A quickly assembled home team in the Canadian book publishers industry has claimed victory over the so-called “Toronto multinational book factories” with a deal to bring out another 40,000 copies of The Sentimentalists, Johanna Skibsrud’s largely unavailable, Giller Prize-winning novel.
Under the terms negotiated between tiny Gaspereau Press of Nova Scotia and Vancouver-based publisher Douglas & McIntyre, the Friesens Corp. of Altona, Man., has agreed to print a new paperback edition by this Friday. “Because of the urgency of the situation, we will pull out all the stops,” Friesens sales manager Doug Symington said.
The deal brings “three proudly independent Canadian entities” together to solve the crisis that emerged when Skibsrud’s unheralded debut novel won Canada’s most prestigious literary award, according to publisher Scott McIntyre. “With our sales, marketing and distribution system onside, an exceptional novel will quickly reach the wide audience it deserves,” he added.
The books should be available for sale early next week, according to McIntyre. Printed in paperback with a pumped-up cover image and the signature red sticker of a Giller Prize winner (as well as the Douglas & MacIntyre Book Publisher imprint on the spine), they will sell for $19.95 compared with the original edition’s $27.95 cover price.
Booksellers snapped up the entire new edition within hours of its being announced, according to McIntyre, and Friesens is reserving paper stock to print another 20,000.
Gaspereau Press made headlines across the country last week when it turned away Toronto publishers eager to bring out more copies of the award-winning book, which it had hand-printed in an edition of 800 copies and was reproducing at a rate of 1,000 copies a week even after it won the award. But even as the company attempted to justify the go-slow approach, calling the Giller win “an interesting opportunity to slow the world down a hair and let people realize that good books don’t go stale,” Gaspereau co-publisher Andrew Steeves was negotiating a new deal with Douglas & McIntyre.
“D&M had always been my back-pocket doomsday scenario,” Steeves said yesterday, adding, “I was as surprised as anyone when we actually won.” He added that the company will continue producing its deluxe edition with a wrapper printed on a hand-cranked letterpress.
Both publishers emphasized the advantage of the new deal to Skibsrud, who had remained quiet last week while her publisher vowed not to compromise its principles by selling large quantities of her novel to an eager public.
It was patience well rewarded, the author wrote yesterday in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail from Istanbul, where she is vacationing. Admitting that she “doesn’t have much knowledge or interest in the business end of things,” Skibsrud said she was “so glad that a solution has been arrived at that allows the books to be distributed widely without sacrificing any of Gaspereau Press’s practices and ideals, which make them so unique and special to work with.”
Even Friesens, a $70-million, can-do book manufacturer, is sympathetic with the Nova Scotians. “I get where they’re coming from and I can also somewhat understand the Toronto-versus-the-rest-of-the-world mentality that they’re showing,” Symington said, adding that Friesens and Gaspereau are a good philosophical fit.
“We’ve been around for 103 years, we’re employee-owned, we’re a privately held company, so all the staff out here has a high concern and a high regard for books,” he said. “We’re big, but we’re not so big, so to speak.”
The book is such a “cause célèbre it will just shoot out of the gate,” McIntyre predicted, saying that opinion on the matter
Add a CommentBlog: Schiel & Denver Book Publishers Blog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Book Publisher, Book Publishers, Steig Larsson, book publishing, LA Times, Add a tag
Massive, worldwide success often remains a bit enigmatic, but this book publishers breakthrough seemed especially unlikely. The first novel begins with the dull thud of a family tree full of foreign names: The book starts slowly — digging into arcane corporate finances — and the ensuing novels get longer, sometimes nearly skidding to a halt while recounting the structure of a government bureau. The books’ politics are radical-feminist and anti-capitalist left, they’re set in a country most Americans have never visited and the prose is translated, at times inelegantly. They’re certainly, in a days of declining attention spans, not taut.
But Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy has become the book publishing companies phenomenon of the young century, with international sales exceeding 45 million. Three films have been produced in Larsson’s native Sweden — the trilogy’s conclusion, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” will be released here Friday — and David Fincher has begun shooting a big-budget Hollywood version starring Daniel Craig.
Larsson’s books have managed, in the 25 months since the first novel’s U.S. publication, to go through almost 200 printings here. “That’s crazy!” says Paul Bogaards, spokesman for Alfred A. Knopf. “The category leaders in thrillers or mysteries take years to get there, if they get there at all.”
Financially, Larsson’s success has few parallels in book publishing. Other authors have sold in the millions, but none has sold as many as quickly as Larsson has. His book publisher estimates that by year’s end, they will have sold 15 million copies in 2010, or roughly the equivalent of recent works by John Grisham, Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer and Stephen King combined.
The books, Bogaards says, “have had a significant impact on our bottom line. The series has exceeded all projections; indeed, it blew all the models to bits.”
And Larsson has managed to do it without a single bookstore signing, author appearance or Charlie Rose interview: He died at 50, in 2004, not long after turning in the manuscripts for the three books. So what’s going on here?
“The truth is, I’m not sure, either,” Knopf Doubleday chairman Sonny Mehta says when asked about the enigma of the novels’ broad popularity. “It raises my spirits to see that people can go crazy about a set of books.”
The series, which was a sensation in Scandinavia — selling several million copies in Sweden alone — years before translation into English, has dominated bestseller lists across much of Europe. With the addition of Mongolia and Georgia, Larsson’s books are now in print in 46 countries, and have begun to make inroads in Taiwan (350,000 copies sold so far), Japan, China and South Korea.
The books had already become huge hits in Sweden when Mehta was handed a rough translation of the first novel at the 2007 Frankfurt Book Fair.
“It was the complexity of the thing,” Mehta, a longtime reader of crime fiction, says of what grabbed him. “Sort of an ambition.”
Complex, ambitious novels don’t always strike a chord with American readers, especially those from Europe. The trilogy’s central installment, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” became the first translated work to debut at the top of the New York Times bestseller list in more than 25 years.
Knopf has long published Larsson’s fellow Swede Henning Mankell — whose grim police procedurals have an international following — and Maj Sjöwall and
Add a Comment
By: Jason Boog,
on 2/26/2008
Blog: ThePublishingSpot (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: book reviews, Publishing Spotted, Steve Bryant, LA Times, Video Storytelling, Add a tag
Can you spot a bad memoir from 100-yards away? If you are going to be a writer, you need to recognize your bad writing just as quickly your best writing.
With that in mind, John Coyne reflects on years of experience as editor of Peace Corps Writers and as a novelist, identifying surefire signs that a writer needs more editing:
"What I see at PeaceCorpsWriters are a lot of self-published books that have very limited value and aren't well written. For example, some RPCVs think that they can collect all those letters home, slap them together, add a few grainy black-and-white-photos, and have a book. Rarely, are those Letters Home worth reading...you really have to be a pretty good writer to make a book like that of interest to anyone beyond you and your family."
How else can you hone your critical reading abilities? By reading the best critics in the best book sections. I'm happy to report that our book blogging friend, Pinky Paperhaus, just joined the online staff at the LA Times, bringing together a great critic and a great book section.
Finally, when your writing radar is really strong, test it out on these strange, fascinating web videos with intentionally bad writing.
By: Gina MarySol Ruiz,
on 3/2/2007
Blog: AmoxCalli (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: finalists, LA Times, Book prizes, Add a tag
Link to the Times announcement.
BIOGRAPHY
Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday)
Rodney Bolt, The Librettist ofVenice: The Remarkable Life of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Mozart's Poet, Casanova's Friend, and Italian Opera's Impresario in America (Bloomsbury)
Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Alfred A. Knopf)
Jeffrey Goldberg, Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide (Alfred A. Knopf)
Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
CURRENT INTEREST
Douglas Brinkley, The Great Deluge: Hurricaine Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast (William Morrow)
Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Random House)
Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone (Alfred A. Knopf)
Alicia Drake, The Beautiful Fall: Lagerfield, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris (Little, Brown)
Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
FICTION
David Mitchell, Black Swan Green (Random House)
Peter Orner, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown)
Susan Straight, A Million Nightingales (Pantheon)
Daniel Woodrell, Winter's Bone (Little, Brown)
A.B. Yehoshua, A Woman in Jerusalem -- translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin (Hacourt)
ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD for FIRST FICTION
Tony D'Souza, Whiteman (Harcourt)
Lisa Fugard, Skinner's Drift (Scribner)
Jennifer Gilmore, Golden Country (Scribner)
Alice Greenway, White Ghost Girls (Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic)
Janice Cooke Newman, Mary (MacAdam/Cage)
HISTORY
Taylor Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968 (S&S)
Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West (Penguin Press)
Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War (Viking)
John Tayman, The Colony (Lisa Drew/Scribner)
Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Alfred A. Knopf)
MYSTERY/THRILLER
Michael Connelly, Echo Park (Litle, Brown)
Patrick Neate, City of Tiny Lights (Riverhead)
George Pelecanos, The Night Gardener (Little, Brown)
Jess Walter, The Zero (HarperCollins)
Don Winslow, The Winter of Frankie Machine (Alfred A. Knopf)
POETRY
Erin Belieu, Black Box (Copper Canyon Press)
Adrian C. Louis, Logorrhea (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press)
Thom Satterless, Burning Wyclf (Texas Tech University Press)
Frederick Seidel, Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Michael Waters, Darling Vulgarity (BOA Editions)
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Joyce E. Chaplin, The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (Basic Books)
Ann Gibbons, The First Human: the Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors (Doubelday)
Eric R. Kandel, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (W.W. Norton)Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (Dutton)Edward O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (W.W. Norton)
YOUNG ADULT FICTION
M.T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party (Candlewick Press)
Coe Booth, Tyrell (Push/Scholastic)
John Green, An Abundance of Katherines (Dutton Books/Penguin Books for Young Readers)Meg Rosoff, Just in Case (Wendy Lamb Books/Random House)
Nancy Werlin, The Rules of Survival (Dial Books/Penguin Young Readers Group)
ROBERT KIRSCH AWARD -- William Kittredge
Good luck to all the finalists!