Toronto mayor Rob Ford knows lots of B words

Although Margaret Atwood didn’t attend Thursday night’s marathon Toronto city council executive meeting to address the city’s budget deliberations, she was there in spirit and in swag (scroll down the Torontoist’s impressive live blog to see an Atwood button and references to photocopied face masks of the author). Although Atwood has become a symbol for library-devoted Torontonians thanks to councillor Doug Ford’s stated inability to recognize the country’s most recognizable author – even the Guardian mentioned it – several other authors waited patiently for their turn to speak to city council.

NOW magazine reports that Thom Vernon, author of The Drifts (Coach House Press) told the room, “We are not for sale … The KPMG report is a work plan to transfer public wealth to the private sector.”

Children’s author Vikki VanSickle expressed her concerns about the budget at around 4:30 a.m. After being asked the title of her book, Words That Start with B (Scholastic Canada), mayor Rob Ford is heard on video muttering, “I can think of another B word for her.”

This morning, the Twitterverse was filled with support for VanSickle, who tweeted, “Rob Ford thinks I’m a bitch, but I think he’s a bully.” There’s no response yet from the mayor, although joke account Hulkmayor tweeted, “WAIT! HULKMAYOR NO CALL LADY B-WORD! IS MISUNDERSTANDING.”

Publishing at the polls: Copyright reform

As Canadians head to the polls on May 2, Q&Q looks at key federal policies affecting the publishing industry. Stay tuned for upcoming features on federal funding, mass digitization, and foreign-ownership regulations.

After nearly a year of parliamentary hearings and heavy industry lobbying, Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act, succumbed to a sudden death on March 26, when the latest Canadian federal election was called.

For nearly a decade, publishers, authors, and other content creators have lived without a copyright act that takes into account the realities of a digital economy. Bill C-32 was the federal government’s third attempt to update the legislation. To get a sense of how outdated Canada’s current laws are, the last copyright reform, passed in 1997, instituted a levy on cassette tapes. It will now be up to the new government to table yet another copyright bill — and successfully get it passed for there to be meaningful reform.

As Canadians head to the polls once again on May 2, Q&Q spoke to several publishing copyright advocates about the lessons learned from Bill C-32.
(more…)

Anansi puts Rob Ford on a streetcar

When House of Anansi Press was strategizing its marketing campaign for The Little Book of Rob Ford, a collection of “quips, quotes, and colourful comments” from Toronto’s mayor, it took a more subtle approach than NOW Magazine’s controversial nudie cover. They put Ford on the side of a streetcar.

Anansi’s director of publicity Laura Repas says the idea originated with one of Ford’s own quotes: “If you get stuck behind a streetcar you’re stuck! Enough with the streetcars!” Originally Anansi wanted to do a vinyl advertising wrap that would cover the entire car, but with a price tag of more than $20,000, the bold idea was cost-prohibitive. Repas says that poster ad on the side of the TTC streetcar was “an amazing deal,” especially considering the “happy accident” timing of Ford’s new transit plan announced on Thursday.

The book, conceived a day after Ford was elected and released on Feb. 16, does not have a huge marketing budget outside of the streetcar ad, which runs on the Queen Street line: “It goes by City Hall and it’s such a great, long route,” says Repas. Anansi also organized direct outreach to unconventional bookretailers like bike stores and “edgy, fun giftshops,” and set up a Tumblr page to promote the book. Anansi’s Twitter and Facebook followers are encouraged to send in their photos of the TTC ad for a chance to win a package of spring 2011 titles.

Cover to Cover: Gil Adamson’s Ashland

From the April 2011 issue of Q&Q: Designer David Gee explains the steps involved in redesigning a Southern Gothic-reflected cover for a new edition of Gil Adamson’s poetry collection Ashland (ECW Press).

ECW Press approached me to repackage Gil Adamson’s 2003 poetry collection, Ashland. I was given no hard parameters, just the manuscript and a ­request to redesign the cover in a similar Wild West/­Southern Gothic vein. (Above is the cover for the 2003 edition, designed by Darren Holmes.)

I initially wanted to give the cover a sense of empty, dry, dead space – something that provided an idea of a barren landscape without getting into the specific themes of the book. The large curving arcs of the type were meant to mimic old maps. I started to feel this design was a little too empty, and lacked the menace and darkness in the text.

Using old frontier typography seemed like a no-brainer, but I wanted to find an innovative way to do it. Woodblock ­letters achieved this, and the collage reflected the fact that this is a collection of shorter pieces. However, I had a feeling I’d seen this kind of approach before. I had: David Pearson recently redesigned Cormac McCarthy’s backlist using a collage of old wood type.

FINAL. Taking a bit from everything I’d come up with so far, I ended up with a cover that achieved what I most wanted: a ­design free of all the typical visual language one would normally associate with Southern Gothic tales.

Chinese novel alleged to have stolen from Canada’s “literary elite”

The “Great Chinese Canadian Literary Feud” is now underway, according to a Toronto Star story by Bill Schiller. The author at the centre of the supposed controversy is Toronto’s Zhang Ling, whose previous novel, Aftershock, became a surprise bestseller in China when a film version was released there last summer.

For her latest novel, Gold Mountain Blues, Zhang is accused of stealing from a diverse group of Chinese-Canadian authors, including Denise Chong, Wayson Choy, Sky Lee, and Paul Yee. An English translation of the novel was due to appear with Penguin Canada by early 2012, but according to the Star, it has been put “in limbo until [Penguin] is satisfied that the author hasn’t been poaching from the works of Canada’s Chinese Canadian literary elite.”

It’s a damning accusation, but the case against Zhang is anything but cut and dried. The accusations of plagiarism appear to stem from an online smear campaign led by an anonymous blogger known as Changjiang. When the Star tracked down and questioned the man supposedly behind the posts, one Robert Luo, he “grew alarmed and then hung up.” Another of Zhang’s attackers, Cheng Xingbang, also refused an interview.

Meanwhile, Penguin has not said it is delaying publication of Gold Mountain Blues, only that it is waiting for the English translation to be complete before making an internal decision about how to handle the accusations. And two of the supposed victims of plagiarism contacted by the Star – Sky Lee and Denise Chong – were equally in the dark, as neither reads Chinese. As the Star reports, Chong, who is also published by Penguin, is hesitant to weigh in on the controversy:

Changjiang’s website accuses Zhang of borrowing the key character of Chong’s [1994 memoir, The Concubine’s Children] – her grandmother May-ying, the hard-drinking, smoking, gambling “concubine” of the title — then fashioning it into a character in Gold Mountain Blues.

Chong says that without a translation she can’t really comment.

But she did send an email to alert her agent once the controversy hit the Chinese blogosphere.

Reached in Montreal, reclusive Canadian writer Sky Lee, author of the groundbreaking novel Disappearing Moon Café (1990), an instant classic, admits she was “shocked and dismayed” when she first heard from a friend in British Columbia that someone might be poaching her work.

But then she realized that she couldn’t really evaluate the allegations first-hand. She doesn’t read Chinese either.

So she farmed it out to her trusted friend, Jennifer Jay, a historian at the University of Alberta who is fluent in Chinese, who spent a day reading an online version of Gold Mountain Blues.

Jay was careful in a telephone interview, saying she was not an expert, noting she had had limited reading time and, while intimately familiar with Disappearing Moon Café, she had not read it for a while. But she said Gold Mountain Blues did make her feel “alarm.”

“I’m not ready to say this author is a plagiarist,” she says. “At this point I’m saying it’s ‘problematic.’ ”

At the same time, says Jay, she has “a lot of sympathy” for Zhang.

“It must be a nightmare for the author to be going through this if she’s innocent,” she says.

Borders on the brink, but Kobo continues to grow

A year ago, in the week following Christmas, Canadian publishers and distributors were greeted with the dismaying news that one of the country’s leading bookstore chains, McNally Robinson Booksellers, was significantly scaling back its operations, closing down locations in Toronto and Saskatoon Winnipeg. This year, a retail shakeup on an even bigger scale is taking place in the U.S., where the future of the bookselling chain Borders, which operates 676 bookstores across the U.S., is in question.

Late last week, the Ann Arbor, Michigan–based chain announced it is delaying payments to some of its vendors in an attempt to restructure its debt. The news set off investor panic, resulting in the company’s share price falling by 22 per cent on Friday.

Now, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that at least one major vendor, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group (which owns the distributor National Book Network) has temporarily suspended shipments to the retail chain. Other publishing companies, including Hachette Book Group and Sourcebooks, are also reported to be considering similar options. From the WSJ:

“When a customer of that size calls you up and says you aren’t getting a check, that’s a piece of information you have to act on,” said Jed Lyons, CEO of Rowman & Littlefield.

Mr. Lyons said he wanted more information from Borders and expected to learn more from the bookseller this week. “Up until now they’d been paying us like clockwork,” he said.

[...]

Mr. Lyons said that about a year ago, National Book Network approached its clients and said that if they wanted their books distributed to Borders, they would have to assume the risk associated with that business. Most clients, he added, responded by saying they wanted to continue shipping to Borders.

Borders is the U.S. retail partner for Kobo, the Indigo-owned e-book company, which nevertheless put a rosy spin on its holiday numbers. In a press release, Kobo reported that it had its best weekend ever on Christmas and Boxing Day, and that the number of registered Kobo users had nearly doubled since mid-November.

“Earlier this month we predicted that Christmas would be a record breaker for Kobo, and we have exceeded our expectations driving several ebook downloads per second since Christmas Eve, or an equivalent number hardcover books stacked as high as 50 Empire State Buildings [sic],”  Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis said in the release. Kobo also noted that it had experienced some of its biggest gains outside North America, in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Singapore.

Books of the Year 2010: Non-fiction

There’s no formula for choosing the books of the year. Some break ground, some tackle familiar themes with new energy. Some represent the best work from established authors, some introduce us to important new voices. And some are simply in-house favourites we feel deserve a little more attention. Here are the non-fiction books that made the most impact in 2010. (more…)

Amazon, Indigo compete for lowest shipping charges

Yesterday, Amazon.ca announced that it was immediately lowering its “Super Saver Shipping” threshold – the amount customers have to spend to receive free shipping – from $39 to $25. “With the Holidays fast approaching, we felt this was the perfect time to give an early gift to our customers,” said Amazon.ca director John Nemeth in a press release.

The announcement clearly had an impact on Indigo CEO Heather Reisman, who began promoting a similar reduction on her company’s homepage today. Stay tuned to see if Amazon responds with yet another reduction.

No to dead-parent narration?

Generations of pre-J.K. Rowling books described kids acting (mostly) without adult supervision. Among other KidLit classics, characters from Peter Pan, Pippi Longstocking, and The Chronicles of Narnia often had at least one missing parent.

But Leila Sales, a children’s book editor at Penguin Young Readers Group, is speaking out against the ever-growing “ol’ dead dad syndrome” in KidLit. In a Publishers Weekly column, Sales describes the approach as “lazy writing,” offering a quasi-Oscar Wilde quote: “‘To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose a parent in nearly every children’s book looks like lazy writing.’ (I assume that is what Wilde meant.).”

Sales argues that by killing off parents, authors decrease the number of characters, make readers instantly sympathetic, and avoid boring adult subjects. Later she writes:

Dead parents will always have their place in children’s literature. If your book is set at an orphanage, then I would hope you include a lot of dead parents. Or if a book is about a teen coping with the recent death of her mother, then, you know, her mother should have recently died. But when authors omit parents for the sake of convenience, I take issue — as an editor, and as a reader. Because a convenient story is not the same as a good story.

Why “likeable” characters aren’t important

Lazy reviewers – often online reader-reviewers – tend to be deeply concerned about whether or not a character is “likeable” and use this as the foundation of their overall critique of a book. Laura Miller skewers this propensity in an article for Salon‘s reading club:

I confess, I’ve grown to hate such remarks. It makes me feel like we’re all back in grammar school, talking about which kids are “nice” and which kids are “mean.” It’s a willfully naive and blinkered way to approach a work of literature.

James Wood, in his book How Fiction Works, wrote that this complaint implies that “artists should not ask us to try to understand characters we cannot approve of — or not until after they have firmly and unequivocally condemned them.” That we might recognize a character’s unappealing qualities while simultaneously seeing life through her eyes, “and that this moving out of ourselves into realms beyond our daily experience might be a moral and sympathetic education of its own kind,” doesn’t seem to occur to far too many readers. Wood calls this sort of criticism, so common in Amazon reader reviews, a “contagion of moralizing niceness.”

The Salon reading club is currently discussing (what else?) Freedom. Miller describes her feelings about one of the main characters:

Patty is not nice. She does some bad things, and she can be grouchy and bitter. I wouldn’t necessarily want her as a friend, but then that’s not really an option because she’s not a real person. She’s a literary character — which means it’s not imperative that we take a moral stance on every single thing she does. Literature is an experiment of the imagination, and if we don’t try to leave behind our contemporary compulsion to pass judgment on everything and everyone when we enter into that experiment, then we are the ones who lose out.