In Canada, the mid-list squeeze contributed to the bankruptcy of two
independent publishers, most recently Vancouver’s Douglas &
McIntyre. At its demise, the company was out more than $2-million it had
paid authors in advances against royalties on sales that had not
materialized by the time the company failed. “They ended up with
mid-list authors, hoping there would be a breakthrough,” said Rowland
Lorimer, director of the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at
Simon Fraser University. What happened instead was collapse.
[A]n author like Dan Brown “would never get published now, because his
first three books sold nothing,” [literary agent Denise] Bukowski said. But as everybody knows,
Brown’s fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, has sold more than 80 million copies.
More
casualties are expected as foreign-owned multinationals merge and pare
their lists, leaving mid-list authors in the hands of small presses with
limited marketing power. Although Esi Edugyan’s little-known first
novel was handsomely published around the world by the top houses, its
indifferent sales consigned her second novel to Toronto publisher Key
Porter, which quickly went bankrupt. Half Blood Blues was ultimately brought out by boutique publisher Thomas Allen – just in time to win the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Moving to an independent press incurs a severe financial penalty,
according to Bukowski: “You get nothing, and those small presses are all
really bad at publicity and marketing. They don’t sell any books, they
just live from Canada Council grant to Canada Council grant.”
To
replace Canadian authors they once supported with long-term, multi-book
contracts, multinational publishers increasingly fill their lists with
so-called “buy-ins” – pre-paid, pre-edited books supplied directly from
head offices in London or New York. “So more and more of their list is
from those imports, and less and less is from Canada,” Bukowski said.
“They need to do that, but now the pressure is to do it more and more –
and to only buy books that are sure things.”
