Tundra Books

People are on the move at Tundra Books. Kathy Lowinger, who has been publisher for 13 years, is retiring and leaving the company in the hands of two successors who are also veteran Tundra folk. Alison Morgan, former marketing and sales director, is now the managing director, and Kathryn Cole has been promoted from senior editor to editorial director. Lowinger will still be a presence in the company, at least for 2010, staying on part-time to edit some books.

Cole says there won’t be dramatic shifts in the direction of the company, but she says Tundra, which has focused on high-end books for the library and school market, may try to have more commercial offerings for the chain stores. This fall Tundra has the nonfiction A Thousand Years of Pirates, written and illustrated by William Gilkerson, and a new edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, featuring the original art of Oleg Lipchenko. Cole thinks both books will be collector’s editions, appealing even to adult readers. “We’re really trying to spread the appeal upward a bit,” she says.

This year’s big gamble, commissioning Cary Fagan to write a new book featuring Mordecai Richler’s beloved character Jacob Two-Two and reillustrating the previous books, is paying off so far, says Morgan. When the news of the new book broke, “there was sort of the predictable 'what are you doing with a Canadian icon?’ ” reaction in the press, Morgan says, but response to Fagan’s finished book has been positive, she adds. Tundra’s risk taking continues with Lesley Fairfield’s graphic novel Tyranny, about a woman’s struggle against anorexia, and the spring title Me and Death: An Afterlife Adventure by Richard Scrimger, the story of a 14-year-old wannabe gangster’s visit to the afterlife, which Tundra describes as both bleak and hilarious.

HarperCollins Canada

HarperCollins Canada’s president and CEO David Kent is remarkably jovial in these tough times. It was “a great year across the board” and a record year for the Canadian publishing program, he tells PW, as of late September. “We had this book, The Book of Negroes, which is now at, what, 315,000 copies?” It’s 333,000 in late October, a staffer says. “I was away for two weeks,” Kent says, with a hearty chuckle. Lawrence Hill’s novel has been lifting spirits at the company since it was published two and a half years ago. Sales may have started modestly, but they grew when the book won the $15,000 Roger’s Writer’s Trust Fiction Prize in Canada, and then the £10,000 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. There was another bump when the book prevailed in a celebrity panel debate and won CBC Radio’s Canada Reads competition in March this year. Now at 370,000 copies, the book’s success is perhaps even a little sweeter for HarperCollins Canada, which chose to stick with a book title that Kent said was considered too controversial in other territories. In the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand, it was published under the title Someone Knows My Name.

Known for leading the way with marketing innovations like book trailers, HarperCollins Canada blazed new trails in 2009, too, experimenting with putting a QR (quick response) code on a book. The codes can be scanned by readers with camera phones, taking the user to a programmed Web address. HarperCollins U.S. has since adopted the idea for some new titles. Now the Canadian marketing team is testing ads on subway trains in Toronto that invite people to plug their headphones into a jack in a poster and listen to a 30-second excerpt of a book.

HarperCollins authors have also been making headlines. Retired hockey star Theo Fleury made news across Canada with his story of his career as well as his battles with addictions and revelation that he was sexually abused by his coach; Playing with Fire quickly shot to the top of Amazon.ca’s bestsellers. And when climate change activist Tim Flannery came to Canada for the publication of his new book, Now or Never, he stepped into the spotlight by criticizing the Canadian government for being “unhelpful” in international climate-change negotiations.

Penguin Group (Canada)

President David Davidar says last year was Penguin Group (Canada)’s best year ever, not only in terms of sales but because Joseph Boyden’s novel Through Black Spruce won the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Canadian Booksellers Association voted the company publisher of the year.

That gives Davidar lots of momentum as he takes on a new role as CEO of a newly created division, Penguin Group International, which encompasses Canada, Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent.

Davidar will continue to head Penguin Group (Canada) as its president, but Nicole Winstanley, currently the executive editor of fiction and the newly launched high-end literary imprint, Hamish Hamilton, will step into the role of publisher in January. The first two books produced by Hamish Hamilton—Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared and Colin McAdam’s Fall—were shortlisted for this year’s Giller Prize, an encouraging sign for the new imprint, Davidar says, noting that it was launched at a time that didn’t seem to be the “best time in the world for launching anything.” Next year, Penguin plans to follow suit with a high-end nonfiction imprint, Allen Lane.

A new venture into custom publishing has also launched “with a bang,” Davidar says, referring to a 100,000-copy sale to Scotiabank. He expects 2009 to finish on budget with help from new books from bestselling Canadian authors Stuart MacLean and Jack Whyte, as well as two attention-grabbing sequels: And Another Thing, the sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, written by Eoin Colfer, and Dracula: The Un-Dead, coauthored by Dacre Stoker, one of Bram Stoker’s descendants.

Owl Kids Books

After Owl Kids Books bought Maple Tree Press in the summer of 2008, executives considered dropping the Maple Tree name and publishing all their books on one imprint. “We thought about just using Owl Kids,” says publisher Jennifer Canham, “but we’ve been in it a year now and we’ve really seen the value to keeping two imprints.” Owl Kids used to be almost all nonfiction, but using both imprints accommodates a more diversified list, she says. Both sides have strengths, says sales and marketing director Deborah Bjorgan. Maple Tree has a long history of critically acclaimed books in the institutional market, while Owl Kids Books, with 35 years of experience producing Chirp, Chickadee and Owl magazines, has “years and years of focus groups with parents and kids telling what they like, what they are reading, what they are looking for,” she says.

The fall season is off to a good start with a Napa Award for Learn to Speak Music. Written by John Crossingham, a former member of the Canadian indie band Broken Social Scene, the book goes beyond picking up an instrument to look at all angles of the world of popular music: songwriting, starting a band, making a video. Naturally, the book is featured in its own video on YouTube and MySpace.

Two new titles are well-timed to get some extra attention during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, I Is for Inuksuk by Mary Wallace (with the inuksuk being the official symbol for the 2010 Olympics), and How Figure Skating Works by Keltie Thomas, which shines a light not only on the sport but also the complicated world of judging and past scandals.

Kids Can Press

Kids Can Press president Lisa Lyons says Kids Can’s strategy for staying successful and relevant involves looking for gaps in the market, picking up on trends and seeking out books on subject matter that others haven’t found a way to publish for the children’s market. Noticing a lack of graphic novels for younger readers, ages 7—10, Kids Can published an existing series in graphic novel format. Observing a trend toward altruism among children and teachers and librarians’ efforts to bring those ideas into the curriculum, Kids Can has produced a collection of books now branded as Citizen Kid that aims to distill complex, global issues into books for 8—12-year olds. Lyons says her team had to be “fleet of foot” to do it, too, researching and developing the brand in three months in order to launch it at BookExpo America. Intrepidly going where others fear to tread, in spring 2010, Kids Can will publish a vividly illustrated book on evolution.

Of course, Kids Can has a couple of other things going for it. One is a timid rodent, better known as Melanie Watt’s creation, Scaredy Squirrel, whose books have now sold 525,000 copies. Another is that Kids Can is owned by Corus Entertainment, a Canadian media and entertainment company that also owns the children’s television channels YTV and Treehouse. This allows the company to, among other things, cross-promote its charity partnership project with Indigo Books and Music’s Love of Reading Foundation. Public service announcements on YTV and online banners on TreehouseTV.com will direct attention to a new Scaredy Squirrel boxed set available at Indigo. Proceeds of the sale of the boxed set will go to the foundation, which gives $1.5 million each year to high-needs elementary schools to build up their libraries.

McArthur & Company

McArthur & Company has had more to contend with this year than most Canadian publishers. Hachette Book Group’s decision to move sales and distribution of its U.K. lines to its U.S. offices meant that McArthur will lose about two-thirds of its business as of January 2010. Fortunately, president Kim McArthur knew this move was coming and has been making the transition for about a year and a half.

“We are going back to the McArthur & Company part of the company, which is not so slouchy,” she says, dropping names of such authors as Bryce Courtney, Vikram Seth, and Nancy Huston. Beginning the new year with $5 million in business rather than $15 million will require scaling back McArthur’s downtown Toronto offices to the original space, after an expansion five years ago, but McArthur hasn’t had to cut any staff positions because “we were so small already,” she says.

“We’re going to be fine,” adds McArthur, a veteran of rolling with these kinds of punches. “When I started Little, Brown Canada, it was $1 million and by the time we finished it was $26 million. And in 1998, when Little, Brown got closed, I started McArthur with zero, so that was zero to $15 million,” she says. “At least this time, I don’t have to close the company and start again. We can just kind of carry on and regroup.” And McArthur is already picking up new distribution clients: Unbridled from the U.S. and Birlinn, Scotland’s largest independent publisher, have signed on.

McArthur’s fall season has been highlighted by big sales for Ian Rankin’s The Complaints and acclaim for Canadian authors Kate Pullinger, whose novel The Mistress of Nothing was longlisted for the Giller Prize, and Anne DeGrace, whose novel Sounding Line was chosen by Indigo CEO Heather Reisman for her companywide Heather’s Pick promotion.

Orca Book Publishers

Publisher Andrew Wooldridge says it’s been a good year for Orca. Not only has the company weathered the economic storm with overall sales increases across Canada, but awards for a number of books were recently capped off by two nominations for prestigious Governor General’s awards for Robin Stevenson’s Thousand Shades of Blue and Shelley Hrdlitschka’s topical novel, Sister Wife, which tells the story of women exploited within a polygamist community.

Already well on its way into the world of e-books, rapidly digitizing all of its titles, Orca promoted one of its series by giving away digital copies of a new title, Media Meltdown, from its Web site. The response was so good, it crashed the site initially. There were 25,000 downloads in the first two weeks. “The hope, of course, is that it drives sales and increases exposure for that series,” says Wooldridge. “But we were really happy.”

In the spring, Orca will be launching a new imprint called Raven Books aimed specifically at adult reluctant readers. Orca has traditionally only published books for children, but based on its success with Soundings, books for reluctant readers, the company is stretching out. “Soundings are sort of a series/imprint still published under Orca,” Wooldrige explains, but Raven will be its own imprint to help distinguish it from the children’s books. “There’s a huge market for adults like this.”

House of Anansi Press

President Sarah MacLachlan says Eric Siblin’s nonfiction book, The Cello Suites, highlighted what was a very good year for Anansi. Nominated for both the Governor General’s Award for nonfiction and the $25,000 Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the book about Siblin’s quest to solve a mystery about Johann Sebastian Bach and a missing manuscript of suites from the 18th century “is selling way beyond our expectations,” she says. Rights have been sold to Grove in the U.S., Harvill Secker in the U.K., Allen and Unwin in Australia, and Irisiana in Germany. “In Frankfurt we were talking with the Italians and the French about it, so it’s been very exciting for that book, which really came out of the blue,” MacLachlan adds.

Strong sales and acclaim for another nonfiction title, Wade Davis’s The Wayfinders, also in the running for the Writers’ Trust prize, came as less of a surprise. A renowned anthropologist, Davis delivered this year’s CBC Massey Lectures, which MacLachlan says is a “kind of cornerstone” of Anansi’s publishing program. A three-way partnership with Toronto’s Massey College; Canada’s public broadcaster, CBC; and Anansi, five different lectures by a well-known writer on big ideas are delivered to large audiences in five different cities, broadcast by CBC across the country, and published by Anansi. MacLachlan says the lectures can be counted on to sell close to 20,000 copies, sometimes more.

This fall, Anansi has high hopes for Canadian author Gil Adamson’s fiction title Help Me, Jacques Cousteau; her 2007 novel, The Outlander, continues to be one of the house’s bestsellers. In the spring, the press is looking forward to publishing Guilt About the Past, a collection of essays by Bernhard Schlink, author of The Reader.

Firefly Books

Since Firefly sells more books in the U.S. than in Canada, the company couldn’t help feeling the effects of the U.S. recession. But president Lionel Koffler says September sales of frontlist and backlist titles were “terrific,” and he expects “the very reasonably priced” fall list will make for a good season.

The tough economic times may have partly fueled sales of two of Firefly’s biggest books this year as well. Firefly sold 200,000 copies of the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving and about 40,000—50,000 copies of The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving. “The emphasis there is on a combination of thrift and knowing where your food comes from, and nutritious food, and people are concerned about all of those things,” says Koffler.

No longer distributing Whitecap Books, Firefly invested extra effort in its own publications and published about 25% more this fall.

One fall title, World Heritage Sites, 850 pages of full color on UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) heritage sites, is likely to sell out before Christmas, says Koffler. Unfortunately, he says, a reprint won’t be available until February. That’s because Firefly is committed to using FSC paper, which is certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council to come from well-managed forests, and definitely not old growth or rainforests, says Koffler. FSC paper is sometimes harder or takes longer to get, but Koffler says Firefly folk sleep better knowing they are not printing books about orangutans or apes on paper produced by cutting down their habitats.

Groundwood Books

Sales are up, not only in Canada but also in the U.S., says publisher Patsy Aldana. She attributes this success to having a very focused list “that has a real identity and a real coherence to it, and in our case, that’s really aimed at the top of the market,” she says.

Sales of two Groundwood titles were boosted when the New York Times named them as best illustrated books of the year, she adds. The Black Book of Colours by Menena Cottin, illustrated by Rosana Faria, illuminates what it is like to be blind. Skim, written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by Jillian Tamaki, is a vivid glimpse of what it is like to be 16. Two books by Deborah Ellis—oral histories of Iraqi refugee children in Jordan in Children of War, and stories from Iraqi and Afghan children whose parents are soldiers in Off to War—have also been very successful, Aldana says.

Three Groundwood books are also finalists for the Governor General’s Award for children’s literature (illustration): Bella’s Tree by Janet Russell, illustrated by Jirina Marton; My Great Big Mamma by Helen Mixter, illustrated by Luc Melanson; and Alego by Ningeokuluk Teevee.

Aldana came back from a recent trip to China enthused about new possibilities in the market there. In the past, she says, she was primarily asked for her bestsellers, but now she finds there is much more interest in a wider range and quality of books, including books on social justice. “I feel like Asia is really going somewhere and that’s a place we should all be paying a lot of attention to,” she says.

Groundwood is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Marie-Louise Gay’s Stella series with this fall’s publication of When Stella Was Very Small, which Aldana says is already in its fourth reprint. Another hit this season is Jennifer’s Cowan’s environmental novel, Earth Girl.

McClelland & Stewart

“While we do think in Canada that we are protected from the kind of recession that the United States and other parts of the world are going through, and I think that has borne out to be the truth,” says McClelland & Stewart president Doug Pepper, “you are still not sure from a retail point of view if people are going to buy books.” That’s remarkably cautious for someone whose house is going into the holiday season with new books from both Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, but maybe he just doesn’t want to jinx anything.

“Sales have been very good on both of them. We’ve gone back for a fairly sizable reprint for Margaret Atwood, despite the fact that it’s not on shortlists,” he says. It’s true that Margaret Atwood’s new novel, The Year of the Flood, is not among the finalists for Canada’s prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize or the Governor General’s literary awards, but if any Canadian author can do without accolades, it’s Atwood, who already has plenty of them.

Alice Munro graciously withdrew her short story collection Too Much Happiness from the Giller list to make way for younger writers, which may benefit another M&S author. “Anne Michaels’s [novel, The Winter Vault,] has gotten a really nice boost from the Giller shortlist nomination,” says Pepper.

Recently, Pepper has been busy answering questions about M&S’s controversial decision to contract out its foreign rights sales. “We’ve joined up... with the Cooke Agency and with Random House, who is the other client, to set up the Cooke Agency International. We feel they are going to be a very potent force in the world market, and we are going to be able to combine strengths from a small territory and have more impact selling rights.”

ECW Press

ECW publishes a diverse list, which includes both high-end literary titles and very commercial ones, and this year success came in both critical and populist forms. Jacob Scheier’s More to Keep Us Warm won the $25,000 Governor General’s Award for poetry, and Fruit, a backlist novel, was chosen for CBC Radio’s Canada Reads program. (Five books are promoted online leading up to a weeklong radio broadcast of a literary debate, in which five celebrity panelists defend their book as one is eliminated each day.) Fruit didn’t win, but all the books benefit from the nationwide publicity.

“The combination of those two really gave a push to what was happening in terms of publicity in November, December, January, all the way through to March [2009] when the final Canada Reads broadcast was aired,” says copublisher Jack David, adding that Fruit is now a strong backlist title.

This fall, ECW has another attention grabber. Final Appeal: Anatomy of a Frame is a memoir written by Colin Thatcher, a former Saskatchewan politician who was convicted and given a life sentence for the murder of his ex-wife but was then paroled. Thatcher maintains his innocence, but the provincial government is taking him to court over his book, based on a law that prohibits profiting from a crime. David defends the book based on Thatcher’s right to tell his story and that the book is not an account of the crime but of a mishandling of the case.

For those who prefer lighter reading, ECW is also expecting a book on The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, the short-lived variety series that came after The Brady Bunch ended its five-year run, to do well.

Random House of Canada

At the end of October, Louise Dennys, executive publisher of the Knopf, Random Canada Publishing Group, was flitting among the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, the International Festival of Authors in Toronto, and launches for Random’s big fall books, but she paused briefly to say that this fall, in her view, has been “one of the most extraordinary falls we’ve ever had... because of the quality of the books that are going out and the potential sales for so many of those books.”

A heap of award nominations add to the rush. Two of Random Canada’s novels were shortlisted for the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize. Dennys describes Linden MacIntyre’s novel The Bishop’s Man as “a little bit reminiscent of Brian Moore or Graham Greene, but just a beautifully written moral tale.” Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean, about Aristotle’s education of Alexander the Great as a boy, is the only book shortlisted for all three major awards in Canada—the Giller, the Governor General’s literary awards and the Roger’s Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Douglas Coupland’s new novel, Generation A, is also a finalist for the Writers’ Trust, while Michael Crummey’s novel Galore (Doubleday Canada) is up for a GG.

No matter what the results, Random House of Canada will have a large roster of high-profile authors to draw on when it hosts its second annual readers festival in spring 2010. In the debate about the fate of the now-defunct BookExpo Canada, some of the multinational houses advocated more public events. The aim of the Globe and Mail Open House Festival, says Random House of Canada president and CEO Brad Martin, is “to engage the public and to engage our authors with the public.” He counts the May 2009 event, which included readings and panel discussions and attracted about 3,000 people over two days, as a success, and says details for next year’s festival are in progress.

Simon & Schuster Canada

The future looks bright, according to Simon & Schuster Canada’s president, Kevin Hanson. Although he doesn’t have a crystal ball to predict what will happen in the near future with the economy, he sees new generations of keen readers emerging.

“One of the really happy stories that we’ve had is with our YA fiction, and probably leading the pack is Cassandra Clare,” says Hanson. Clare’s trio of urban fantasy novels—City of Bones, City of Ashes, City of Glass—have been “flying out the doors,” he adds. “It should give everyone some hope that there is a really strong reading public.”

That youthful enthusiasm has also proven to be a very effective marketing tool. Hanson says a first novel from Becca Fitzpatrick has sold “extremely well, right out of the gate.” He attributes some of that success to Simon & Schuster’s online marketing strategy of getting buzz started via bloggers and an identified reading public. “There are these kids who read and communicate with their friends. They are voracious and they like to be on top of things, so it is a way to get the word out in advance of publication,” he says. Publishers are now less dependent on reviews and media tours to create awareness. “It’s really a significant change in how books are marketed,” he says.

Hanson says sales overall this year have been strong. In adult fiction, both Jodi Picoult’s Handle with Care and Lisa Genova’s Still Alice have been big hits, he says. To top it off, this month Simon & Schuster Canada will be watching the sales of Stephen King’s new novel, Under the Dome.

Georgetown Publications; Georgetown Terminal Warehouses

Larry Sisnett is vice president of distributor Georgetown Terminal Warehouses and president of Georgetown Publications, which offers sales, marketing, and distribution to its client publishers. The two companies are “a good representation of the changes that have taken place in the book industry over the past year,” he says. There has been consolidation among the publishers the distributor represents, which has meant it has lost some clients. However, Sisnett says there has also been a fair bit of movement among publishers and distributors, and he has gained new clients and managed to increase the overall number of clients to 47, approximately a 10% increase. Despite the tough economic climate, business is strong.

The challenges Georgetown Terminal Warehouses faces also reflect changes in the industry, he says. The company is looking for ways to make the growth of e-books an opportunity. Print-on-demand is also changing the game. “We are receiving smaller shipments more frequently because publishers, of course, are looking to really control their inventory, particularly on backlist titles, which is where POD has made quite an impact,” Sisnett says. POD is still in its relatively early stages, but he expects it will grow tremendously. “This is the kind of thing we have to monitor,” he says, “but there are opportunities for us there as well. If we can serve our publishers better and provide value-added services for them and for their customers, then that’s good for both of us.”

D&M Publishers

The Frankfurt fair had extra buzz this year for D&M Publishers, says Rob Sanders, publisher of the Greystone Books imprint. That was because news broke during the fair that author and renowned environmentalist David Suzuki had been awarded the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. “We publish and originate David Suzuki, and we’ve continued to do extraordinarily well with his books,” says Sanders. But he adds, “I was just astounded at the response we had in Frankfurt to Suzuki.”

Andrew Nikiforuk’s book Tar Sands, about the megaproject to produce oil in northern Alberta, has also been a hit for D&M. It received “tremendous international attention and good sales in the United States and tremendous sales in Canada,” says Sanders. An experiment in marketing, giving away an e-book version for a limited time to see the reach of specialty markets such as environmental organizations, helped, he says. “We watched sales spike at the same time. And of course, it drew a tremendous number of people to our site. We have an ongoing digital club... and our membership just roared up at that time.”

This season, D&M is particularly excited about Red: A Haida Manga, by Native author and artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas. “Michael is a wonderful Haida artist and he’s also been influenced tremendously by Japanese manga, so he’s created a brilliant Haida manga,” says Sanders.

D&M will soon be launching a major digital innovation called BookRiff. “The concept is similar to iTunes for written content,” says D&M president Mark Scott. “We will have all kinds of formats available, but initially we are focusing on print-on-demand, so you can go on to BookRiff and make your own compilation of a book. It can either be a whole book with additional material or collections of content.”

Key Porter Books

Publisher Jordan Fenn says many independent publishers sidestep competition with the large multinationals by publishing in niche categories, but Key Porter tries to go “head-to-head with the big publishing houses” with a general trade list. This season’s list ranges widely: the new Gordon Ramsay cookbook Maze; Hockey Night in Canada: By the Numbers; Freedom, a collection of short fiction from renowned writers around the world on the theme of human rights, published in association with Amnesty International.

Hockey books have been a big success for Key Porter. Since publishing its first hockey book in 2000, Fenn says the company has become the largest hockey publisher in the world and will publish 12 titles this year. In order to produce a book on the Stanley Cup winning team within a week of the final game this year, Key Porter prepared books on both the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Detroit Red Wings, updating them both through the series. Then, on the night Pittsburgh won, Fenn says, “I was at my computer; the NHL was in New York on theirs. The author was in Greenland, and my designer is up in Holland Landing [Ontario], and we were all putting this thing together. We sent it to press at three or four in the morning, and I had [a finished book] on my desk three days later.”

Fenn has great expectations for a spring business title about the company that developed the gadget that has both enchanted and enslaved millions of people in 160 countries: The Blackberry: The Untold Story of Research in Motion.

Key Porter is also at work on a large-scale marketing plan for another spring title. Barbecue cookbook author Ted Reader wants to promote his new burger cookbook, Napoleon’s Everyday Gourmet Burgers, by breaking the Guinness world record: cooking a 500-pound burger on a specially designed grill in a public square in Toronto or New York.

Second Story Press

Margie Wolfe, owner and publisher of Second Story Press, says she’s feeling optimistic. Despite the tough economic conditions, sales are up in both Canada and the U.S. “We have not suffered dramatically, partly because one of our major markets is the library and some school markets. So they continue to order in a different way than in the trade,” she says.

Still, the reverberations of the recession have been felt at Second Story. “Our company sells a lot of subsidiary rights, and we’re still doing that, but our purchasers are being more careful and considered before they make a decision,” says Wolfe, whose company is well-known for publishing such books as the Holocaust remembrance series of 10 books for young readers that started with Hana’s Suitcase by Karen Levine. The series has been sold in more than 50 countries and translated into 39 languages. This year The Diary of Laura’s Twin by Kathy Kacer won the National Jewish Book Award both in the United States and in Canada. Kacer’s book Hiding Edith also won the 2009 Yad Vashem Prize for Children’s Holocaust Literature in Israel.

This season Wolfe expects Violet, a picture book by Tania Duprey Stehlik and illustrated by Vanja Vuleta Jovanovic, about a little girl whose father is red and whose mother is blue,to do very well. She was also excited about Thinandbeautiful.com, a novel by Liane Shaw, which focuses on the impact of the Internet on people with eating disorders.