UPDATE: Read here for good news on the funding for the Literary Press Group.
If your main goal were to get Canadian books into Canadian hands and you had a sales force who had just logged a year of significant growth, would you fire them?
Probably not. But that’s in essence what the federal Canadian Heritage Department has done to the Literary Press Group, an association representing small but influential English-language publishers across the country, with its recent denial of the outfit’s annual Canadian Book Fund grant.
The expected $200,000 would have supported promotion of 224 books released by 47 publishers like Insomniac Press, ECW and Coach House. But now they’ve been left scrambling to make up the shortfall, which turns out to be retroactive to April.
“Throughout the previous 20-plus years of our existence,” LPG head Jack Illingworth tells me, “there has always been a process of consultation well ahead of time with the government. But in the past year and a half, that’s changed. It’s very troubling.”
David Carron, co-publisher at ECW Press, one of my publishers, puts it differently. “You need six months as a publisher to redeploy new sales representation [for a new book], and to be told that you have minus two months to do that just doesn’t work.”
So what’s going on?
For some, it’s very tempting to see the rearing of the Stephen Harper agenda. Last year, for instance, when the ministry pulled its grant to the SummerWorks theatre festival, many believed a controversial play was the cause. (The festival recently had its funding restored.)
But if the LPG has committed some “offence,” it’s not at all obvious what it might be. If there’s any logic behind this, no one at Heritage is forthcoming.
Maybe it’s just a random way of making Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s point that arts organizations shouldn’t set their budgets on the assumption that they’ll get government funds. Who knows?
Repeated queries to the ministry have gone unanswered. Whatever the reasoning, one thing seems certain: without heroic fiscal efforts by the LPG this year, considerably fewer titles will find their way into Canadian homes.
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