An Open Letter To Author Dalton Higgins
By Kwame Eff
Dear Dalton,
Let me congratulate you on the success of 101 Fascinating Basketball Facts. I was so proud to attend your launch event at A Different Booklist last fall. When our dear elder Itah called on me it felt like something of a return from exile. I’d left Canada shortly after signing you to the book deal if you recall.
I’m back in the Canadian book business. I have joined Iguana Books as its general manager and we announced a strategic partnership with my start up Out of Print Press. I am really stoked that you’ve agreed to republish Fatherhood 4.0 through Out of Print Press. It’s a major win to have an author of your calibre as one of our first titles. Give thanks.
Artsterity: Foreshadowing what’s next for rest of Canada
The story I wanted to share with you is that Nova Scotia’s capitalist premier Tim Houston (who was mentioned in the Paradise Papers) passed budget cuts that included the complete termination of government funding specific to the book publishing industry. That means about $700,000 in annual government cheese that up until now had been distributed between a handful of Scotian presses including Nimbus Publishing, the comrades at Fernwood Publishing, and a handful of mom and pop shops. I’m hyperlinking these publishers because for one, they do good work, and for another after the news about their funding, they’ll need all the free promotion they can get.
In terms of impact, the heads of firm for Nimbus and a second Scotia based press have already announced production cuts, meaning fewer titles will be published in the province. In my opinion, this is fine as there are already too many books being produced every year, most of them going unread and unnoticed. Canadian literature will survive this.
What about the money?
In economic terms, there is a glut in the market and it’s coming from the self-described “traditional” publishers. The orthodox capitalist response to a glut or surplus of product is to either lower prices or to cut production. Unfortunately for them, the traditional publishers can’t unilaterally lower their prices because the cost of their inputs is higher than ever before and there is virtually no vertical integration within the industry outside a few multinationals who own their own manufacturing and distribution operations.
Still, given the material reality of the Canadian book market, the moms & pops in Canada have been overproducing unsellable books precisely because the Canadian State has been incentivizing this behaviour through its decades-long regime of having the public finance private publishing activities. Publishing more books regardless of market outcome has been the Canadian industrial policy for decades and few with vested interests in the status quo are likely to question this arrangement.
Clearly something was going to have to give, with or without state financial support, because these firms have been effectively hamstrung by rising costs of inputs, competition from foreign owned and operated multinationals, a social decline in reading, weakened copyright enforcement, and other downward pressures. Toss in a Trumpian trade war and you have a recipe for major headwinds for Canadian owned presses.
My questions for you:
Do you think the average working class Nova Scotian will notice or care that production of Scotian published books might decrease by 50% to 75%? Would the average Canadian notice or care about a comparable cut in the number of Canadian published books? Does anyone in Canada even know or care about the nationality of their favourite book’s publisher? Isn’t everyone postnational now anyway?
If I were Tim Houston, and my goal was to ram budget cuts down Nova Scotian gullets, I would divide and conquer. He’s already moved in that direction, restoring some partial funding to the most militant and best organized factions of the provincial arts and culture community. Houston reversed some funding cuts aimed specifically at Black Scotians, disabled persons, Indigenous people, etc.
Brilliant strategy if your goal is capitalist austerity and a withdrawal of the state from the arts and culture. I simply can’t see the privately owned book publishers winning much public support on this, and I think the Houston government has provided a template that other capitalist premiers and heritage ministers will without a doubt move to adopt. There haven’t been any useful opinion polls published since this kicked off, but Houston’s Conservatives are firmly in the political driver’s seat in Nova Scotia. No sporadic protests from the province’s bohemians are going to penetrate his political fortress in the near term.
My hunch is that this issue won’t really resonate beyond the chattering classes, and that the unwashed masses will not rally to the banners of bohemian and petty bourgeois literary impresarios. It will be far too easy for rightwingers with budget cuts on the brain to present book publishers and other cultural sector types as “out of touch, downtown living, latte sipping, champagne socialist, liberal elites” to borrow from the playbook of Etobicoke’s Ford Brothers.
Speaking of Doug Ford, how long until he notices his buddy Tim Houston’s move and replicates similar cuts to the public subsidies of publishers in Ontario? He clearly isn’t too keen on the arts and culture, what with his anti-basket weaving position, so watch Ontario for the next domino to fall regarding cuts to cultural funding.
Corporate Welfare Is Bad Policy
I have always been opposed to privately-owned, for-profit (capitalist) entities receiving state subsidies. I don’t care if they are multinational oil and gas corporations or mom and pop book publishers. I don’t think it is appropriate to ask the mass of people to subsidize entrenched private interests as they seek to accumulate capital and/or maintain their personal privileges via state grants. Of course, the entrenched interests will claim that without their cultural gatekeeping activities, all Canadian literature will come to a cataclysmic end. The reality is the opposite. The barriers to enter the publishing of literature have never been lower. Platforms like Substack, Ghost, Patreon exist. There are many self and hybrid publishing options too, so it has never been easier for writers to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of the written word.
Besides, I’ve been involved in publishing in the Global South. If companies like Ian Randle Publishers and Blue Banyan Books can produce high quality books in a relatively poor and small country like Jamaica, then surely the book industry in Canada can find a way to function without dependency on the state or the presence of foreign multinationals. These subsidies make companies as unimaginative and ineffective as multinational corporations who only profit via their monopolistic hold on the market rather than any special talent or innovation unique to them.
There could be substantial consolidation among the grant-dependent presses without causing the collapse of Canadian arts and letters as the Chicken Littles of CanLit claim.
You’ve seen the ineffectiveness of “indie” presses from time to time in the course of your writing career. I don’t believe for one second that Dalton Higgins stops writing or saying what he has to say even if every indie press in Canada disappears tomorrow. You’re the one driving the majority of the sales on your titles, so why do you keep giving up 90% to publishers who barely move the needle for you?
Anyway, big up yourself, and feel free to write back if you wish. Happy to give a shout out to anything you’re working on or promoting.
Kwame