Please sir, can I have some more?
Blacklock’s- Hard Times Hit Book Trade
Canadian book publishers face hard times without ongoing federal aid, says a Department of Canadian Heritage report. The industry is short of money for long term investments despite 46 years of subsidies, it said.
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Where is Canada’s Donald Trump?
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Ahem, it’s Mr Wonderful and he’s in the USA.
Maybe if they had a product that people wanted to pay for, instead of government approved literature, they wouldn’t need subsidies.
Of course, it’s easier to take the government money.
Ever notice how many of the books you read are printed in China?
Heh, the micropublishing business I run is doing fine, thank you very much, and we’ve never taken a cent in subsidies. The problem with the big publishing businesses is that they think they’re still in the 1960s, not 2020s.
Nobody with half a brain or greater wants to read Canada’s full-blown,non-stop,left-wing pablum.
Just wait until Carney requires all Canadian content. Same with the CRTC: all Canadian content (to save the country, doncha know, not to control the message). Waiting for Liberal controlled CBC to eschew all American programming (Carney will double their grant, as requested). Private industry had better do the same, if they know what’s good for them.
A few months ago, I came across the Cancon regulations, as inflicted upon us during PET’s “benevolent” reign. Going through them, I got the impression that they made the apartheid-era race laws in South Africa look reasonable and logical in comparison. Most people have absolutely no idea of the conditions under which all sorts of rubbish could qualify as “Canadian” content, or, for that matter, legitimate material could be rejected for not being sufficiently “Canadian”.
I suspect that Mark the Magnificent will make them even worse. Be prepared for a lot of hack performers making dreadful cover versions of your favourite songs, not to mention being deluged by horribly bad movies and TV shows made purely to qualify as tax write-offs.
If the music industry is any indicator, the big publishers will be putting out nothing but AI slop soon enough.
I walk through the local chapters/indigo multiple times a week in the winter because I use their big shopping mall to walk indoors.
The Canadian stuff there is relentless left wing propaganda drivel, woke nonsense to the max
If the publishers want to publish that shit, let them die, same for the book stores.
Used to read tons of books, then the internet was invented. Books are obsolete technology.
I switched to kindle and a tablet years ago, then switched back.
I like to skip back in a book and finding a place I only sort of remember where I read what I want to re-read is easier, for me, with a book.
Plus I like to wander into the local used book store, or the little free libraries and pick up stuff that’s well out of my normal likes and appetite.
The ability to skip back pages easily is also very handy in computer, math and physics textbooks. Some e-reader software has a pretty good bookmarking system, like Read Era, but that’s a whole other skillset.
despite 46 years of subsidies, it said.
That would be:
Because of 46 years of subsidies, right?!
Bingo!
Ohhhhhhhhhhh mommmaaaaaaaa … Canada needs to study and emulate the American literary and book selling business. Here in America … Obama’s book revenues have financed multiple $20M mansions, Townhouses, and Estates not to mention a .001% lifestyle of the rich and famous. Not to mention HER book “sales” that have made HER a hundred millionaire.
L- There two new book stores, where I live. They used to have a few guy type books and a few
that would question the narrative but not overtly challenge it. The vast majority stocked are
female oriented novels, biographies and under the oppressed category. During Covid their main customer customer base being of that gender that is, on average, higher in the negative emotion(neuroticism, one of the Big Five traits). They being more afraid of other humans, avoided the store, who stopped their weekend evening live music for the restaurant, too.
They heavily enforced masking, too.
Post-Covid Lockdowns, they didn’t recover their in store customer base, nor their open friendly
ambience. Though a large restaurant a block away made sure to do so and recovered. Also, their selection narrowed, not even one copy of Scott Adam’s latest “Reframe Your Brain” is to
be found. Odd for a bookstore that stocks a lot of “self-help” books.
Jordan Peterson’s 2 volumes of 12 Rules for Life have sold around 11 million copies. The most famous and best selling Canadian author in Canadian history. Yet neither store has ever had a prominent display promoting his books. A few copies are kept in out of the way shelves.
Of course, his self-help advice has been remarkably effective. Especially so for the young men
driven to despair by the war on “toxic masculinity”.
Now learning that for the last few years, they’ve been kept afloat by Trudeau gov’t. subsidies;
that explains why they avoided stocking any books critical of the COVID-19 Lockdowns/Mandates.
Too bad, So sad. Ignoring half your potential customers has a long term price. I’m old enough to remember when bookstores stocked tales of heroic masculine adventure and the latest books of controversy. Ironically, it was the demand for the writings of the most controversial
writer of his day, Martin Luther, that made printing presses profitable and bookstores possible.
The Handmaid’s Tale has only sold 8 million copies. I thought it would have been more than Peterson’s book but there you go.
7 million of that was probably to schools and universities for their CanConJob
Yes, almost all of Atwood’s sales of Handmaid’s Tale are from school sales. Rather remarkable for a book of no literary merit that has no claim to a place on the curriculum. But the NDP looks after its own.
Day dreamers are always looking for someone to support their day dreaming.
Years ago, standing room only to watch Mark Steyn be interviewed by Heather Reisman in her flagship Indigo store and couldn’t believe how stunned she was. The crowd groaned at her dumb questions more than a few times.
She didn’t have a featured place for his book and didn’t even know her store had sold out of it (America Alone) and had to tell her assistant to order more during the interview after being politely heckled.
One day I walked in to an Indigos just for shits and giggles…killing time really, waiting for the wife.
Immediately what one sees is “Heather’s picks” and if that isn’t enough the shelves are chock full of leftwing drivel and Margaret Atwood’s books up the wazoo.
No doubt the management of these companies are on low wages, you know, because they are subsidised businesses.
” The industry is short of money for long term investments despite 46 years of subsidies, it said.”
They still don’t get it, do they? Let me fix it for them.
The industry is short of money for long term investments because of 46 years of subsidies.
The cost of printing all those extra “u’s” is obviously crushing.
Lol.
Tariff me harder, Daddy.
Subsidies, grants, and forgivable loans. Everything and everyone sucks the lifeblood of the economy: grocery billionaires, hop-growers, micro-breweries, book publishers, tranny circle-jerks, auto manufacturers, etc etc. Ai-yai-yai-ai-yai! No wonder we’re in the shape we’re in.
Canada: old Piegan word meaning “land of ticks”.
Yeah, don’t get me started. You’ll not get a fiction novel published in Canada unless you A)- bring a grant to the table, and the only grants are for authors writing from the perspective of any one of the dozen or so recognized oppressed minorities (native, LGBTQLMNOP, female, French speaker in a non-French region, non-native visible minority, etc) or B)- are a recognized Canadian celebrity looking to capitalize on name recognition (Beverley McClachlin, Chris Hadfield). There are NO other avenues to publishing a novel as a Canadian writer.
Baen is OK for SF and Fantasy.
Psst, some of us have set up on our own. I’ve published 31 novels under my own imprint and make more than enough money to fly 1st class wherever I want to go.
Thank you, Bill. Everything you said here is 100% true.
Economically, this is how it shakes out: a Best Seller in Canada is 5000 copies. That’s a blockbuster. That’s what you get with publisher push and the full support of all the bookstores. Meaning Chapters puts your book on an endcap for months. But nobody gets publisher support these days, and nobody gets an endcap. It just doesn’t happen.
The author gets a buck a copy. Yes friends, writing a Best Seller!!!! in Canada means you get five grand from the sales of the book.
And that is why nobody gets published (or even starts writing) without a Canada Council grant or similar. Sometimes two or three grants, because even a starving author isn’t going to get out of bed in the morning for 20K per year.
However.
There is another way. You IGNORE the publishing industry and put your book up for sale on Amazon. That’s what I’ve done. I have three Science Fiction books for sale right now, plus a novella and a short story. I’m not in Best Seller!!! territory yet (nor do I expect this) but I have sold some books, and I made more than a buck each.
Also, of late the general sales of new Dead Tree paperbacks is on the order of a couple thousand copies per title. Numbers like that are considered a success. Measured on that scale, I’m not doing so bad.
I’d have been quite happy to sell in bookstores, but ZERO publishers would even bother to return an e-mail to me, so I did it myself. All the rest of you out there can do it too. At no cost, I might add.
Anybody wants to see what The Phantom has been up to, just click through to my blog.
Phantom- Yeah. I publish on Amazon. It works pretty good.
obviously they were former recipients of USAID?
heard the same the about cana_da tv/print media ….
asking for a friend
I was saying this on another thread. If you look at the raw sales numbers for publishing, they sell ~$141 billion a year world-wide. US-AID easily moved enough money to swing the bottom line of world-wide publishing. For N. America and Europe, they had enough money to dictate terms to the publishers.
That’s why every fiction book in the last 15 years has had some form of gay/trans themes and characters in it somewhere. And that’s why Disney doesn’t care if their big blockbuster movies like The Marvels bomb like a B-52. Their profit doesn’t come from movie tickets, it comes from US-AID.
ADecades ago (1970s to early 80s) I was head of Marketing & Sales for Canada’s only successful, highly profitable international publisher . . . . Harlequin Romances. We sold hundreds of millions of paperbacks per year in a dozen languages, and were of course mocked relentlessly by Canadian snobs for being “bubblegum for the female brain”. Several years ago Torstar (desperate for cash) sold Harlequin – their only money maker – to a large U.S. publisher. Social media has since replaced Harlequin as this generation’s “bubblegum for the female brain.” Other than Harlequin no Canadian publisher has ever been consistently profitable. Best regards,
Dave Sanderson
Venice, Florida (winters) & Perth, Ontario (summers)
Very cool comments!
publish or parish
To be more accurate > sell what you publish, or perish.