The policy prioritization of cultural industries in the s coincided with a movement now commonly called neo-liberalism that has de-emphasized Keynesian liberal doctrines for the sake of more classical liberal methods, such as the deregulation of markets and the adjustment of the role of state governments to that of enabler of a flexible system of regulation for the optimized flow of market forces. In the context of Canadian literary production, it has moreover found expression, as interviewees have repeatedly pointed out to me, in a stagnant, and in the case of Alberta see also David Whitson et al.
The space of national literature has become noticeably commercialized in this neo-liberal climate, which, coupled with technological developments that have vastly diversified the cultural entertainment and publishing landscapes, has made it more difficult for small- and mid-sized publishers to compete for readers and expand market reach.
It has made it more difficult for publishers such as Thistledown, Turnstone, and Coteau, which over the s grew from small-scale cottage industries into mid-scale professional businesses, to continue inhabiting the idea of a market- and reach-based space of grassroots national literature; producing that space seems to have brought unanticipated consequences and constrained those i. Interviews with small, emerging publishers also indicate that it may be easier overall for them to get the funding support they need than it is for their larger, established counterparts.
The reality is actually quite the opposite. When we received an Emerging Publisher Grant from the Canada Council, the diversity, quality, and innovative nature of our list were cited as the main reasons that we received the grant. Alberta has seen significant cutbacks in provincial funding for publishers since the s that has led to a draining away of its mid-sized publishing companies.
While it is impossible to discuss these funding issues in more detail within the scope of this paper and to draw definite conclusions, the interviews I conducted suggest that federal and provincial support for emerging publishers as start-up cultural businesses is more sustained than support for established publishing businesses.
A theme supported by all interviewees is that the literary community in Canada has expanded tremendously since the s and even s. Adding to this, technological developments since the s and s a period during which the rise of small presses was itself enabled, in part, by technological developments such as cheaper printing methods have made publishing much more broadly accessible.
For instance, Alice Major and Paul Wilson told me that it was technological developments — and especially the introduction of the laser printer and the comprehensive application of the computer in the publishing process — that enabled their respective publishing ventures, Rowan Books established in , no longer operative and Hagios Press established in , still operative.
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More accessible computing and printing technologies have also given a boost to self-publishing, which has been on the rise in the last ten years and has further democratized the publishing process and increased title output. While several of the interviewees addressing this phenomenon emphasized that self-published titles frequently consist of local e. All of the booksellers I interviewed 9 stock self-published titles on consignment, and several of them pointed out that, due to improvements in digital print quality, self-published titles often look as professional as traditionally published books i.
Even though there are no conclusive studies showing that Canadians today are reading less, or that the reading public for literary titles is diminishing in Canada, 10 books now compete with more entertainment choices than ever before, including the Internet, iPods, mobile phones, BlackBerries, DVDs, video games, and satellite TV. Books were a major source of entertainment along with movies, and both have lost ground overall. Many interviewees concur with Gerrard that since the late s CBC television and radio coverage of books has dropped, especially for small Canadian presses, and so has the attention given to books in print-review venues.
Media concentration, and the resultant rationalization of operations, has resulted in a system in which books are often reviewed once only per newspaper chain, with the different newspapers that make up the chain sharing these reviews rather than assigning their own.
Exposure and contrasting opinions are diminished in this system, and fewer books are being reviewed in print venues overall. I will backtrack to contextualize how these developments have affected the way books are being distributed and sold in English Canada today. The market share of the chains, Brisson records, increased from fourteen percent in to forty-three percent by Vital Links emphasized the importance of the independent bookstore to the public exposure and promotion of Canadian books on a nationwide scale.
Whereas the coexistence of mall outlets and independents could still work on that level of distinction and on the basis that chain outlets were mostly located in suburban malls and independents in downtown areas, in the s the introduction of the chain superstore changed this landscape. Publishers repeatedly pointed out that even though Coles and W. For Freehand Books, this concerted effort has materialized in a productive way.
On average, mass-market retailers are not accessible to, or viable for, small- and mid-sized presses. Not only do these presses often not publish the kinds of fast-selling frontlist titles that the retailers rely on, investing in the mass production of a title that might not sell through in the short span given to it in a mass-market retailing chain is financially risky for a press that operates on small margins. A person working in the movie industry in California picked it up while on vacation, liked it, spread the word, and American sales started going up.
My interviews with publishers indicate that online book sales have gained in importance while for now remaining small , and so has online marketing. The Internet promises new opportunities for both niche and large-scale exposure and distribution for literature as material and lived space reaching across and beyond the territorial expanse called Canada. All of the publishers I interviewed see list in bibliography have their own websites, which they use to market their books, and several of these publisher websites have a direct online order option.
The Saskatchewan Publishers Group, too, runs an online bookstore with a direct order option for all member titles. For instance, only a few of the publishers ran blogs on their websites or had interlinked their sites with other websites such as Facebook or Flickr, with author blogs, or with digital media such as podcasts and tweets.
Frontenac House was the only publisher on YouTube and with a blip. Nor does it provide an effective climate for selling Canadian books in the United States.
British Journal of Canadian Studies
You also have to pay for shipping it to them, so, at the end of the day. Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More , that on Amazon, blockbusters and other books compete on even footing in a market of multitudes. There are, of course, alternative providers such as Northwest Passages, an online retailer established in and specializing in Canadian fiction, poetry, drama, and literary criticism. In light of the geographic challenges of distribution in Canada — and especially in the Prairie provinces where distribution costs are higher than they are in southern Ontario — I pursued the question of whether digital technologies such as print on demand and electronic publishing can create efficiencies in the supply chain, with the supply chain being a crucial component of the physical space of Canadian-national literature.
To date, this press has offered three of its non-literary titles as free digital downloads. In our interview conversation, publisher Jerome Martin mentioned that his freely downloadable title Capucchino U , a text that explores the potential of digitization for educational publishing, has had hits from various parts of Canada and the world and has made money for Spotted Cow Press in the sense that Martin has been hired to give presentations and to do consultancy work. While most other Spotted Cow Press titles, including the literary titles, are available as e-books, also they are for-sale e-books, on offer alongside the traditional print format and do not sell as well as the print books, in spite of being cheaper than the print versions.
Of the publishers I interviewed between and , Spotted Cow Press was the only one that had started experimenting with print on demand in the publication of frontlist titles print on demand is currently used by a number of the publishers to keep almost out-of-print backlist titles in print. We may read the operations of Spotted Cow Press as a microcosm of how electronic technologies are creating new spaces of writing, publishing, and distribution in Canada — and of the book itself — and of how the space of national literature in Canada will continue changing along with the role of — and the relations between — the literary text, the publisher, the bookseller, the author, the distributor, the reader, and the cultural funder.
In the cultural industry of book publishing, multinational publishing conglomerates — whose subsidiaries in English Canada are concentrated in Toronto — have accumulated more powerful, pervasive global connections than independent publishers, which in English Canada are spread out over all provinces.
The interviews I have discussed in this paper speak to the reconstituted spatial realities independent book industry players in Canada face as they operate within the larger structural confines of a neo-liberalized and globalized mode of capitalism — which for them concretely materialize in processes of consolidation in traditional media and bookselling channels; simultaneous concentration and fragmentation of global and national markets; diversification in publishing and entertainment; change from a print-technology-anchored society into an electronic-technology-anchored society; spatial reconstitution of literary community; and attenuation in cultural objectives in policy and funding.
Having their own dynamics in the specific spatial contexts of my study, these processes reflect major challenges shared by book industry players in many countries around the world with developed book industries for comparisons, see Greco et al. Moreover, they reflect larger societal and market trends of which they are an integral part. As cultural businesses not primarily driven by the profit motive, the independent publishers and booksellers I interviewed give evidence that contemporary cultural markets are made up of diverse economic forms rather than constituting one singular neo-liberal-capitalist economy.
They do so, however, in their embeddedness in specific multi-scalar networks of capitalist, neo-liberal market activity and in a market-reach- and reputation-based stratification of literary power descending from international to national, regional, provincial, and local.
Smaro Kamboureli » Producing Canadian Literature Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace ()
To give an example, in conversations with the Metis publishers Gabriel Dumont Institute and Pemmican Publications, interviewees described their operations and titles as contributing to Canadian culture and literature — as operations and titles that make heard the voices of the Metis, a founding people of Canada — without equating this contribution to national-territorial market reach.
Indeed, as community-based publishers, Gabriel Dumont Institute and Pemmican promote and sell most of their literary and non-literary titles locally to people in the Metis community, to schools, and to libraries. Tying into this is a comment Edmonton poet Alice Major made in interview: Neither does it deny that wide distribution and exposure play a role in the creation of a shared sense of national literature, or that a literary title widely distributed and talked about across Canada will influence what people think of as national literature.
Still, the space of national literature is more than that. It is, as this paper illustrates, a socio-cultural and historical space and, as such, multiple, multi-scalar, and subject to contestation and change.
Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (Electronic book text)
Situated however tenuously within a market- and consumer-driven cultural, political, and economic landscape conceptually shaped by localism and globalism more than by the kind of nationalism that ran high in the s, the space of Canadian national literature today is simultaneously centralized and decentralized rather than eroded ; it is produced and reproduced at the intersection of a variety of shifting local, regional, national, and global forces. Andrews, Jennifer, and John Clement Ball, eds. Canadian Literature and the Business of Publishing. Minister of Supply and Services, April Federal Cultural Policy Review Committee.
Minister of Supply and Services, A Provincial Government Perspective. Cope, Bill, and Angus Phillips, eds. The Future of the Book in the Digital Age. U of Toronto P, Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization.
Producing Canadian Literature Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace
Wilfrid Laurier UP, Cultural Policy under Siege. Gattinger, Monica, and Diane Saint-Pierre. Gerson, Carole, and Jacques Michon, eds. History of the Book in Canada: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing in the 21 st Century. When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing. Lorna Crozier and Gary Hyland. Neoliberalism and Cultural Policy Approaches. Kamboureli, Smaro, and Roy Miki, eds. Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature.
The Production of Space. Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing, Book Publishing in Canada, Melanie Little, Editor, Freehand Books. The Literary History of Alberta: From the End of the War to the End of the Century. U of Alberta P, Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption. U of Chicago P, Murray, Catherine, and Jan Marontate. Perspectives from Two Coasts. The Beginning of the Book Trade in Canada. Elements for a Theorization. Focusing directly on writers rather than on publishing houses or readers allows the gathering of insightful and perceptive descriptions of how political economy affects writing, as well as how they see their position within its overall framework of power.
The range of writers interviewed is impressive: Issues covered include the impact of funding on writers; the effect of agents, editors and publishers when creating novels; the process of selling novels in Canada and abroad; and the effect of literary awards on subsequent novels. The biggest strengths and the biggest weakness of Producing Canadian Literature are related to its short, semi-structured interviewing style.
The relatively short interviews force a corresponding economy of words which helps keep a sharp focus on the issues under discussion. By having a similar set of questions for each of the interviewees, Dobson and Kamboureli are offering the opportunity to compare the wide range of experiences which the writers have with funding bodies particularly Canada Council and other cultural institutions as well as individuals involved in the writing process.
However, the interviews are best when they wander slightly from the prescribed list of questions. However, the disadvantage of the interview approach used in Producing Canada is that responses like this are not able to be probed even further as they would be in longer interviews nor are they discussed. The interviews were conducted between and preceding the recent fast growth in online self-publishing and e-books which one suspects would make for [End Page ] a substantially altered political economy analysis.
Notwithstanding these limitations, Producing Canada will be of interest to those interested in how the Canadian literary marketplace works and is an excellent, original contribution to the field. If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution that supports Shibboleth authentication or have your own login and password to Project MUSE, click 'Authenticate'.
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