Not content to just incite riotous outrage amongst nearly all my regular readers [ed. all 5 of them?] for killing poetry, I thought why rest there? Why not lets take on another beloved media: Fiction. Can we kill off poetry and fiction in just one week’s work?
This time I went straight to the experts. Exclusive! My one question interview with the lovely and sage Grace O’Connell, rising star at one of Canada’s more eminent publishing houses (who shall remain unnamed). What bleak hope is there for the humble novel in the hyper saturated media market in contending for your average consumer’s attention?
My guess was that things don’t look good for the Great Canadian Novel, at least under any of the traditional models of business and distribution.
But, you know, sometimes I just make these things up, let’s ask Grace…
Q: So what is the deal with book publishing these days? Is book consumption suffering from competition from other media, the internet, better tv-on-demand and everything else? are some types of books suffering more than others?
yes, books suffer from competition from other media. apparently, according to surveys done by various institutions, american reading levels are going down, especially among the youngest age groups, whereas canadian reading and book buying trends are fairly steady – still, people have only x hours of leisure time and if they spend it shopping online, then ergo, they didn’t spend it reading. Also, publishers will never be able to match the advertising budgets of many other media outlets. Of course the importance of that depends on what you think the importance of traditional advertising really is.
general trends right now are leaning toward trade non -fiction (which basically just means very readable non fiction instead of dry…think Malcolm Gladwell) and memoir – in other words, people want to read “true” things, they want to be behind the scenes and get the inside scoop. Political insider type books always sell well. Maybe it’s a spin-off of the reality television thing, but fiction has been suffering a bit in recent years as far as i understand. apparently canadian fiction went through a huge vogue in the nineties that has sort of dropped off now. The trend now apparently is fewer fiction books from new writers and paying more for fiction books from established writers. This of course creates a succession problem, because who is going to write the big canadian novels when the atwoods and mistrys and ondaatjes and urqharts retire/die? (not to be morbid). Apparently now is one of the worst times in the last few decades for new canadian writers to try breaking into novels, with obvious exceptions. Of course, this is also dependent on perception.
canadian publishing is always pretty precarious and ebbs and flows depending mostly on gov’t grants. i heard everyone was nervous about the new gov’t but it has turned out to be fairly favourable. obviously the seventies were a great time, where grants were being handed out like candy and most of the canadian houses were founded (many ended up going bankrupt but some important houses like Coach house, Brick Books and Anansi are still around). a big problem for publishers is distribution; our population is so very small considering the territory we have to cover. maybe if e-books ever really take off this problem will be solved. the biggest problem facing the industry though is one that will likely never go away: returns. Bookstores buy whatever stock they want and then whatever doesn’t sell is returned to the publisher for a refund. Publishers only get money for books that reach the consumer, even if Chapters wants to buy thirty copies to line their walls, they can return 29 and only have to pay for the one – at a huge discount. Chapters of course is a whole other kettle of fish – that was worse before Heather Reisman took over, but it’s still not great.
Another problem is production costs – it is expensive to print in Canada but slow to print overseas. Kid’s books have the worst of it, because they are illustrated (expensive to print) but there’s a lot of pressure to keep the cover price down, and they have to be really well made so that the little brats don’t pull them apart. Also, since the Canadian marketplace is flooded with American books, Canadian publishers have to match American list prices (this goes for adult books as well). If an American publisher prints 50,000 copies of a book and a Canadian publisher prints 5,000 of a comparable title, the production cost is far less for the American publisher; however, the Canadian is stuck selling for the same price, otherwise they will lose customers.
Back to those surveys about Canadian reading and book buying, I think the numbers may have been a little inflated – a huge portion of the population claimed to spend about an hour everyday reading, which seems unrealistic.
Things like musician’s biographies and books by celebrities always sell well. Cookbooks are steady sellers and considered safe investments. Most trade houses supplement their money-losing fiction programs with business books, wine guides, cookbooks, or computer books, etc. Many novelists don’t even earn out their advances – at that point publishers scramble to make up the loss on international and subsidaries rights. Not that novelists make much! And poetry…shudder….some of the best poets in the country get less than $5,000 for an advance.
Okay. That’s a big rant off the top of my head, but I will try to answer your questions more specifically later. Sorry for the novel! (no pun intended)
Thanks Grace!
so, what you think, how do we save fiction?
I could think of a few suggestions, but rather I’ll leave the last words to yet another soul far wiser than me:
“Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.” (Groucho Marx)