MAKING AN IMPRINT
SOME CANADIAN AUTHORS ARE BYPASSING THE OLD GUARD FOR A NEW KIND OF SELF-PUBLISHING
So you baked sourdough bread during the first COVID-19 lockdown of 2020?
Cute.
With unexpected downtime on his hands, Sault Ste. Marie orthopedic surgeon Graham Elder knocked off the first draft of a novella in five weeks. Self-published via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) in June, A COVID Odyssey is Book No. 1 in a trilogy of medical thrillers, two of which are already selling on Amazon.
Similarly, Toronto’s James Wysotski hopes to go viral with his debut novel After the Next Pandemic. Written after he was laid off from his communications job, it’s the first instalment in his self-published Survivor Series trilogy.
It seems the writing bug is catching, and modern authors are bypassing the traditional slow route to publication. For Canada’s premier self-publisher, Victoria-based Friesenpress, business is booming.
“It’s been insane,” says Friesenpress president Tammara Kennelly. “I don’t think I’ve stopped hiring this entire year.”
The employee-owned company has grown from about 40 core staff to 55 and counting. Its stable of freelancers has also grown exponentially, to about 100, and Kennelly is still hiring editors and illustrators.
Since the lease on the company’s headquarters expired at the same time staff started working at home last spring, it is now a fully remote workplace, with a nationwide talent pool.
In July 2019, Friesenpress had a joint celebration to mark its 10th year in business and its 5,000th title. Two years later, it’s closing in on 10,000 titles. Kennelly figures it will reach that milestone at the end of this year, or early in 2022.
Owned by Friesens Corp., one of North America’s top printers for traditional publishers, Friesenpress was the awkward outsider of the industry 10 years ago. Publishing peers looked down their noses at Kennelly, and when she took the helm in 2013, Friesenpress was a sinking ship.
Not anymore. Traditional publishers have seen the light. Some, like old-guard firm Simon & Schuster, have launched their own self-publishing imprints. But in Canada, Friesenpress is the biggest of them all.
Kennelly says there are many benefits, for writers and for readers. For starters, writers keep a greater portion of royalties from sales, and they don’t have to wait two or three years until they fit into a publisher’s schedule. By the same token, readers’ choices aren’t confined to a limited number of annual releases.
Friesenpress clients include renowned cookbook author Rose Reisman and journalist Victor Malarek (Orphanage 41), both of whom have worked with traditional publishers in the past, as well as Alain Frenchy, whose bio was adapted for the movie Target No. 1, in which Josh Hartnett played — wait for it — Victor Malarek.
The company offers several service packages, starting with a $2,000 entrylevel bundle that includes an editor’s manuscript evaluation, custom layout and cover, print and digital distribution, a marketing tool kit and nitty-gritty items like obtaining an international standard book number (ISBN) and bar code.
Children’s book packages are slightly different and may include custom illustration.
Counsellor and mental-health first aid instructor Lucy Sloan turned to Friesenpress to publish her first children’s book, Cindy and Cristabelle’s Big Scare, inspired by two real-life fainting goats who live on her Lil’ Steps Miniatures and Wellness Farm in St. Malo, Man.
“Cindy and Cristabelle are anxious goats,” she says. “Cristabelle faints quite often.”
Luckily, a pig named Wilbert helps to ease their fears in the book, first published in 2019. Friesenpress provides a consultant who acts as a guide throughout the process, and Sloan says she learned enough to strike out on her own for her next Lil’ Steps book. Inspired by a real-life goose and sheep who were close friends, it will deal with death and other forms of loss — missing hugs and school friends during the pandemic, for example.
Not surprisingly, real and imagined pandemics are hot topics right now.
In Wysotski’s case, COVID presented a way to tie together several elements of a post-apocalyptic story that had been percolating for some time. At 49, the married father of two teens says it also presented a prime opportunity to pursue a lifelong ambition.
“This dream of mine of writing a novel had always been pushed aside.”
Now, he and his artist brother David Wysotski have achieved a goal they set as teens, of completing a book and having David create the cover illustration.
Wysotski hired a freelance editor to polish his manuscript, which he published on KDP, following the advice of friend J.L. Madore, a prolific author of paranormal romance novels. As part of the deal, the book can be sold only via Amazon for the duration of renewable 90day contracts.
Wysotski figures if he can upload a new book every 90 days or so, he can develop a following and write fulltime. To that end, he expects to publish two more sci-novels before the second book in the Survivor Series is uploaded this fall.
Elder isn’t new to post-apocalyptic fiction, either. He and a New Yorkbased friend from med school, Laura Cody, have been serious writing partners since 2015. They share a website at twodocswriting. com, where they post stories from their Epsilon Project, about the surreal fallout after solar flares knock out global electrical grids.
The protagonist of his COVID-19 books is a smalltown doctor in northern Ontario whose wife is trapped in Florida at the onset of the pandemic.
When she is infected, he embarks on a rescue mission to the U.S. In the second book, he’s off to England in search of a cure.
“I got this idea of writing about a pandemic during a pandemic,” Elder says, adding the third book is on hold until he sees how the real-world drama plays out.
Having the ability to self-publish was a “tremendous advantage,” he says. The first book was online last June and the second book achieved KDP bestseller status after it went live this April.
Kennelly says writing during a pandemic can be just what the doctor ordered.
“She encourages anyone with an idea for a book — whether it’s a personal keepsake for your grandchildren or the great Canadian novel — to give it a shot.
“Writing is so cathartic and therapeutic,” she says. “Writers second-guess themselves too much. Just do it — get going and see where it takes you.”