Small book publishers need a work ethic built on the love of the job and the desire to offer premier works of language.

"I think anyone who gets involved in literary publishing must love language, the acquisition of language and language's limits, first and foremost," says Beth Follett, publisher of Pedlar Press in Toronto, who answered questions by e-mail.

"To stay involved, one must have a deep and abiding love and commitment to the act of writing."

Follett began Pedlar Press as a one-woman operation in 1996 and has published 35 titles since, five of them in 2005.

Photo courtesy of S. Dragland
Pedlar Press publisher Beth Follett started the company as a one-woman operation.

A company selling less than $500,000 in books annually is considered a small publisher in Canada, says Marg Anne Morrison, director of the Organization of Book Publishers of Ontario (OBPO).

"That's a difference between Canada and the States," Morrison says. "In the States, a small publisher is a publisher who sells under $5 million worth of books per year. In Canada, that would be considered a big publisher."

The OBPO was started in 1990 and represents its members through co-operative marketing efforts, professional development and government lobbying toward the common goals of the publishers.

Morrison says 50 to 55 publishers belong to the OBPO.

Pedlar Press is a member of the OBPO, as is another Toronto publisher, Coach House Books. Coach House began publishing in 1965, but closed in 1996. It reopened a year later and has continued publishing books since then.

"All the records pre-1996 are gone, but you could say we've published hundreds," says editor-in-chief Alana Wilcox. Coach House published 15 books in 2005.

According to the Ontario Media Development Corp.'s (OMDC) website, 243 book publishers were based in Ontario of the 627 in Canada in 2001, the most recent year for which statistics are available. The OMDC is an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Culture.

"The Canada Council for the Arts has guidelines that distinguish between an 'emerging' publisher and a press that is more established. About six of our publishers are emerging," Literary Press Group (LPG) executive director Ronda Kellington said in an e-mail.

"However, by industry standards, almost all LPG publishers would be considered small when you compare them to M&S (McClelland & Stewart) and Penguin, etc. But we prefer to not think of ourselves as small, but as independent."

LPG, which has 51 members, has a mandate to help book publishers across the country and, like OBPO, it offers sales and marketing services to Canadian literary publishers, as well as doing advocacy work on their behalf.

Pedlar Press and Coach House Books both belong to LPG, as well as OBPO.

Biblioasis, a book-publishing house in Windsor, is an emerging publisher in Ontario. Founder Dan Wells says Biblioasis actually began as a bookstore in 1998 and continues to operate as one today.

"We started talking about publishing maybe in 2002, but our first book came out (in 2004)," Wells says.

"By most standards we're still only about 14 months old. In the last year, we've done five full-length trade books and we've published six chap (small, inexpensive) books as well," he says.

One of the writers Biblioasis has published is poet Goran Simic. "(Simic) was probably the most prominent poet in Eastern Europe before the war in Bosnia. He emigrated to Canada about 10 years ago," Wells says.

The OBPO's Morrison says there are key issues that affect big and small publishers in Ontario.

"High returns from the bookstores have been a problem over the past few years; also insufficient government grants," she says. "When there's a change of government at either the provincial or federal level, that can be a little bit scary because it can affect the granting program."

Though the high book returns may suggest fewer books are being purchased, Morrison says it's hard to know for sure.

"StatsCan kind of reports an increase in book buying, but it's so uneven across the board. Although I'd say there's had to have been a little bit of a drop, just simply because of the competition from the electronics, with people having access to computers. And then there's digital TV. It's all competition for the book; the printed word," she says.

However, the emergence of e-book technology doesn't cause much fear among publishers or their supporting organizations.

Wells says: "I'm somewhat skeptical of (e-books). I'm a fan of print on paper. It might grow in popularity if they can find a better way to present it and make it look more like a traditional book. Most people I know, if they have to read more than a page or two on a computer screen, print it out."

Morrison says: "They haven't quite taken off the way we feared they might about 10 years ago. What's important is to have a web presence for your company. Maybe put little excerpts from your books on the web or a chapter here or there."

A web presence can be an important marketing tool for book publishers, especially smaller ones who find it difficult to get their name out to the public because of lower budgets and fewer available resources.

Marketing is "probably where we're lacking a little bit at the moment," Wells says. "We're using the design and the appearance of our books in many ways to help do that.

"And we've got a lot of praise for that so far. And I think it's helped bring us to the attention of writers and readers that may not have noticed us otherwise."

"We try to do something different with every book," Wilcox says.

"Because Coach House has a printing press inhouse, we can print little things that attract attention. We've made a fake prescription pad, a do-it-yourself origami boat, postcards and things like that. We also do a lot of author touring, sending them around the country to do readings."

Says Follett, "My financial resources are extremely limited. I believe deeply in word-of-mouth publicity and I have seen how public awareness of Pedlar has grown because of it. Also: quality always sells."

Follett says it costs about $8,000 for Pedlar Press to print 1,000 units. Wilcox says it can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $100,000 depending on the quality and the number of books in the print run.

Wells says he has considered including an audio CD of one of his authors reading his poems with the book. However, the use of another medium may not be financially viable for small publishers.

"It can be an investment in something that will just sit in the warehouse unless they have the proper access to the sales channels for those things," Morrison says. "Generally, niche publishing is a good way to go if you're small. Find a niche and stick with it."

Kellington says: "The book is a remarkable technology and its demise has been foretold many times, but it's still here.

Most publishers are aware of technology issues, but primarily it's seen as a way to better promote the paper and ink version of the product currently, not to replace it."

(Dave Richie can be reached at richie@businessedge.ca)