About five years ago, give or take a
few months, all the employees of the publisher I worked for gathered
in the office of our fearless leader and popped champagne at 10 A.M.
We were celebrating the wild success of a book we had recently
released. The book had sold tens of thousands of copies in its first
three weeks and that morning had simultaneously hit the number one
spot on four bestseller lists. There were toasts, photos, a couple of
articles about our success on trade websites. We looked out, proud
chested, through the windows of our penthouse-floor offices onto
Yonge street. And we felt good.
Three years later, that office was closed and that company ceased to exist.
To be fair, day-to-day we weren't anywhere near as flashy as
this initial paragraph makes us out to be. We scrimped and penny
pinched, as all publishers do. We held rather successful book
launches on budgets of $200. We carpooled to sales conferences and
considered every expenditure carefully. I worked in the
publicity/marketing department, arguably the place where the most
non-essential spending takes place at a publishing house, and I know
we did our best not to tip the scales. And yet . . .
I've come to believe that, for all the
unique and specific reasons behind that particular collapse, the key
to keeping Canadian publishing vibrant and alive is to think small.
Really small. There have been nothing but bad news stories for our
mid-sized publishers lately it seems (with a few exceptions), and
yet, the really little guys appear to be getting more visibility on
awards shortlists and proving more adept at adapting to the
near chameleon levels of industry changeability.
At a time when brick-and mortar
bookstores are increasingly either closing their doors or devoting more floors space to things that aren't books, is not industry is telling us that
publishers need to fundamentally change their working environments as
well? The industry isn't changing, it has changed.
Two months before the collapse of the
company mentioned above, I took a job at a little publisher most
people had never heard of and went to work in the basement home
office of one of its owners. I didn't work a full, 40-hour work week,
I was responsible for more aspects of the business than any one
person had ever been at my previous jobs, and most of our staff
meetings were held over Skype. And yet I did, and still do, feel more
secure, fulfilled, and excited about publishing than I ever did in
the penthouse days.
There's a freedom that comes with working in small
press publishing. Small presses aren't as afraid of taking risks with
what they publish because they keep print runs low and overhead down.
They have a community of independent booksellers, both brick-and
mortar and online, that support and acknowledge the fact that they
are able to try things that the bigger presses are perhaps too
overburdened to take the chance on. Would my own first book have made
the cut if my publisher were solely interested in selling enough
copies to to make it onto a bestseller list? I'm not sure. There
generally isn't a lot of room for new voices or perspectives on those
kinds of lists.
Multinationals (and soon
mega-Godzilla-super-Heman-multinationals) will always take up a large
chunk of our book market, and they do provide us with some of the
most amazing Canadian literary talent we have. But perhaps we need to start rethinking what an independent press in Canada
looks like, and stop buying into the myth that small equals
insignificant.
I can't give you statistics or Booknet
numbers to back up this theory of mine. It's just a gut thing. A
little spidey-sense that the overall publishing tide is turning in
favour of a lean, mean, streamlined publishing model lead by small,
focused presses with fewer in-house staff and a thriving pool of
freelancers. If I am right, there will be problems. We can't continue
to churn out hundreds of publishing grads each year, promising them a
life of literary bliss, if the number of jobs continues to decrease.
Growing (or shrinking?) pains are inevitable. And there's always the
chance that I'm dead wrong, that's been known to happen. Time will
tell. But in the meantime, read independently, read happily, and above
all read a lot.