Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace ed. by Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli (review)

Writers, while always willing to discuss their work-in-progress or bewail the horrors of the prize season, are coy about details like advances, the exact number of foreign deals they have or have not signed – even their agents’ names. It is an intensely personal thing for writers to discuss the mysteries of how and where they make their money, let alone how much they make. Kit Dobson and Smaro Kamboureli couldn’t completely crack that hard-boiled shell, but in their collection of interviews with writers, Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace, they do tap their spoons on a few heads.

In his introduction, Dobson declares their emphasis to be not the intellectual process of creation but the “small-scale, particular and precise facts” of getting books out into the world. The interviews in this collection are particular. Revealing, frustratingly repetitive, and as prolix as might be expected from a packed posy of writers, they are also sometimes enlightening. Stephen Henighan speaks very well on midlist vulnerability and gives a fine analysis of the death of reviewing in this country. Erín Moure’s obsession with trim and colour is both deeply odd and oddly reasonable. Christian Bök’s astringent advice to his students acknowledges the limitations of his chosen form: “If they have something truly important, ground breaking to say, the proper context for doing so would be a press conference, not a poem.”

Bitterness about the ordinary truth of publishing – that sometimes people don’t buy your book – seems to be built into the profession. Writers (not to put too fine a point on it) are a bunch of snivelling complainers. They still smart from old reviews; they take opportunities to crab at each other and accuse others of paranoia in these often-entertaining conversations. Nowadays, of course, thanks to social media, we are all able to eavesdrop on what at one time would have been barroom bickering.

Although Dobson and Kamboureli selected carefully for “cultural constituencies” of race and gender, this is not a representative sample of writers struggling to make a living: of the ten writers, eight hold fulltime university positions. Not needing writing income for sustenance, they have a very low stake in the marketplace – Aritha van Herk’s academic position has allowed her to thumb her nose at the market, to “write a book that sells almost nothing.” Jane Urquhart, one exception to the academic crowd, offers sensible views on her markets, her editor (Ellen Seligman), and her agent (unnamed, based in New York).

The problem with these interviews, conducted from 2006 to 2008, is that the world they depict is gone. Chapters, the megalithic bookstore chain, only just intrudes on the discussions; there is not a single mention in the book of the most significant and troubling player in today’s literary marketplace, Amazon. In her 2006 interview, Urquhart asks a prophetic question: What will happen if multinational publishers decide they’re not making enough money in Canada?

The Canadian literary market has radically reshaped. In 2012 McClelland & Stewart, the last major wholly Canadian publisher, was swallowed by Random House, part of the behemoth Bertelsmann group; last year the conglomerate ate Penguin. As Urquhart feared, Harper Collins has just closed its Canadian warehouse; distribution will now be handled from Indiana. The closure also leaves several small independent publishers without distribution. Copyright disputes have further complicated the academic market many of us relied on. Writers (though maybe not these particular writers) have real cause for worry: the Writers Union of Canada has estimated that the average annual income writers make from their writing in this country has dropped to a new low of $12,000.

Last week, New York agent Andrew Wylie (full disclosure, in the spirit of uncoyness: I am represented by the Wylie Agency) tried to reassure anxious literati at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors, comparing this...