“When I started Pajama Press, everyone was saying to me, ‘Why are you doing this now? Why don’t you retire?’ ” Gail Winskill recalls. “I don’t want to retire. I like working and I have all these glorious young people working for me. I feel very lucky.”
Winskill launched her career in publishing in 1975 as a sales coordinator at Methuen Publishers; worked at Scholastic and Penguin Canada; was publisher of children’s books at Fitzhenry & Whiteside for more than 10 years; and briefly served as publisher of Dancing Cat Books. Winskill launched Pajama Press in Toronto in 2011 with a debut list of three titles. Twelve years later, she has five employees and approximately 170 titles in print, with 12 releases in 2023.
The mission of the press is clear: Winskill wants to publish literary fiction and nonfiction that relates to children’s lives, with an emphasis on social-emotional learning and diversity. Winskill ensures that Pajama’s releases “represent everybody,” including immigrants, refugees, and people with disabilities.
When acquiring, Winskill is often guided by “what kids want, what teachers want, what parents want. Relevance to what’s going on in the world.” Sometimes though, she admits, she’ll “pick up a book simply because it is just so beautifully written and it begs for great illustrations.”
The press’s two lead titles this fall demonstrate Winskill’s two-pronged approach to acquisitions. We the Sea Turtles by Michelle Kadarusman is a collection of nine short stories for middle grade readers set on islands around the world, featuring a turtle that appears in protagonists’ lives at key junctures. The stories are “fabulous,” Winskill insists. “They’re exquisitely written and they’re relevant and that’s what mattered to me; they’re about nature and the environment. There aren’t a lot of books like this one out there.”
As for The Imaginary Alphabet, a picture book by Sylvie Daigneault, Winskill says that she had never before considered publishing alphabet books because so many of them are “cheesy.” She explains, “This one was different. It’s so beautiful, it just screamed, ‘You gotta do it.’ So we did it.” Pajama is so committed to The Imaginary Alphabet that it sent Daigneault to Children’s Institute in June, where she signed 100 copies of the book—which were drop shipped to the conference in Milwaukee from the printer in Hong Kong—for booksellers.
“It’s the biggest push we’ve ever done for a book,” says sales and marketing manager Quinn Baker of the press’s aggressive marketing campaign promoting The Imaginary Alphabet. “We wanted a summer of Sylvie. We wanted everyone to have seen the book by September and the fall season.” The push seems to be working: The Imaginary Alphabet sold through its initial 7,000-copy print run and went into a second printing weeks before its pub date.
While Pajama’s list includes everything from board books to YA, picture books, Winskill notes, “are the mainstay of our publishing program,” representing 80% of the list each year. Winskill says if a manuscript “reads really well, and I can see the art when I am reading it—usually that’s a pretty good sign.”
Baker confirmed this, noting that Winskill’s response to “a book that she loves is contagious. When she is into a book—because she doesn’t just get into any book—99% chance every single person in the whole office is going to love it.”
Emphasizing that “we do what we know we can do well,” Winskill insists that the market agrees. Pajama authors and illustrators have won Canada’s most prestigious awards, and sales have been on an upward trajectory since Pajama signed on in 2014 with IPS (now PGW) for international distribution; U.S. retailers currently account for 80% of the company’s total sales, which are 11% higher in the first three quarters of 2023 than in the same period of 2022.
“We’ve gone through some hard times,” Winskill says, “but I feel very optimistic. Even though the Canadian market is flat, the U.S. market continues to amaze me—how broad it is, how many opportunities there are for us to expand our business. We’ll keep going, and I think I have the right team to do it. We work hard, but we can have a little bit of fun while we’re at it too.”
