A big week for the little guys

Rogers Writers’ Trust selects small-press gems

“K.D. Miller has been writing some of the best stories in the country for more than two decades, but few have noticed up to now,” Dan Wells, the publisher at Biblioasis, says in an email after learning that K.D. Miller’s All Saints is a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize for Fiction. “It’s gratifying that we’ve been able to finally get her some of the attention she’s long deserved.”

The finalists for the prize were announced on Wednesday morning in Toronto’s Ben McNally Books. Miller’s All Saints joins fellow small-press titles Girl Runner by Carrie Snyder (House of Anansi) and Coach House Books’ Pastoral by André Alexis. Miriam Toews’ Giller-longlisted All My Puny Sorrows and Steven Galloway’s The Confabulist, both on Knopf Canada, round out the shortlist.

“We were taken a bit by surprise,” Alana Wilcox, editorial director of Coach House Books, said over the phone about the announcement. “We all had hoped this would be on the shortlist because it deserves to be.” Alexis’s Pastoral was called “a virtually flawless novel” by the jury, composed this year of Neil Bissoondath, Helen Humphreys and George Murray.

At the conference, Humphreys assured me that the jury had no agenda. “The word for this particular jury is cohesive — these are just the books we all loved,” she said. The Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize for fiction awards each finalist with $2,500, and the big winner takes home a total of $25,000. The five finalists were chosen from 127 books submitted to the award by 52 publishers. That three of the five would be published on different Canadian indies is noteworthy; in previous years, the finalists have typically been published by larger publishing houses, with one or perhaps two small presses titles on the list.

“I believe we’ve been doing really excellent work at the small press level, and it’s nice to see some recognition,” Wilcox says over the phone, when asked about this year’s shortlist overall. Wells echoed the sentiment, saying that the moral support that a nomination can give to a writer is the most significant element of a prize nomination, “getting that small nod restores a bit of faith, helps keep you going. We all need it from time to time.”

Of course, there’s also the hope that it sells some books. Noah Genner, president of BookNet Canada, a sales tracking service that analyzes data from the Canadian publishing industry, said that sales of the collective shortlist from last year’s Rogers Writers’ Trust prize rose 191% over two weeks after the finalists were announced. “There are always a lot of factors that affect sales of a book — availability, price, title competition, media mentions, etc. — and awards are one of these factors,” Genner told me by email. “It is sometimes difficult to isolate an increase, or decrease, in sales to a specific event, or series of events.”

“All Saints is actually selling pretty well thus far: we were likely going to reprint it anyway,” Wells says. “But this nomination means that we’ll be reprinting immediately.”

Wilcox is preparing to attend the Frankfurt International Book Fair, and she thinks that Pastoral’s nomination might improve the book’s chances of selling well on the foreign market. A prize nomination also gives a book a second media life at home.

Pastoral, Wilcox says, “was a spring title, so it’s a nice chance to bring it back into the spotlight. I know our sales reps are talking to Indigo right now, so hopefully it’ll get a little more attention.” The nomination comes at a particularly good time for Alexis and Wilcox, she says, because she’s already “working with André on his next book, for spring, right now. So it’s a nice way to go into that, to have this nomination sitting there.”

The winner will be announced on Nov. 4, at a ceremony where the Writers’ Trust awards ten prizes in total, including the Hilary Weston Prize for NonFiction, the McClelland and Stewart Journey Prize, and the brand new Latner Prize for Poetry. It’s one the richest literary prize nights in Canada, awarding $139,000 in total to writers across genres.

Wells is cautiously optimistic about the outcome. “I think the nomination will result in hundreds of more copies, at the very least, reaching the right hands,” he says. “And from there, who can tell?”