Canadian Publishing 2024: Working All the Angles

Publishers in British Columbia, which prize their province’s diverse population and geography, are looking at ways to expand their markets across Canada, the U.S., and internationally. We spoke with publishers, distributors, and the Association of Book Publishers of BC (known as Books BC) about growth, brand identities, and accessible formats.

Although many B.C. books retain a regional flavor, publishers want to cast a wider net. At TouchWood Editions, publisher Tori Elliott says she banks on “culinary tourism,” with cookbooks including Babette’s Bread by Babette Frances Kourelos (Oct.), a South African woman who emigrated to Canada and left her beloved bakery behind, and Rasmus Zepernick’s Haloumi (Oct.), “a rights purchase we translated from the original Danish.” A strong backlist title for TouchWood is Naomi Hansen’s Only in Saskatchewan, spotlighting the province’s restaurants. Elliott says TouchWood emphasizes “strong connections to place and built-in pride in community.”

Harbour Publishing, celebrating its 50th year, publishes “every kind of book, but with a regional profile,” says publisher Howard White. Forthcoming titles include Haida weaver Delores Churchill’s From a Square to a Circle (Oct.) and Henry Willes’s hockey history Never Boring (Oct.), about the Vancouver Canucks. Nightwood Editions, a standalone company run by Howard’s son Silas White, will publish The Bears and the Magic Masks (Oct.), a picture book by Kwantlen storyteller Joseph Dandurand and illustrator Elinor Atkins. Douglas & McIntyre, another Harbour-owned publisher, leans national; its latest titles include Ken McGoogan’s new release Shadows of Tyranny: Defending Democracy in an Age of Dictatorship, Anh Duong’s memoir Dear Da-Lê (Mar. 2025), and Richard Van Camp’s YA novel Beast (Oct.).

At Anvil Press, publisher Brian Kaufman looks for literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and he’d love to duplicate the surprise success of Holly Peach’s memoir Thick Skin: Field Notes from a Sister in the Brotherhood. “The author is a performance poet who took training as a welder and boilermaker,” Kaufman says. The book is “edgy, it’s got some grit, the stuff that we like. We tapped into a super supportive niche market of women in the trades” who have invited Peach to speak at North American conferences.

Anvil’s current list includes Jowita Bydlowska’s autofiction Monster (Oct.); Jill Yonit Goldberg’s drama of an oil rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico, After We Drowned (Nov.); and American-Canadian poet Holly Flauto’s Permission to Settle (Oct.), about immigrating to Canada and, Kaufman says, “being a white settler in modern times.” In spring 2025, Anvil will release music critic Jason Schneider’s That Gun in Your Hand, about the song “Hey Joe” and violence in popular music.

Where some presses sprout new categories, New Society—the publisher of master gardener Jean-Martin Fortier’s books in English—has pruned its offerings. Head of acquisitions Rob West says the annual list numbers 12–14 books, “about half of what we used to do three to four years ago. The ‘more’ model is a dubious one if you’re not a volume publisher.”

With fewer acquisitions, New Society can devote time to editorial, production, and marketing, add color to practical books like the forthcoming Grower’s Guides for the Market Gardener series, and ensure the print quality of Dan Briseboise’s The Seed Farmer (Nov.) and Fortier and Aurélie Sécheret’s Microfarms (Dec.).

A slimmer catalogue “hasn’t affected our bottom line,” says West, and print runs “have gone up a little bit. We expect books to reprint and end up as enduring backlist titles.”

Global outreach and resilience

At Books BC, interim executive director Leslie Bootle and board chair Don Gorman describe a combination of market strategies and Canadian government support for creative initiatives. “Sales are becoming more important to B.C. publishers, and you can see that in the shift in content,” Gorman says. “For a long time there was a myth that Canadian publishers would only publish Canadian authors and content for the grants.” Today, acquisitions are diverse, and “publishers are spending time selling and buying rights too. It’s exciting to see those lists change.”

Arsenal Pulp Press, for one, sells language rights to its titles, with recent sales in South Korea, west Africa, France, Italy, and Germany, says publisher Brian Lam. “We’re doubling down on books by LGBTQ+ and racialized authors, and publishing across a wide range of genres, and in conjunction with expanding our editorial list, we’re working more closely with booksellers in the U.S.” This fall, graphic memoirs include Sarah Leavitt’s Something, Not Nothing and Teresa Wong’s All Our Ordinary Stories, both out now, to be followed by Pakistani journalist Taha Siddiqui’s The Dissident Club (Apr. 2025).

Building those global connections can be costly, says Books BC’s Gorman, who in addition to being publisher of Rocky Mountain Books is the national sales director for Heritage Group Distribution. “Logistics have become a complicated aspect of publishing around the world, but in Canada we struggle with supply chain more than the U.S., because there are only a handful of distributors,” he notes.

To help remedy expenses, B.C. publishers were granted C$500,000 in targeted public “resilience funding” last April. “It’s a one-time envelope of money going directly to independent B.C. publishers, on the heels of a three-year package of supply chain crisis funding,” says Books BC’s Bootle. “It’s project-specific, to support a print run, shipping, or “taking a chance on a whole new book.”

“The government realizes B.C. publishers have potential in the U.S., and there have been a lot of conversations about how B.C. publishers can increase revenue,” Gorman says. “Resilience funding is not just about addressing inflation costs. It’s about ensuring that we have a future outside our dependable Western and Canadian markets.”

The potential of accessible books

Another market—still taking shape—calls for accessible publications. B.C. publishers have used prior public funding to prepare for the European Accessibility Act, which takes effect in June 2025. “It’s been a priority for several years to make sure our members could get access to professional development” about creating accessible content, Bootle says. Now, “we’re sitting on this growing bank of accessible Canadian books and our next challenge will be figuring out how people can find them.”

Bootle sees accessible tools as a way to reach disabled readers, as well as a foundation for creative projects, such as documenting and teaching Indigenous languages. B.C. has 198 distinct First Nations, and numerous companies make it their mission to publish Indigenous authors and content. Orca Book Publishers touts its multilingual children’s titles (see “Orca’s Ruby Anni-
versary,” p. 19), while Arsenal Pulp will publish Métis author Andrea Currie’s memoir Finding Otipemisiwak (Oct.).

Boutique hybrid publisher Page Two Books sees continuing sales of Bob Joseph’s 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act, a history and a reconciliation strategy book first published in 2018. Trena White, co-CEO of Page Two with Jesse Finkelstein, says the company partners with “leading subject matter experts” on its diverse titles, which include Carolyn Roberts’s Re-storying Education (out now), on decolonization, and Rose LeMay’s Ally Is a Verb (spring 2025), on reconciliation with Indigenous people.

Medicine Wheel Publishing is promoting Wet’suwet’en author Corinne George’s Alha Disnii: My Truth (out now). Medicine Wheel, an English-language Indigenous press founded in 2016 by Teddy Anderson, an adopted member of the Tlingit community, was honored as Books BC’s publisher of the year for 2024. “It’s exciting to have someone relatively new in the field catch everyone’s attention for their strong foundational relationships with authors and for bringing stories to a wider audience,” Bootle says.

Anderson confirms that the press is in high demand, so much that “we’re going to increase our production 20%–25% per book in the next five to six years,” and add an additional two to four books per year to Medicine Wheel’s list, which currently numbers six to eight annually.

One of Medicine Wheel’s recent successes is an educational board game, The Truth in Truth and Reconciliation, created by Anishinaabe educator James Darin Corbiere. After publishing the game in August, “we sold 500 copies in the first 10 days,” Anderson says. “It gives participants a unique experience of facing the policies of the government” from an Indigenous perspective.

Because elders and teachers consult with authors at Medicine Wheel, Anderson compares the press to “a think tank.” He sees Medicine Wheel as “a place for Indigenous creators who have unique projects they want to get into the world. Everything we create has explicit approval of the author, and we’re supporting their vision.” Current and forthcoming titles include Today Is Orange Shirt Day (out now), a board book by Secwépemc storyteller and Orange Shirt Day founder Phyllis Webstad, with illustrations by Coast Salish artist Natassia Davies; a graphic novel series about young Indigenous superheroes; and, this spring, the YA title Broken Home, Healed Nest (Mar. 2025), by Hopi elder Pershlie Ami and Anthony Goulet, about intergenerational trauma and “strength-based” therapies.

At Books BC, Gorman feels good about the present state of B.C. publishing. “Anecdotally, it’s going quite well,” he says. “Our books are known for their quality, content, and unique perspective on life in North America, so a lot of us are seeing positive results in the U.S. We do things very well up here.”

Bootle agrees. “Our books are getting great accolades, either by award nominations or wins or reviews,” she says. “Those stars and awards help make it relatively easy for a B.C. publisher looking for sales and distribution in the U.S., because we’re getting great recognition for an awful lot of our books down there.”

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