HAVE GREAT TIMING

Dundurn Press produced Young Royals on Tour: William & Catherine in Canada by Christina Blizzard in time to benefit from the celebrity fever around the newlywed couple. “We printed 9,000 and we sold out about a week after getting the book and had to go back to print,” says publisher Kirk Howard.

Simon & Schuster Canada released Sylvia Nasar’s book Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius just as economists and governments everywhere needed a little inspiration.

TARGETED EXPANSION

Bucking the trend of cutting and contraction, Dundurn Press is growing. This year, the Toronto-based publisher bought two smaller houses, Napoleon & Co. and Blue Butterfly Books. Publisher Howard says this brings Dundurn’s number of acquisitions, since 1993 to 11. “I think content is important, and I think you need a certain bulk of titles to compete with the multinationals operating in Canada. We’re trying to acquire companies that are publishing in fields we’re already publishing in. Napoleon was specializing in mysteries and YA, and add quite a bit to our list that way.” Blue Butterfly has focused on publishing fresh voices and perspectives in fiction, nonfiction, and biography.

McClelland & Stewart launched its new nonfiction imprint, Signal, in the spring as a home for provocative “big idea” books. And its first list this fall is stacked with big names—Christopher Hitchens’s collection of essays, Arguably; Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination; and Dr. Samantha Nutt’s Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid. Though she’s certainly not as well-known as Hitchens and Atwood, M&S president and publisher Doug Pepper says this first book from Dr. Nutt, the founder and executive director of War Child North America, will be huge. “I think it’s something that can change policy, and that was the whole hope of Signal—that we publish books that make a difference when it comes to politics and religion and culture.”

Random House of Canada is expanding its culinary horizons, creating a new, as yet unnamed imprint that is expected to publish 15–20 food and lifestyle titles a year. Robert McCullough, formerly the publisher at Whitecap Books in Vancouver, will be the publisher of the new imprint.

ECW Press is venturing into YA for the first time with a series called the Dead Kid Detective Agency, written by Evan Munday, who also happens to be a publicist for Coach House Books. ECW says that the series’ 13-year-old heroine, October Schwartz, is “like Nancy Drew, if she’d hung out with corpses.”

BUILD ON SUCCESS

Kids Can Press celebrates the 25th anniversary of Franklin with an anniversary edition of Franklin in the Dark, which includes extra content, and reissues of the top 12 bestselling classics with refreshed covers. A new 3G version of Franklin and Friends launched on YTV in Canada, and it will be rolling out around the world followed by a huge merchandise program, says Kids Can president Lisa Lyons. Storybook spinouts from the television show are in the works.

YTV has also launched a television show based on Melanie Watt’s Scaredy Squirrel books. “Now, it looks different from the Scaredy Squirrel books,” warns Lyons. “They’ve aged him up because the YTV audience is a little bit older. He now has a job, but the response has been tremendous.” Kids Can has also launched a YouTube channel that has book trailers for Scaredy Squirrel and a Facebook fan page. This fall, a game-based app, Scaredy SOS, is also coming, the premise being that Scaredy has lost his emergency kit and players have to collect all the items in the kit to help him defeat germs, poison ivy, angry unicorns, and all of the things he’s afraid of in the books.

Annick Press has sold the rights for a live-action feature film of Robert Munsch’s beloved classic The Paper Bag Princess. Cookie Jar, the Toronto–Los Angeles production company that is making the film, plans to follow with a television series.

Second Story Press’ bestseller Hana’s Suitcase by Karen Levine will be made into a feature film in 2012, but this year, a new book in the publisher’s Holocaust Remembrance series, To Hope and Back: The Journey of the St. Louis by award-winning author Kathy Kacer, will be released. The book is based on the true story of the ship carrying Jewish refugees from Germany who were turned away from Canada, the U.S., and Cuba. It is told from the perspective of two people who were children on the ship and survived.

Coach House Press – takes Suzette Mayr’s acclaimed novel Monoceros, which was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in Canada, to the U.S. market in October.

OWLKids adds Learn to Speak Dance (Ann-Marie Williams) to its Learn to Speak Music series, created and edited by Broken Social Scene musician turned editor John Crossingham. The series demystifies music and dance for kids and encourages them to explore their own creativity. Learn to Speak Fashion and Film are yet to come.

MAKE FRIENDS IN ALL KINDS OF PLACES

Penguin and YA readers: Penguin Canada launched a Canadian edition of the successful YA imprint Razorbill. Lynne Missen, the new publishing director for Penguin Canada’s children’s and young adults program, is guiding the launch of a Razorbill social media Web site. “We want to be the ‘go to’ list. These are the books that teens will want to read and want to talk about,” says Missen, mentioning authors Hiromi Goto; Charles de Lint, who has a new Wildlings series; Carrie Mac; and Mariko Tamaki.

Scholastic Canada and TD Bank: Barbara Reid (author of The Subway Mouse who sculpts all the illustrations in her books in plasticine) has created, with Jo Ellen Bogart, the book Gifts, which has been selected as the Toronto-Dominion Grade 1 Book giveaway. The bank is giving more than 500,000 copies of the book to children across Canada.

McArthur & Company Publishing and CBC: McArthur created an enhanced e-book for Kate Pullinger’s Mistress of Nothing, which won a Governor General’s award for fiction in 2009, using audio from CBC radio broadcasts of a dramatic reading of the book. McArthur’s enhanced e-book includes the full text, CBC audio and abridged text, and video with Pullinger reading and discussing what it is like to write a historical novel, plus a slide show of what Egypt was like at the time.

Robert Kennedy and President Bill Clinton: Robert Kennedy Publishing, that is, home of Oxygen and other fitness magazines and the Eat Clean Diet series of books. Weight loss coach Charles D’Angelo’s book Think and Grow Thin has been endorsed by Clinton.

Excelovate and the Rogers Cup: Excelovate, which began publishing in 2008, was invited to the U.S. Open for Arthur Ashe Day to promote tennis to kids from across the U.S. with its book Strings and Grips by Desmond McLennon. Hurricane Irene washed out the event, but Excelovate still managed to find 160,000 tennis enthusiasts at the Rogers Cup in Toronto.

TAKE SHELTER IN CANADA’S RELIGION

Penguin’s Mike Bryan says that he realized soon after arriving in Canada that hockey is not a game here, it is a religion. And when times are tough, publishers can still count on hockey fans to read about their game and the players. Penguin is publishing 30 Years of Hockey Canada, Back to the Bigs (about the return of the Winnipeg Jets), and a memoir from Georges Laraque. Jordan Fenn has joined McClelland & Stewart as publisher of a new sports imprint that will publish Hockey Talk with Sports Illustrated, Records Forever with the National Hockey League, and a biography of Conn Smythe. Fenn will also do a series of hockey board books for young children with Tundra Books as well as a series of chapter books with Hockey Canada’s mascot Puckster, the polar bear. Firefly Books will have Hockey Hall of Fame Treasures, and Harper will have a Ron MacLean memoir.

MIX TECHNOLOGY AND CREATIVITY

HarperCollins Canada will launch an augmented reality campaign for Kenneth Oppel’s new YA novel, This Dark Endeavor. Holding a cellphone up to a banner in Indigo stores with an image of an antique bookcase will unlock a 3D animation on the phone. A book will fly off the shelf and an interactive trailer with sound effects will play.

DIVERSIFY

Groundwood Books – “We can sell a lot of books in the chain,… but we don’t depend on them for our living. Groundwood Publisher Patsy Aldana says there is stability in diversification: the library market, the school market, export, international and special sales such as HIPPY Canada, an organization that buys a huge bunch of books from Groundwood every year for their literacy program.

INVEST IN TECHNOLOGY

Webcom invested C$12 million in high-speed inkjet technology – threee new binding lines, two new digital presses and a change in workflow. “Our objective is to get the cost of a few hundred copies to equal the cost of a few thousand copies,” to allow publishers to choose smaller print runs, said president Mike Collinge.

2011 may have had a slow start, but Canadian publishers and companies are finding creative and innovative strategies to move ahead. Here’s the Canadian guide to success in tough times.