On Books and Publishing
The Bookshelves in My Office
My friend Wendy recently passed on to me a full-page special she’d clipped from The Globe and Mail (Saturday, June 24, 2023). Its headline is discouraging: “Promoting a book can be ego-crushing.” Canadian writer Tom Rachman makes the case that few people are interested in the novels that people like him spend years writing. The result, he says, is poor book sales and a blow to the writer’s self-esteem.
Rachman identifies at least one major reason for this problem—even “bookish types” are turning from fiction to non-fiction:
To attract coverage, you need a narrative behind the narrative—that your fiction is actually non-fiction in disguise, inspired by your messy divorce, your messy kids, your drug bust, your life in the burbs, your PTSD, your OCD, your impotence, your incontinence, your pet marmot Ernesto.
Is Rachman right in his assumption? I haven’t read any of his work—but then, I’d never even heard of him before reading the article. (I now have his first novel on order from the library!)
Of course, he’s talking about literary fiction. Which is a hard sell. Its mandate is to expand the reader’s moral, aesthetic, and intellectual horizons. While the best crime novels do the same, genre fiction is generally written to entertain. It therefore has a broader audience.
Even so, marketing books is challenging. There are so many of them! And every novelist competes not only with the writers of their generation, but also with those of the past. Agatha Christie has been dead for almost fifty years. She’s still a best-seller!
Those of us who love books read only a tiny fraction of what’s out there. Of necessity, we buy fewer than we read. (Bless Saskatchewan’s excellent library system for reducing the gap between them!) Prize-winning novels like those by Louise Penny become best-sellers. Others good novels languish unread.
In the spirit of promoting the work of my western Canadian peers, let me note two books I read recently. Both are written by “older” women and published by independent Canadian presses. While they may never garner international acclaim, I enjoyed reading them:
Raye Anderson’s And Then Is Heard No More (Signature Editions, 2021). The second in a crime series featuring Sergeant Roxanne Calloway of the RCMP. This one is set in Winnipeg, but the other two take place in Manitoba’s Interlake region, where Anderson lives.
Elinor Florence’s Bird’s Eye View (Dundurn, 2014). The debut novel of a woman who grew up in Saskatchewan but now lives in BC. Her protagonist, Rose, is a Saskatchewan farmgirl who goes off to England and becomes an intelligence officer in the British army. An entertaining and well-researched story.
