Consensual dissent is the future of publishing as Canada’s newest group of publishers do everything they can to get their books in the hands of readers – including not printing books at all
Judging the book by its cover
There’s no question that Canadian book publishers must meet the challenge of shrinking funds and ever encroaching new technologies head on. The answer isn’t more cook books or a renewed commitment to romance novels. The solution lies in the capacity of the publisher to reinvent and reimagine what books are, and how they affect and challenge in a way that no other medium can. While most of the mainstream corporate presses and too many of the established small presses twiddle their thumbs and subject each of their generic how-to titles to an exact accounting of their ever shrinking potential earnings, the new small presses are adapting to the coming of the millennium.
Whether they are doing so through changing the very idea of what a “book” is, or by capitalizing on the territory that mass market paperbacks and generic chains don’t cover, or by utilizing changing technologies to reach more readers, one thing is certain: the new underground of book and chapbook publishers are poised to grow and thrive in Canada, free to experiment and adapt and renew the potency of reading. Beyond that generalization, there are as many different ways to approach and understand small press publishing in Canada as there are publishers. In today’s Canadian independent publishing scene, you can never judge a book by its cover. It may not even have one.
A Book by Any Other Name…
Although the publishers I’ve talked to for this article produce a wide spectrum of books with varying levels of production costs, they all share in the small (or independent) press philosophy of making quality objects considered deserving simply because they contain something interesting and worthwhile. Some are bitter, some are optimistic for the future, but all are committed to the making of books, not money. As Corey Frost of Montreal’s ga press puts it: “I think of making books as a kind of performance, which reaches its audience when someone first picks up the book.”
Thinking like this is completely antithetical to the principles of a larger press where the division of labour resembles an assembly line. Someone writes it, someone designs it, someone prints it, someone else ships it to stores and, somewhere down the line, someone buys it and maybe gets around to reading it. The independent press ethos that claims meaning for the book itself subverts this assembly aesthetic. Handbound books or even mass produced books that exist outside the typical literary conventions of the novel or the non-fiction exposé hope to make contact with the reader on a visceral level, to instill readers not just with the unique enterprise of encountering the singular vision in any particular book, but also with the way the book’s mere existence signifies a labour and commitment that goes beyond the creation of generic product.
But the move toward renewing the sense of the book itself as a singular, valuable and beautiful item is fraught with difficulty. Indie presses must create and publish within a system that devalues the book as an object, that makes no distinctions between a mass paperback and a hand-bound limited edition. Additionally, books must fight against video games and video recordings.
“We should abandon the term ‘small’ press and replace it with ‘independent’ press,” says Blain Kyllo, marketing director at Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press, one of Canada’s larger independent publishers. “The perceptions and connotations surrounding the word ‘small’ cause too many problems and make it easy for bookstores, media, and the general public to ignore us.”
But even if the small press in Canada can be reinvented as an independent press (in much the same way independent record labels position themselves as the hipster alternative to the major label conglomerates) there remains the challenge of wading through the morass of the publishing industry which, at best, provides grudging support for new publishers. Many of the new Canadian independents don’t even bother to compete directly with the big book publishers. While mavericks like Insomniac Books in Toronto (along with TO based Riverbank Press, Rushhour Revisions and Gutter Press and Arsenal Pulp and Anvil Press in Vancouver) publish in much the same format mainstream presses do, other presses are giving up on book publishing altogether. Against the increasingly homogenized vision of the book is a whole bevy of chapbooks, mini-books, and even internet books that stand counter to the established notion of the book as a mass produced generic item containing the kinds of narratives