Industry news
Indie booksellers name Annabel Lyon as Giller favourite
If indie booksellers could pick the winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, it would be Annabel Lyon stepping up to the podium Tuesday night. Of the dozen or so booksellers contacted by Q&Q this week, most said they would prefer to see Lyon’s The Golden Mean take the prize, but that they expect Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault to win instead.
“I expect Michaels to win, but the response [to her book] has been fairly muted here,” said Michael Hamm, book buyer for Halifax’s Bookmark. Meanwhile, The Golden Mean – which Hamm calls “the underdog gem” – has been selling like crazy. “We ran out after [the Giller and Governor General’s Award] noms, so now we’re stocking it in plentiful quantities.”
Dave Worsley, a staffer at Words Worth Books in Waterloo, also guesses that Michaels will win, but declares a personal preference for Lyon. He’s been a fan of hers since her 2000 short story collection Oxygen, which he still hand sells to this day. “I would also love to see Kim Echlin win it,” Worsley added, explaining that Echlin’s The Disappeared was the inaugural pick for the store’s monthly book club, which debuted last summer.
Other booksellers who named Lyon as their personal favourite include Samantha Holmes, co-owner of Bolen Books in Victoria; Joanne Saul, co-owner of Type Books in Toronto; and Janet North, owner of Westminster Books in Fredericton. Dave Hill, manager of Munro’s Book Store in Victoria, admitted he hadn’t read any of the shortlisted titles – “I don’t get the sense there’s a great deal of excitement surrounding any of them,” he said – but he noted that Lyon’s book probably deserves to win just by the sheer fact of being on so many award lists (she’s been nominated for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize as well) and by the notable spike in sales. “We had to scramble to get more copies of it after the nomination,” he said.
Not everyone is a Lyon advocate, though. Both Chris Hall, book buyer for McNally Robinson in Winnipeg, and Richard Bachmann, owner of A Different Drummer in Burlington, Ontario, would prefer to see Michaels take the prize. “She should win, as she’s got a longer track record,” said Hall, adding that Giller juries do tend to reward more established authors. Bachmann, meanwhile, calls The Winter Vault “very deserving” and “properly difficult.” “It’s not a book you read casually, but that’s as it should be,” he said. If Michaels were to win, added Bachmann, it would have an added benefit for him, as Michaels is slated to do a reading in his store this Thursday alongside John Bemrose.
In terms of sales, most of the booksellers we spoke to said the Lyon title has been the only one of the five Giller nominees to clearly benefit from the media attention. (The Winter Vault has done well, but most of its sales came last spring, when the book debuted. ) Several booksellers noted modest but steady sales for Echlin’s book and for Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man, but sales of the latter were reported as stronger out East, likely due to the book’s Maritime content.
Sales of Colin McAdam’s Fall, meanwhile, don’t seem to have received much of a boost. According to Chris Hall, it is easily the slowest-selling title on the Giller shortlist, performing not unlike McAdam’s last title, Some Great Thing. “We stocked [Some Great Thing] three times due to the good word of mouth, and each time, we kept having to send it back,” Hall said.
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