. “There were rumblings that things were not going well.”

Kaiser has two authors with books under contract — Charles Wilkins and Mark Abley — and she is unsure what will happen now.

“There is an immediate, urgent concern: Are these people going to be able to be paid?” wonders Kaiser. “They’ve implied that their publishing program is going to continue, but if they can’t pay people, I don’t know what the answer is.”

In a statement released by the Writers’ Union of Canada on Tuesday, Merilyn Simonds, the organization’s chair and herself a Douglas & McIntyre author, said while the Union “will work hard to minimize the impact of this situation on our writers, we hope restructuring of the company will mean that it can continue as a force in Canadian publishing.”

“This is a business that is legendary for complaining, and people saying the sky is falling, but I think that there is some truth to the concerns,” says Kaiser. “You cannot easily manage all of the changes going on in this industry as an independent.” Publishers, she adds, are under “tremendous pressure to commercialize. And D&M and other publishers who do not commercialize appropriately will probably be in peril.”

Though perhaps this is just another example of the cyclical nature of publishing. Crean points out that when he began working at McClelland & Stewart in 1971 “Jack [McClelland] was trying to sell the company — it was in crisis.” In recent years, the industry has witnessed the demise of H.B. Fenn and Company and Key Porter Books. House of Anansi president and publisher Sarah MacLachlan points out “the history of publishing around the world has been of publishers rising and publishers falling.” Still, “it makes it kind of lonely to be an independent Canadian [press],” she says.

“I’m horrified, it is tragic, and it’s the end of all the major players in Canadian publishing,” says Marc Côté, publisher of Thomas Allen and Cormorant Books. “When I started in the industry 25, 26 years ago, we had Clarke, Irwin, we had Deneau, we had Lester & Orpen Dennys, we had Macmillan, we had McClelland & Stewart as a Canadian-owned company, we had Key Porter Books, we had H.B. Fenn, we had Douglas & McIntyre. We don’t have any of them anymore.”

This story will be updated throughout the day.

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