Winning their way to the top?
The relationship between book sales and Canada’s most prestigious literary awards is an inexact science at best, writes Vit Wagner
This much we already know about the winner of the 2005 Scotiabank Giller Prize, which will be handed out tomorrow during a televised, black tie gala in the Regency Ballroom of the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto: odds are it’s the first time many Canadians will have heard the lucky author’s name.
There is no Atwood among the nominees. No Munro or Mistry or Urquhart or Ondaatje or David Adams Richards. The same is true of this year’s Governor General’s Award for English- language fiction, to bestowed in Montreal on Nov. 16. And while that might make it harder for pundits to predict the outcome, it likely foreshadows a more significant boost in profile and sales for the eventual winners — at least in relative terms — than it would if the victors were already famous.
“Golda Fried and Charlotte Gill and those people have zero profile,” says Ben McNally, manager of the Toronto bookstore Nicholas Hoare, commenting on a Governor General’s short list that also includes Joseph Boyden, David Gilmour and Kathy Page.
“ The fact that their books are actually on a list gives them a boost they wouldn’t otherwise get.
“ And the winner of the Giller is probably going to do really well in terms of sales because none of the Canadian fiction books have been selling particularly well going into the announcement.” Brad Martin, director of sales and marketing at Random House Canada, has three authors in the Giller hunt: Joan Barfoot, Camilla Gibb and Edeet Ravel. To this point, the print run for each is 8,000 to 10,000.
“ If one of the books we publish is named as the Giller winner, we will pull together a print run of 20,000 and have it on press within two days,” he says. The dust jackets will be embossed to acknowledge the Giller victory. And there is the additional hope of gaining favourable display space in bookstores across the country.
That said, Martin — like almost everyone else in the book business — views the relationship between awards and sales as an inexact science at best. The general consensus is that the Giller has more impact than the GG.
The Man Booker Prize, a Britishbased award Canadian writers are eligible to win, is capable of dwarfing both.
“ If a Canadian book is shortlisted for the Booker, that gives it a big boost in sales,” says McNally. With David Bergen and Lisa Moore rounding out the Giller field, this is the fifth time since the Giller was introduced in 1994 that Canada’s two big literary prizes have failed to produce a single common nominee.
Last year, Alice Munro’s Runaway and Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness
were each nominated for both awards, with Munro taking the Giller and Toews winning the GG. It’s a safe bet the result did more to boost the reputation of comparatively unknown Toews.
“Certainly, the Giller Prize helped continue to elevate Alice Munro’s profile for that book,” says Ellen Seligman, fiction publisher at McClelland and Stewart. “ But it would be impossible to say how many more books were sold because it is Alice Munro and it isn’t as if she doesn’t already sell a lot of copies.
“ Alice Munro’s book was published to enormous international acclaim and all of that was filtered back into Canada. So the Giller certainly had a positive impact on her sales, but it did not revolutionize her sales that season.” Even in the case of Toews’s A Complicated Kindness, which was released to rave reviews and was well established as a bestseller when the nominations were announced, it is unclear how much the Giller nomination and GG win spurred sales. The book has sold 90,000 in hard cover and an additional 150,000 as a paperback, prompting publisher Random House to republish Toews’s back catalogue.
“( The nominations) just added fuel to a roaring fire,” says Martin, who witnessed a similar effect on sales of Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil, which won a non- fiction GG.
“ In both cases, those books already had velocity that put them on the best- seller lists. When the GG was announced, it didn’t necessarily launch them into a higher velocity. I’m not discounting the GG as a prize, but it generally doesn’t have the impact the Giller does. The GG doesn’t have the pomp and circumstance that surrounds
either the Booker or
the Giller.”
The Giller pomp,
such as it is, will be
televised live on CTV,
giving the prize an edge
in terms of media profile. The fact that the Giller has but one award to give is also cited as an advantage in focusing public interest. The GGs award 14 prizes, seven in each of Canada’s official languages.
“ The GGs still have enormous prestige,” says Bruce Walsh, director of marketing and publicity at McClelland and Stewart. “ We were horribly disappointed that none of our fiction authors were on the GG short list this year. Obviously an author would love to win a Governor General’s Award. But it doesn’t have the same impact as the Giller.”
Richard B. Wright’s Clara Callan performed handsomely after winning both prizes in 2001, tripling its sales after being nominated and then selling an additional 100,000 copies in paperback. But it didn’t fare quite as well as Montreal writer Yann Martel’s 2002 Booker Prize- winning Life of Pi, which failed to convert its GG nomination and wasn’t even considered for the Giller. The book has sold more than half a million copies in Canada, and more than three times that worldwide.
“ Would we have sold that, if he hadn’t won the Booker? No,” says Martin. “ Winning the Booker increased its profile immensely in this country. Aside from Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code, I can’t think of another book that has sold that many copies in this market.” And, says Nicholas Hoare’s McNally, “ it’s still selling like crazy.”