I am a 21st century author and a reluctant publisher. I say this because I finished writing my first novel in 2001, enrolled in the Humber School for Writers in 2002 and took the book through its mentor critique process, got recommended by my mentor to the school’s literary agency, and then hit a brick wall. I was the wrong type, you see. Even though immigrant literature was the flavour of the month at the time, and I was a Sri Lankan immigrant with a rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags story to tell, I wasn’t brown enough to hit the South Asian immigrant stereotype, given my European ancestry. I was classified as an “old, white guy” writer – that endangered species who had socked back all the privileges during the last century and was now being phased out in favour of female, marginalized, and younger writers.
Being from a business background, and not having come from literature’s traditional talent pools of academia and journalism, I self-published that first novel, as I was in a hurry to start writing my second…and third…That was a big mistake, it appeared, because the prevailing publishing model, that began in the 1930s when paperbacks took off, decreed that publisher and author should remain at arms length for “editorial integrity,” and anything outside of this arrangement was vanity publishing. Thus Virginia Woolfe, Voltaire, Charles Dickens, Shakespeare and other noted self-published luminaries had been outlawed in one fell swoop.
After four years of drifting in the wilderness, seeking a Canadian publisher who could make me respectable, I landed one who published my second AND third books. Another big mistake, I discovered, for that publisher exists in name only today, but does not reproduce any of its backlist, and my two books are technically “out of print,” even though the third one won a literary award in 2010.
Thoroughly fed up with this cottage industry, for it is a cottage industry in Canada, with the real players being the Big 5 headquartered overseas, I reluctantly started my own cottage press, Blue Denim Press (BDP) in 2010. My intention was to have a permanent channel for my own books and to publish other authors stuck in the same situation as I was. This was a hard choice because in so doing, I would always be labelled a “self-published author”; I would be excluded from being eligible for literary prizes whose rules outlawed this channel and who treated POD as vanity and not a tree-saving technology. Oh ye misinformed ones, who do not buy that it is the words on the page that matter and not the means by which they are assembled!
I soon discovered that the Canadian publishing industry lived on subsidy, i.e., grants. Yank the subsidy away and a publisher tanked, as the grant was a big number on its revenue line. This goes back to the ’60s when Jack McClelland of McClelland & Stewart strong-armed the federal government to give him enough money to start a Canadian Publishing Industry (CanLit). This initiative spawned several clones like M&S, and became too big and an embarrassment to the government should it fail. Key to receiving this magical funding was the use of Canadian printers (this requirement subsequently changed when the funders must have realized that a large portion of the grants were going to expensive printers instead of to authors and publishers, and that there were cheaper printers overseas) and local distributors (another expensive group with punitive upfront costs). The only way a little guy like me could afford this costly overhead was to get a publishing grant. But wait a minute – that is putting the cart before the horse – one has to incur these expenses before seeking the grant, with proof of expenses provided. And if the grant was declined, you were SOL. It happened to a small publisher in my neighborhood who followed this model, ended up with a basement full of books (one of mine included), and closed its doors.
I discovered that publishers treated authors rather shabbily and not as respected suppliers. Submissions vanished into space and were often not replied to; instead, “we receive a large number of submissions…” was offered as a lame excuse. I swore, and still practice, to acknowledge submissions within a few days of receipt, and send rejection letters with a bit more detail to the ones who had promise (some subsequently resubmitted, taking my feedback to heart, and I have gone on to publish them). And I still lament the two submissions that vanished into space ten years ago when my e-mail system crashed before I had an opportunity to respond to them, casting me forever into the camp of the “callous publisher” in the eyes of those two now-untraceable authors.
I also discovered that grants shaped behaviour, as political imperatives are embedded in conditions for offering those grants – thus various groups who became politically important had to be featured within the literature if the bounty was to be bestowed. Let me not itemize those groups lest I be labeled misogynist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic.
I had the pleasure of having dinner once with a group of eminent Canadian poets and publishers, those of the grant-receiving nobility, and I politely asked them how many copies of their books they sold or helped sell. They squinted at me and said, “Books sold? We don’t worry about that. We collect our grant money and leave book selling to someone else.” Who that someone else was, I never found out.
Nevertheless, as a loyal Canadian publisher, I tested the waters by putting up my hand for this magical funding that sold no books and made us mediocre due to our obeisance to political headwinds. I was told that I was in a long line of recipients and had to wait my turn, which could take years, or never. Grants come from a finite pot, so, one beneficiary gets money at the expense of another. After a couple of grant cycles and ending empty-handed, I decided not to beat a dead horse and spend my time on more lucrative work.
The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) is more generous with the Book Tax Credit program, where a publisher could apply for a portion of expenses to be refunded. And this program, though capped per book, is open to all eligible publishers. (I have only skimmed the area of grants vs. tax credits – for a detailed study of this topic, I recommend Marc Côté’s excellent essay in Quill & Quire, titled “The case for a federal tax credit.”)
Armed with this information, I set up my own publishing program which I labelled the Chinese Wall. On one side of this wall I published under the traditional publishing model (publisher bears all costs and pays the author a royalty), and on the other side a gun-for-hire model which offers publishing services for a fee. Authors have powerful egos, and vanity has a high price tag, enough to act as a funding source in lieu of grants. The only caveat, spelled out on my website and in contracts, and which I stubbornly adhere to despite some desperate authors offering to bribe me, is that if you played on one side of the wall, you couldn’t play on the other – that is, there was no doorway in my Chinese Wall. And I use a mix of printers, local and foreign (BTW, despite my “Wall,” none of my books are printed in China, not yet, anyway!). This model has sustained me for the sixteen years I have owned my press, earning me a modest income, supporting authors, including myself, and most importantly releasing me from being beholden to political flavours of the month in our literature.
Others have sliced the publishing model differently. The hybrid publisher model, whereby the author pays a majority of fixed costs (editing/formatting) and the publisher bears variable costs of marketing/distribution, is gaining traction because it is understood that in the fully loaded (publisher side) traditional publishing model, the author gets more value than the publisher, and some equalization is required.
One conclusion I have reached, is that with dependency on government funding or author-pay, the small size of the Canadian market, and our insularity of themes (unless we set our books in America or internationally!), it is difficult for Canadian publishers to expand operations organically. They can only do so by consolidation, which does not really expand the market but narrows choice.
I see the advent of AI about to change our models further. We’ve all heard about the AI-Generated books that have overwhelmed Amazon. I’m not a fan of AI-Generated – what’s the fun in that if our raison d’être as writers is to write? However, I see value in AI-Assisted for lone gunman publishers like me who are looking for an extra pair of low-cost hands. And I will tell you the following story at the expense of being outlawed by the Editors Association and other purists:
Recently, an editor who was supposed to be editing my twelfth novel, When Sirens Beckon, cried off with an emergency medical situation, leaving me stranded four months away from a pre-set launch date. Although I edit other BDP authors, I always outsource my own work to a third-party editor to maintain editorial integrity and distance. Unable to find a reliable editor who could turnaround my work within the unmovable deadline, I resorted to Claude AI. I asked Claude to play structural, style, and copy editor at different stages of the editing cycle to hunt for the areas I needed to fix. This gave me the objective distance I needed. I then finished off with Grammarly, proof reading for punctuation. All this was done in three weeks amidst other work. I ensured not to accept all of AI’s sterile recommendations and Grammarly’s perfect punctuation, maintaining idiosyncrasy in syntax, and even an odd typo. Imperfection is now de rigueur in publishing to distinguish the human from the robotic.
So now I am of the mind that I do not need to go hybrid if my model were threatened, but could offload some of my fixed costs on AI. And as AI gets better at other parts of the publishing business (manuscript evaluation, marketing collateral preparation, synopsis and blurb writing, royalty spreadsheets etc.) I will use it to make my life easier.
In the end there is only a writer and a reader. Today, they are separated by a huge infrastructure and a string of gatekeepers sucking off value along the chain connecting them. Projecting into the future, with technology evolving rapidly, and in our small Canadian market, a writer could dispense with this bloated “value chain” and rely only on an AI assistant, a distribution platform, and an influencer. We’ve already talked about the work of AI assistants like Claude; and their role will expand in future, if we let it. For distribution channels, there are many today – Amazon, Ingram, D2D and others (alas, we let the only Canadian one, Kobo, get acquired by a foreign entity). I hope another Canadian online distribution channel springs up soon so we can assert sovereignty in this area. As for the influencer, I see this role as a combination of a publicist/lobbyist – one who can open doors to prizes, literary festivals, media, readings and signings – i.e., activities that sell books. All other gatekeepers, publishers included, could be sunset. And like the author and distribution channel, the influencer also needs to be remunerated on a share of sales or on the number of avenues opened up, not on a fixed fee – let every link in this shrunken value chain have skin in the game.
Wither grant funding in all this? Given the number of books proliferating exponentially each year and the number of eyeballs per book shrinking, author royalties (other then from the Big 5, who are also narrowing their lists to fund only a select group of blockbusters) will continue to shrink. Book sales and emoluments from literary appearances will not sustain a writer in Canada. And getting a “creative writing instructor” job in academia after publishing a debut novel, does not hack it. If a country values its culture and is interested in preserving its custodians of the written word, then paying authors a living wage is a sound idea – let’s trade it in for the winners-and-losers grant system. As for the criteria of who is a Canadian Writer – that will have to be determined; the present Writers Union of Canada criteria might be a starting point, but it will need severe refinement (the subject of a separate article and discussion, no doubt). One of those “refinements” will be to establish “expiry dates” for writers – writing the next To Kill a Mockingbird and taking early retirement for the rest of one’s life will not cut it if you want to keep earning this living wage.
So there you have it, and I have probably pissed off the established Canadian order of prize juries, funding agencies, fellow publishers, editors, and distributors with my heretical views. I have written this article from a writer’s perspective, because at the end of the day, that is what I am. I got into publishing reluctantly, because no one was willing to help. Yet, being irrelevant, insignificant, and ignored aside, I am full of hope. A Brave New World awaits. A cliché, for this is what we said when the Internet dawned, when social media arrived, and when e-books hit our tablets. Each wave, a new adjustment. And now AI is knocking at our doors and the purists are howling in rage. The key to success is to dig our heads out of the sand and roll with the punches, learn the new technologies and employ them smartly. “Nostalgia is not a strategy,” said Prime Minister Carney, and I agree with him.
