TRENDINGGOP convention | Baton Rouge | Nice Attack | Blue Jays | Rio 2016 | Lotto Max

Matt Williams: Canada's book publishers are looking beyond mere survival

|
More from Special to National Post

Don Stewart, owner of MacLeod's used bookstore, talks to a customer on the phone in Vancouver on Sept. 20.

Canada's book publishers are looking beyond mere survival

Last week was a painful one for book publishing. On Monday, D&M Publishers in Vancouver filed for bankruptcy protection, laying off staff and leaving authors uncertain about their future as the company attempts a reorganization. It was a terrible blow to the industry, and if D&M does go down, this will do great harm to our culture.

Most reports about the D&M situation mention a number of other Canadian publishers who are no more, thanks to bankruptcies or financial reorganizations. The litany of vanquished publishers is now becoming familiar even to the casual observer: Stoddart Publishing, Key Porter Books, McClelland & Stewart and now perhaps D&M.

One inaccurate report in The Globe & Mail newspaper even went so far to assert that this latest news confirms the failure of the independent Canadian publishing industry.

That assertion was alarming for two reasons.

The first reason is that it is not true.

Independent publishing in this country is alive vigorous and vital. There are more than 100 active publisher members of the Association of Canadian Publishers. These publishers are doing the same thing today as they did last week, and indeed, as they will do next week — working like hell to publish books by Canadian authors and illustrators for readers across Canada and around the world. Our strength lies not in the size or the reach of any one publisher, but in the diversity and breadth of the publishers considered as a whole.

The second reason is more worrying.

The notion that the words “Canadian” and “independent” might equate, inevitably, with “failure” is scary. But what if that notion, for the casual observer, somehow becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy thanks to overly grim reporting on the troubles of individual Canadian publishers?

The truth is that it is not just Canadian independent firms that are scrambling — it’s everyone. Even as the D&M news emerged, Random House of Canada was laying off editorial staff, and from New York came word that Simon and Schuster has announced a big editorial reorganization that resulted in layoffs and the departure of senior executives. And yesterday a major merger between two of the largest trade publishers in the world — Random House and Penguin — was confirmed.

These announcements came with positive spin, yet such rationalizations and consolidations surely cannot be good news for a cultural industry whose strength comes from the variety and the diversity of the voices it gives rise to.

And that is just the news of one week.

The publishing business has undergone swift and stunning change. The shift to digital has been seismic. It has left publishers large and small, domestic and multinational, faced with a massively changed marketplace, and with far less retail space to display and market the print books that still make up, overwhelmingly, the bulk of our sales revenues and our authors’ livelihoods. E-book sales are growing in importance and are certainly an area of great future opportunity, but for the vast majority of publishers’ e-book sales are incremental to sales of print books; they have not replaced them.

Publishers have work to do to arrive at a new business model: One that accommodates printed books and e-books; one that works for all our retail partners; one that embraces libraries; one that allows us to be decent and reliable employers; one that enables us to continue to invest in our authors and their future work; one that leads to good and lasting books that enrich and strengthen our culture.

That is the story, one that is a little more positive than whether the Canadian industry is merely going to survive. We don’t come to work to survive. We come to work to publish books for readers, today and into the future.

National Post

Matt Williams is VP, publishing operations for House of Anansi Press / Groundwood Books.

Topics: , , , ,

Full Comment Videos

Post Picks

Confessor, feminist — adult: What the hell happened to shock jock Howard Stern?

Scattered among the gleefully vulgarities are now starkly intimate exchanges that have made Stern one of the most sought-after stops for stars setting the record straight

‘We’re still friends’: Tokyo Police Club’s longevity, success and bond are no mystery

'I feel like there are fewer and fewer bands that have been around as long as we have. We don’t meet too many bands that are in the position we’re in'

Jason Bourne proves why computers are the worst thing to happen to the spy thriller since no more day-to-day formalwear

'Of course the only idea of real interest the Bourne films ever had was formal rather than thematic or conceptual'

‘I’m just really in love with my girlfriend’: Kristen Stewart opens up about relationship with Alicia Cargile

'When I was dating a guy I was hiding everything that I did because everything personal felt like it was immediately trivialized, so I didn't like it'

Chris Kyle no longer: Bradley Cooper’s Democratic convention appearance irks conservatives

Some Twitter users say they plan to boycott Cooper's future films over his presence at the convention

Recent Tweets
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/matt-williams-canadas-book-publishers-are-looking-beyond-mere-survival
news.nationalpost.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2016-30
76360
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:OLYSLW77FDQLH4XTZL6ZF2KGE2RWMPAI
<urn:uuid:ed2ed878-ff2a-4aa6-97d7-2a4932b43b5b>
2016-07-29T00:17:16Z
192.0.79.32
sha1:5Q6IFEMWXXNYGJ7MDMZLIGEYRG6UBEJ2
<urn:uuid:051ea52a-5572-48c1-b41f-16150bb6cc56>
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/matt-williams-canadas-book-publishers-are-looking-beyond-mere-survival
length
response
<urn:uuid:153b7054-f8cd-4640-803f-c0878c234331>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-27-174.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2016-30
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for July 2016
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf