Publishers and Writers as Polar Bears in a Melting Digital Landscape

By Maurice Mierau

The Internet began accidentally as an experiment by the US military on how to survive a nuclear war with your communication systems intact, then Al Gore did something no one quite remembers, and after that the ironically named Shawn Fanning invented Napster in his dorm room, in 1999, which led directly to everyone getting their tunes for nothing, and to the state of climate change the publishing industry now finds itself in.

In 2010, I’d spent two years as editor of Enfield & Wizenty, a Winnipeg publisher of short stories and novels. The founder of E&W and its parent company Great Plains, Gregg Shilliday, was worried about the fact that in just two years book reviews of Canadian fiction had become a vanishing species. Whereas in the old days ca. 2008 or before, when any half-respectable press could count on their books getting reviewed at some length in major newspapers and a few literary magazines, suddenly we had to spend hours of marketing time to trigger one or two short reviews, typically sloppy, and filled with received ideas.

During this period the Globe and Mail, Canada’s self-proclaimed national newspaper, killed its stand-alone book review section, as did most North American newspapers. The Globe lost an audience of over 100,000 for their books section, and replaced it with the occasional spectacle of the Toronto-rati blurbing one another in the absurdly named Focus section. [The best 2009 commentary is here.] Features on books in the Globe, as of fall 2012, consisted of numbered lists with big pictures of celebrity authors. However, the newspaper has just hired a young, highly regarded books editor and I’m always willing to hope. The National Post’s online books page under editor Mark Medley also makes me feel more optimistic.

Meanwhile the CBC has conspicuously failed to fill the books coverage gap, and there isn’t one book critic left in this country who makes a living plying her trade. And don’t get me started about prize culture as a replacement for intelligent writing about books.

Perhaps it was stupid for an obscure Winnipeg publisher like us to worry about the disappearance of book reviewing; reviews represent, after all, only a bunch of people talking about print culture. And yet that discussion matters a great deal to publishers, to writers, and most importantly, to readers. As one of Oscar Wilde’s characters said, “the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” The talk is really, in the hands of a competent reviewer, a carefully staged argument with oneself, staged for the benefit of readers who believe that something in the argument actually matters.

In short, Gregg Shilliday and I talked like this so much that we decided to start an online magazine devoted to book reviews. Quixotically, we’d avoid reviewing our own books. We invested some of our own small press money in design and infrastructure, and launched The Winnipeg Review at the end of 2010 as a web blog about books. In the two years since starting, we’ve published over 200 book reviews, mostly of Canadian fiction. We’ve also published many of Canada’s leading poets, interviews with writers, cultural journalism, satire, new fiction, and book excerpts, and in the process we’ve built an audience of about 3,000 unique visitors per month.

Since 2010 the most redundant piece of jargon to emerge in publishing has been the term “discoverability.” Discoverability refers to the problem of customers finding your books, especially on-line. The jargon coincides with the widespread disappearance of bookstores, book reviews, the decline of book sales, and the increasing proliferation of self-published books that no one reads.

Like many other writers and publishers I sit here today on my ice floe wondering what the hell happens next. I’m now associate publisher as part of my job, and I get to watch the water temperatures rising. Will ebooks save the industry? Not in their current form, sterile, aesthetically boring, and cheap: ideal for the Fifty Shades products, and heavily marketed genre books or Oprah picks. But so far no one buys small press titles for their Kindle.

Tablet applications have the potential to reproduce not only some of the aesthetic experience of reading a book, but also to create a new reader experience entirely, as demonstrated by the rare success in this area such as Touch Press’s The Wasteland for the iPad.

While I’m grateful that the Canada Council helps support the 2013 publishing program of The Winnipeg Review, we need more of everything: more writers, more editorial vision, more readers, more technical innovation, more institutional collaborators, more advertisers. Today I’m looking for dance partners as ungainly and oddly entrepreneurial as the magazine itself. People like Struan Sinclair at the University of Manitoba have made the first step in sending us creative writing students who are eager to contribute to keeping this bit of ice afloat. Dancing on our boat is a matter of improvisation and I like it that way.

—originally presented as a talk at the University of Manitoba’s “Life in the Infosphere” colloquium, March 4, 2013