Wow, as a Canadian author, this is so agonizing. I've been subscribed to this newsletter for a while now and it has opened my eyes to so much in the Canadian literary industry. I have no direct comment to this piece, only sporadic thoughts I am sitting with. My immediate reaction, however, is what can we do to fix this?
Thank you for the piece, I'm looking forward to the book! One of the challenges with subsidies is that raised by NAFTA, which allowed the American government to classify books as goods and sue Canada if it subsidized their production, leading to a regime of block arts grants and arms-length distribution supports that got applied sporadically and nearly died under Chretien and Martin altogether. Our current government looks much like theirs, with an even more combative America spoiling for a trade war. Grim times for the domestic industry.
Thanks for this important piece, Ken. It seems that as publishers fight over smaller slices of the granting pie, advances to writers from Canadian publishers grow ever smaller, too. Sadly, it then becomes every Canadian writer's dream to get a non-Canadian publishing deal so they can afford to write their next book. I hope you'll delve into some solutions in Part Three.
I don't necessarily know a lot about the publishing industry, but I have also read that other industries have had that same predicament when it comes to scaling growth beyond a certain point. That support to go beyond that first level really doesn't exist. In our market, where it seems you get a lot of PE takeovers, promoting good options for businesses to scale seems like a productive idea.
Most of us in the publishing industry have been in denial about the situation. Meanwhile these failures to support publishing have led to a dismal situation where only 12% of the books Canadians read are written by Canadians. In 2005, that percentage was 27, so there’s been a drop of over 50 percent in the readership of Canadian books in the last 20 years. At the same time, our 43 creative writing programs at our colleges and universities continue to pump out graduates, whose books have as a little chance of finding readers as the milk maid has in the fairytale of marrying the prince. The only way these graduates can survive is to take a teaching job in one of these creative writing programs, creating a literary circle jerk. It doesn’t matter how many mentoring programs we sponsor or how many grants we hand out or how many prizes we give to Canadian writers, if we don’t fix our book market the readership of Canadian books will continue to decline.
Even in television and (especially) in movies, we have long learned you cannot force English Canadians to support Canadian culture. Ever. Even in this day and age.
The book numbers are sad but unsurprising. Though it would be nice if the rules helped out. So, my question becomes: if that ship has sailed, what's next? Are there solutions?
Wow, as a Canadian author, this is so agonizing. I've been subscribed to this newsletter for a while now and it has opened my eyes to so much in the Canadian literary industry. I have no direct comment to this piece, only sporadic thoughts I am sitting with. My immediate reaction, however, is what can we do to fix this?
The graph is eye-opening. Thank you.
Thank you for the piece, I'm looking forward to the book! One of the challenges with subsidies is that raised by NAFTA, which allowed the American government to classify books as goods and sue Canada if it subsidized their production, leading to a regime of block arts grants and arms-length distribution supports that got applied sporadically and nearly died under Chretien and Martin altogether. Our current government looks much like theirs, with an even more combative America spoiling for a trade war. Grim times for the domestic industry.
Thanks for this important piece, Ken. It seems that as publishers fight over smaller slices of the granting pie, advances to writers from Canadian publishers grow ever smaller, too. Sadly, it then becomes every Canadian writer's dream to get a non-Canadian publishing deal so they can afford to write their next book. I hope you'll delve into some solutions in Part Three.
I don't necessarily know a lot about the publishing industry, but I have also read that other industries have had that same predicament when it comes to scaling growth beyond a certain point. That support to go beyond that first level really doesn't exist. In our market, where it seems you get a lot of PE takeovers, promoting good options for businesses to scale seems like a productive idea.
Most of us in the publishing industry have been in denial about the situation. Meanwhile these failures to support publishing have led to a dismal situation where only 12% of the books Canadians read are written by Canadians. In 2005, that percentage was 27, so there’s been a drop of over 50 percent in the readership of Canadian books in the last 20 years. At the same time, our 43 creative writing programs at our colleges and universities continue to pump out graduates, whose books have as a little chance of finding readers as the milk maid has in the fairytale of marrying the prince. The only way these graduates can survive is to take a teaching job in one of these creative writing programs, creating a literary circle jerk. It doesn’t matter how many mentoring programs we sponsor or how many grants we hand out or how many prizes we give to Canadian writers, if we don’t fix our book market the readership of Canadian books will continue to decline.
Even in television and (especially) in movies, we have long learned you cannot force English Canadians to support Canadian culture. Ever. Even in this day and age.
The book numbers are sad but unsurprising. Though it would be nice if the rules helped out. So, my question becomes: if that ship has sailed, what's next? Are there solutions?