Anne Michaels and more in the April Q&Q

Thirteen years after the blockbuster success of Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels is about to publish her second novel, and she’s Q&Q‘s cover subject in the April 2009 issue, which is available now. Also in April, we look at the some of the ideas for industry networking and sales-generating that have sprung up in the wake of BookExpo Canada’s collapse, and at the Literary Press Group‘s future plans now that new executive director Jack Illingworth is on board. Plus reviews of new books by David Suzuki, Kim Echlin, Trevor Herriot, Robert J. Sawyer, Vlasta van Kampen, Tim Wynne-Jones, and more. The full table of contents is after the jump.
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Notes from BNC’s tech forum

About 225 industry people crowded into a Toronto conference room on Thursday for BookNet Canada’s annual technology forum. The theme of this year’s conference was “evolution or revolution,” though most of the speakers seemed to opt for the less radical of the two options: the event was focused on the brass tacks of adapting to the digital marketplace, with idealistic Web 2.0 barnstorming kept to a minimum.

BookNet has posted slides from the day’s presentations here, and it will also be posting videos of the talks to YouTube in the coming weeks (to be kept up to date, subscribe to BookNet’s mailing list). Below is a recap of some of the key themes addressed at the conference.

• The rise of mobile devices. It was less than a year and a half ago that the Kindle first hit the market, but already the notion of a dedicated e-reader – even with e-Ink capabilities – is starting to look dated. Several speakers addressed how the increasing ubiquity of mobile devices – especially the iPhone – is creating what Indigo chief technical officer Michael Serbinis described as “a billion dollar opportunity” to provide digital content on the handheld devices people already have. (Indigo launched its downloadable e-book application Shortcovers two weeks ago, and according to Serbinis it is already being used by readers in 124 countries.) One of the most surprising successes in this emerging market is Stanza, an application that allows users to read e-books on their iPhones, which already has 1.5-million users in 60 countries and has sold over 7-million downloadable e-books since its launch last year. According to Stanza spokesperson Neelan Choksi, “There’s enough technology out there right now to make e-books a good reading experience.” The challenge is to make more content available to readers, and to inform them of what’s already available in digital formats.

• Collective opportunities for Canadian publishers. One question on the minds of many people in the room was how to make sure that Canadian content, especially from small- and mid-size firms, is easily discoverable on the Web. Several speakers argued that this would require collective action among Canadian publishers, whether it be using the standard EPUB format or, as Craigs Riggs of the consulting firm Turner Riggs Workspace suggested, consolidating distribution in the digital realm. When pressed about including more Canadian content on Shortcovers, Indigo’s Serbinis said it would be working with more publishers in the coming weeks, but that the company would likely deal with smaller firms through a distributor in order to speed up the process. (Indigo’s chief merchant Joel Silver, responding to questions from the crowd, noted that smaller publishers can also upload their content to Shortcovers using the “create” function, and then “hustle” sales through blog posts and other marketing initiatives.)

• Innovative new products. Several new products were demoed over the course of the day, including an overview of Shortcovers (currently available only to iPhone users), the new Sony e-Reader (which will include search, annotation, and highlighting features, as well as a touch screen, a built-in LED reading light, and the ability to display colour photos), and the new version of Stanza (which will include a built-in dictionary, customizable toolbars, and increased search capabilities). However, one of the most innovative new products on display came from none other than Harlequin Enterprises. The veteran romance publisher, which turns 60 this year, began offering several e-book-only programs in 2007. Since then, the company has also begun offering enriched editions of e-books that include extensive hyperlinks, full-colour photos, authors’ notes, etc. As the day’s closing speaker, Andrew Savikas of O’Reilly Media, noted, publishers need to begin thinking of e-books as more than just digital copies of print content. “E-books should not be print books delivered electronically,” Savikas said, but should actively take advantage of new capabilities offered by the Web.

Bookmarks: reviews of Shortcovers, Mailer’s reviewers, and a new book for uppity editors

Sundry links from around the Web:

• BookNet Canada’s Michael Tamblyn offers a fairly enthusiastic review of Indigo’s new “e-books for iPhones” app Shortcovers.
• Harper U.S. acquires Kerouac’s unpublished first novel, about a man at sea.
• The Subversive Copy Editor aims at improving frayed relations between authors and editors.
• Norman Mailer strikes back (at his critics).

Bookmarks: Bolano, Meyer, and more

• The mythology of Roberto Bolaño’s hard-knock life is starting to crumble: his widow says he was never a heroin addict, and others say he was not in Chile during the Pinochet coup.
• Slate takes a quick look around at the state of the book business.
• Russell Smith offers some reading recommendations.
• BookNet Canada asks: are e-readers’ claims to a greater greenness overstated?
• Stephenie Meyer still hasn’t gone back to that novel that got leaked; she’s now working on something else.

Coveting thy neighbour’s sales

According to Ben Kaplan of the National Post, the Canadian publishing industry is crazed with envy, obsessively checking up on their rivals’ deals and sales numbers:

Resentment among authors has been around since the first cocktail party lauded the first published word. But in the age of the internet and publicized book deals on Booknet Canada, Publishers Marketplace and the deals section of the Quill & Quire website, first-time novelists now have more tools at their disposal to keep track of opponents – and there’s a certain amount of bloodletting in the Canadian authorship game.
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Publishers, agents and authors all want to keep tabs on their industry. And certain watershed deals – such as the twin fortunes earned by first-time novelists Anne Michaels and Ann-Marie MacDonald in the mid-’90s, Michael Turner’s deal with Doubleday for The Pornographer’s Poem in 1999 or the bidding war that broke out over Tish Cohen’s debut novel last year – attract the industry’s attention and scorn.

“We don’t only go online to check our sales, but also to check everyone else’s sales,” says Kim McArthur, president of McArthur & Co., a publisher and distributor that has seen 63 of its releases become Canadian best-sellers and 21 of them reach No. 1 in Canadian sales. McArthur believes envy is good for publishing, and that deal trackers and sales figures bring moxie to the biz. “Now you can be envious of someone and then go check their figures,” she says. “Really make yourself sick.”

It seems that we here at Q & Q are enablers. We’re sorry, everybody. We had no idea.

Giller speculation

It’s safe to say that last year’s Giller Prize-winner, Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, caught some pundits off-guard. (Ahem.) This year, the peanut gallery has kept curiously mum on who will take home the $40,000 prize (which, of course, is being awarded tonight in Toronto).

Except, that is, for a trio of Globe and Mail panelists made up of “Review”-section editor Andrew Gorham and writers Sandra Martin and James Adams, who say unanimously that the Giller should go to Ondaatje for Divisadero. Only Andrews thinks the prize won’t go to Ondaatje – he’s laying his bet on Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air. (Hay seems to have captured the popular vote, too.)

Literary merit aside, Gorham thinks the timing is right for a Hay win: “It feels like this is Hay’s moment because she has been building in our literary landscape with each book that she publishes,” he says.

Meanwhile, the Toronto Star teases readers with a recent headline — “Which book is likely to win the Giller?” — but finds the question too hot to handle (so does CBCNews.ca, for that matter). Instead of giving a straightforward answer, publishing reporter Vit Wagner coughs up some BookNet Canada sales data (for Quillblog’s take, see here) and simply says:

Winning a Scotiabank Giller Prize or a Governor General’s Award is guaranteed to boost the sales of any author, with relatively unsung writers having the most to gain.

The National Post hardly raises the bar, leading its Giller coverage with this eye-opener:

Novelists tend to command unnatural facility with language and possess keen powers of observation and a high tolerance for solitude. Talking to them can be intimidating.

This Quillblogger, however, is reserving speculation on who will take home the Giller in light of news out of France that the Renaudot prize — the country’s second most prestigious literary contest — was awarded to an author who wasn’t even on the shortlist.

But the biggest surprise of today’s announcements, not least to the novelist himself, was the award of the Renaudot prize to Daniel Pennac. Chagrins d’École was not even among the five titles selected for the final round of the award, which is second only to the Goncourt in importance to French readers.

“It’s a complete surprise,” he declared to journalists as he arrived late for the celebration at the Drouant restaurant in Paris. “I expected it even less since I wasn’t even on the programme,” he added. “There must have been something amusing happening [on the panel],” he suggested.

While a similar upset is unlikely at the well-scripted Gillers, the French shenanigans bode well for seemingly overlooked titles like, say, Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negros.

To brush up on all the Giller nominees, see Q&Q‘s reviews:

Effigy by Alissa York
A Secret Between Us by Daniel Poliquin (trans. Donald Winkler)
The Assassin’s Song by M.G. Vassanji
Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay
Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

BookNet blogging

BookNet Canada, the agency that, among other things, tracks books sales across Canada (the data that Q&Q uses to assemble its bestseller lists), has started a blog. In the latest entry, BookNet president Michael Tamblyn makes an interesting point about the kinds of titles available for download to the Sony e-book Reader:

Have you ever rented a cottage or stayed in an inn or hostel where owners and past guests have left books on the shelves for your reading pleasure? It is usually a mixed bag of thrillers, mysteries, romance novels, maybe some history, sometimes some real wildcards and surprises. You don’t have a lot of choice, but you do get this strange snapshot of what people read when they’re on vacation.

Getting books for the Reader at the Sony Connect store had a similar feeling. As I browsed around looking for titles, I realized that I was seeing a composite picture of the consumers that publishers believe are reading digital books. At the moment, they appear to be a group of randomly selected airport travellers. Lots of thrillers, mysteries and romance novels. Some science-fiction. Plenty of business books and sports titles.

One book Tamblyn would like to have available in digital form while on vacation is Thomas Pynchon’s 1,000-page 2006 novel Against the Day. Unfortunately, it’s not available for download.

Quillblog would humbly like to suggest that part of the problem Tamblyn faces may be due to his definition of a “cottage read.” Remember: Thomas Pynchon in town, Stephen King in the country.