All those involved in B. C. publishing deserve award

On May 3, the British Columbia Book Prizes for 2014 will be awarded to some of the province’s best writers, illustrators and publishers. We say “some” of the best because while only seven will win a prize, the talent pool is so deep and the province’s literary landscape is so diverse that simply to be nominated is a remarkable honour.

Book publishing is a $ 56 million- a- year business sector in B. C. and it’s a tough one in which to make a profit. Overhead is high, risks can be substantial and margins of operating profit on sales are slim and getting slimmer. Statistics Canada tabulations show that B. C.’ s book publishing industry sold more than $ 44 million worth of books in 2010 with an operating profit margin of 3.4 per cent — a 27 per cent contraction in margin since 2008.

Books take years to write and then can be a year or more in the editing, design and production process. Once that’s complete, they go into a volatile market in which the tastes and economic circumstances of customers can change rapidly and without warning. Writing and publishing under these conditions of lag time demand determination, discipline and resolve on the part of writers and, on the part of publishers, faith in the artists and their audiences and a steely set of business nerves.

This is as true for those writers and publishers who won’t be formally acknowledged at the gala event. So let’s include in our expressions of gratitude, those who didn’t make the shortlist as well as those honoured as runners up. Many of them are as deserving of praise as those who will actually win a prize.

It’s important to remember, even as we honour writing and publishing excellence as exemplified by the winners, that this is not a winner- takes- all horse race. Writers are not producing widgets and books are not boxes of macaroni. Awards like book prizes are important — but they represent a jury’s subjective snapshot and not necessarily posterity. What’s occurring is really a much broader celebration of the creative imagination and of all those — editors, production managers, printers, publicists, business managers, booksellers — whose practical skills bring that imagination forth in a tangible form from which all of us may seek enlightenment and enjoyment.

Writing, publishing, reading, the culture of books, which ranges inclusively from the elegant literary tour de force to the page- flapping Who Dunnit of summer vacations and from challenging avant garde poetry to the nitty gritty of untold history, has enriched the province for more than a century.

From poets Pauline Johnson through Pat Lowther to Patrick Lane who writes from the very marrow of B. C.; from Martin Allerdale Grainger through Peter Trower to Ken Drushka who documented our forest and resource heritage; from journalists- cum- authors B. A. McKelvie through Arthur Mayse and Charles Lillard to the incomparable Terry Glavin, who bear witness to our story; from the prescient social commentary of Brian Fawcett and Douglas Coupland to the science fiction prophecies come true of William Gibson; from Robert Bringhurst’s resurrection of Haida epic to Clayton Mack’s plain- asanaxe- handle Nuxalk memoir; from the tree- planter’s clearings to the professor’s seminar; from left and right, privileged and poor, tragic and triumphant, cerebral and controversial — the shape of our self- perceptions is forged in the talented imaginations and practical skills of all our writers and publishers, whose contributions comprise a list too long for this brief space.

Congratulations and good luck to this year’s nominees for best fiction, non- fiction, poetry, B. C. history, and children’s writing and illustration; continued success and prosperity to the companies that published, promoted and sold their work — for literary book publishing remains one of the boldest and most classically entrepreneurial of enterprises in a marketplace buffeted by technological change. Thanks to readers, without whom there’d be no publishing industry.

But thanks, also, to the unlisted writers and their publishers, to the under- appreciated, to those receding into the shadows of memory and history. These annual honours are just one small way of acknowledging a deeper, broader debt that extends far beyond the deserved moment of celebrity.