Independent book publishers in Canada like Flying Books, which also has a Toronto store, face a much more difficult landscape today than they did in decades past.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Depending on your age and literary proclivity, you’ve probably either heard of Dennis Lee because of his blockbuster 1974 book of children’s poetry Alligator Pie, or for the fact he co-founded House of Anansi Press seven years earlier. Lee was already a poet by then, and, of course, that was the point of launching the press: He could put new work into the world.
Back then, empowered by a surge in cultural nationalism and what now seem like absurdly low overhead costs, writers were starting presses. If not for themselves, then to give soapboxes to the writers they loved.
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Those writers, Lee says, “were suddenly crawling out of the woodwork in numbers that were unprecedented in Canada.” Yet he found that the bigger publishing houses, especially the multinationals, either deemed the new generation of authors unsellable, or were so focused on textbooks that they didn’t care for trade books in the first place.
And so Anansi put out some of the earliest works by writers now considered cornerstones of Cancon: Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Al Purdy, Marian Engel and many, many more. As these voices spread across the country’s bookshelves, they encouraged a wave of both discussion and competition. When, in 1974, Jack David co-founded the literary journal Essays on Canadian Writing, which would morph into ECW Press, he was trying to elbow his way into the zeitgeist.
“There really was a literature, compared to five years earlier, that needed to be examined,” David says.
Michael Ondaatje, left, and Margaret Atwood in 2007. House of Anansi Press published some of these now-celebrated authors’ early works.Tom Sandler/The Globe and Mail
The decade straddling the year 1970 was a profoundly opportune moment for Canadian companies putting Canadian stories into the world. The result has been a recent barrage of 50th-anniversary celebrations. The exhaustive list includes not just Toronto’s Anansi and ECW, but Douglas & McIntyre in B.C.; Saskatoon’s Thistledown Press; Brick Books in Kingston; Montreal’s Véhicule Press; and Breakwater Books in St. John’s. Children’s publisher Annick Press, home to seminal works by Robert Munsch and Michael Martchenko, just hit 50. (Coach House Books, it so happens, threw a 60th-anniversary bash in September.)
Yet there have been noticeably fewer 40th or 30th anniversaries – let alone 20th or 10th. Smaller anglo presses have emerged this century, with a few becoming household-ish names – among them Invisible Publishing, Sutherland House Books, Biblioasis and Book*hug – but rising costs, sluggish public funding and the dominance of multinationals have made life much harder for ambitious would-be publishers.
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At the same time, Canadians are experiencing a wave of pride and cultural nationalism in ways not seen since the surge of 50 years ago. In a recent survey of 1,500 Canadians, the Canadian Media Producers Association and Pollara found that 87 per cent agreed that it’s “more important than ever to defend Canadian culture.” Book-industry non-profit BookNet has been studying how the “buy Canadian” movement has affected the market for titles by domestic authors; the trendline, though a bit uneven, very gradually rose from January to August.
“I think we owe Trump a note of appreciation” for kick-starting this surge in Canadian cultural pride, says Scott McIntyre, co-founder of Douglas & McIntyre, who just published a memoir about his career with ECW titled A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing.
The odds, economically speaking, are against new players in publishing. But that doesn’t mean the keenest, if not the bravest, can’t take lessons from the past. “Canada believed in itself in the seventies,” McIntyre says. “We need to get back there. And stories are the great motivating factor.”
Canada’s book industry has become more consolidated for both sellers and publishers.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Just about everyone in the indie-press world is trying to figure out what could help Canada re-establish, or at least approach, the conditions that helped the last explosion of domestic publishing.
Roy MacSkimming, an industry veteran whose book The Perilous Trade: Book Publishing in Canada 1946 – 2006 details a rollicking history of the industry, sees the 1967 centennial as a turning point for Canadian stories. McClelland & Stewart was already leading the way in adventurous publishing under its ambitious leader Jack McClelland, who set a tone for others to meet the moment.
“Canada was a country that was really beginning to feel its muscle,” he says. “An event like Expo 67, it was one of a kind. It was a sui generis event in which Canadians felt like they’d suddenly stepped onto the world stage.”
There were writers. There was pride. Ambition. And there was an explosion of funding available from governments – backed by the urgency that Canadian storytelling needed to be protected. In quick succession in 1970, Ryerson Press and W.J. Gage sold their publishing operations to American interests. The Ontario government launched the Royal Commission on Book Publishing in response – its urgency augmented months later when McClelland & Stewart was put up for sale.
This was the era that birthed Cancon, with Ottawa forcing broadcasters to air quotas of homegrown programming, and literature soon stood to benefit. Once the royal commission wrapped, Ontario gave M&S an emergency loan, set up a loan-guarantee program for publishers and had the Ontario Arts Council begin issuing block grants for literary books. Ottawa followed suit with a major boost to the Canada Council for the Art’s own publishing supports, including $1.2-million for key grants, MacSkimming found. Then, in 1979, the feds established what’s now known as the Canada Book Fund.
Anna Porter founded Key Porter Books in 1979. It ceased operations in 2011.Doug Forster/Supplied
Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Federal funding helped build a national canon that wasn’t limited to, say, Toronto or Montreal, says Rebecca Rose, the publisher of Breakwater in St. John’s and daughter of its co-founder Clyde Rose.
And it soon became sustainable to publish art for art’s sake.
“We often talk about how being a poetry-only publisher is an absurd venture, because poetry doesn’t really reside well in a capitalist economy,” says Alayna Munce, Brick Books’ publisher. “The only way it has been possible is through the support of granting bodies.”
Anna Porter, who rose through the ranks of M&S and later established Key Porter Books, recalls shipping as many as 37,000 copies of Allan Fotheringham’s 1982 Malice in Blunderland, or How the Grits Stole Christmas in its first week. “Talking about those numbers with people in the book business today, they’re amazed at the figures,” she says.
The next few decades were not so kind to domestic publishing. Independent bookstores were elbowed out by the rise of Chapters, then Indigo, then Amazon, centralizing the industry’s buyers in institutions with an ever-greater focus on profitability. Multinational publishers stepped into the country with greater force, consolidating the market and absorbing Canadian institutions such as M&S, now owned by Penguin Random House Canada.
The domestic wings of the multinationals, of course, have dedicated publishing lines with Canadian editors dedicated to signing Canadian authors (including this reporter, with Random House Canada). In fact, one of the highest-profile titles to directly address the moment is coming from the now-multinational-owned M&S: an anthology of essays called Elbows Up! Canadian Voices of Resilience and Resistance, released Oct. 14. Its inspiration is 1968’s The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S., edited by Purdy and put out by Edmonton’s Hurtig Publishers – a now-defunct independent.
The market for these books is small, and multinationals have cornered it. BookNet has found that fewer than a third of Canadians sought out books by or about Canadians last year. At the same time, independent presses accounted for just 5.3 per cent of English trade-book sales in the country.
It’s not that there’s a dearth of independents. According to the Canada Book Fund, there are three times as many domestically owned publishers now than in 1979. But newer presses’ access to the market, along with their likelihood of surviving, has been diminished over the decades.
Richard Stursberg, a former CBC executive vice-president and past assistant deputy minister for culture and broadcasting, is about to publish a book with Sutherland House with ideas to fix the sector. But he’s also keen on generating sales in this rough environment: In an interview, he declined to let this newspaper scoop his proposals.
A shopper browses the shelves at Toronto’s Type Books. Independent bookstores have also been affected by the changing industry in Canada.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Many solutions that industry players will talk about would require some kind of government intervention. Some publishing lifers, including McIntyre, wonder whether there is a way to fix the country’s bookselling hegemony. (“That’s no slight to Heather,” he says, referring to Indigo chief executive Heather Reisman.) Others see a need to push school boards to mandate more Canadian books, and to re-establish loan-guarantee programs for independent houses.
Those publishers are perhaps most desperate for better access to public funding – a kind of structural change not unlike what happened in the early seventies burst.
“It’s not that we want to point to 1972 as a fixed point from which everything flows,” says Laura Rock Gaughan, who until recently ran the Literary Press Group of Canada, an advocacy group that itself is celebrating 50 years in business. “We want continued growth.”
Ottawa announced a one-time $10-million boost to the Canada Book Fund last year. But in a self-evaluation released in November, 2024, administrators acknowledged that the eligibility criteria for its publisher-supporting program “may pose barriers to the program being inclusive of smaller publishers and those from equity communities.”
Meanwhile, the Canada Council’s total pool of funding from Ottawa is in decline, even as demand is surging for its programs. With Crown corporations facing an expenditure review, its budget may shrink further.
“The Council is keenly aware of the precarity of many Canadian owned presses,” its arts-granting director, Lise Ann Johnson, says in an e-mail. Its current budget, she acknowledges, can meet demand “neither for increased funding to current recipients nor for support for new applicants.”
Publishers of Canadian writers can obtain funding for individual projects from the council and, once they’ve established a history with the organization, “core” grants to help sustain operations. But the sector’s leaders say grants require so much of a track record as to be prohibitive – becoming “essentially inaccessible for any publisher established over the last 15 years or so,” says Jack Illingworth, executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers, which recently began offering certification seals for domestic presses.
Martha Sharpe owns Toronto independent book shop and publisher Flying Books.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
“It always feels like you’re trying to fit what you’re doing, in your unique way as an indie publisher, into someone else’s agenda,” says Martha Sharpe, a Simon & Schuster and Anansi alumna who runs Flying Books, a decade-old retailer and publishing house in Toronto.
The Canada Council’s core operational funding program runs in a four-year cycle; its 2023 competition brought in two new publishers, and the next won’t begin until 2027. “For someone new to be admitted, someone else has to drop out, be defunded, or at least have their grant reduced,” Illingworth says.
If only people with a financial leg up can afford the high costs of starting houses, “who doesn’t get to start presses, and make decisions on who gets published?” asks Ashley Fortier, co-publisher of Montreal’s queer, trans and feminist-focused Metonymy Press.
Ashley Fortier is co-publisher of Montreal’s Metonymy Press, founded in 2014.Jackson Ezra/Supplied
After publishing nearly 20 books over the past decade – including award winners such as jia qing wilson-yang’s Small Beauty and Eli Tareq El-Bechelany Lynch’s The Good Arabs – Metonymy has struggled to get sustainable funding, such as Canada Council core grants. “We’re always made to feel like we’re asking too much – to get a better business model,” Fortier says.
Leigh Nash, who’s been managing editor of Coach House and publisher at both Invisible and Anansi, started her own shop, Assembly Press, in Prince Edward County, Ont., in 2023. Despite being an established publisher and experienced grant applicant, she’s found funding is scarce through both banks and granting bodies. With more than a dozen books out, “we’re past the startup phase,” Nash says. And the restrictive application processes and rigid timelines for Canada Council funding makes applying for grants Assembly is actually eligible for a gamble.
While Johnson says the council’s assessment criteria aren’t expected to change soon, she pointed to a new “composite activities” program for major projects that will shortly open to publishers.
Without significant changes to Canada’s public funding, however, publishers face heavy questions, both structural and existential. If publishing startups can’t get off the ground, there may not be any shops celebrating 50th anniversaries in 2075 – let alone seasoned executives ready to take the reins at Canada’s existing presses.
“It feels impossible to do the work we’re supposed to be doing,” Nash says.