'Canada Reads' Winner

[jwmorrice]

I think this is a rather interesting story from the Globe & Mail. I guess one message is that authors should never, ever give up on their works.

jwm

CBC fishes 1928 novel out of obscurity
Rockbound, the story of an island community off Nova Scotia that was selling 200 copies a year, beats Atwood bestseller

By REBECCA CALDWELL
Saturday, February 26, 2005

Frank Parker Day's forgotten classic Rockbound has broken free of obscurity and won this year's Canada Reads contest in an upset win, besting Margaret Atwood's multiple-award nominee, Oryx and Crake.

Yesterday's concluding instalment of CBC's annual tontine-style book match saw Rockbound's champion Donna Morrissey, the author of Kit's Law and the forthcoming Downhill Chance, ultimately trumping Toronto city councillor Olivia Chow defending Oryx and Crake in a 3-2 decision.

The other contenders -- Olympic fencer Sherraine MacKay defending Mairuth Sarsfield's No Crystal Stair, former National Librarian Roch Carrier advocating Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues and chanteuse Molly Johnson promoting Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers -- were voted "onto the bookshelf" earlier in the week.

"I didn't think I was going to go all the way at all. The most I wanted was to come out of this sounding a little intelligent," said Morrissey in a phone interview.

There was little deal-making or good-natured double-crossing going on behind the scenes, reported Morrissey. "Everybody was so honest and pure and beautiful," she said. "The biggest surprise of the entire thing came to me in that first round, when Beautiful Losers was voted off."

Winning the Canada Reads contest has historically proved a major boon in terms of sales, but it's a publishing fairytale for Rockbound. Day's story about the inhabitants of a small fishing community on an island off Nova Scotia first appeared in 1928, released by the U.S. house Doubleday when its author could not find a Canadian publisher. Written in regional dialect and filled with stirring depictions of the hard reality of life on the island, the book apparently outraged some members of the community it sought to evoke with what they perceived was a libellous portrait. The book, however, charmed reviewers: A newspaper advertisement for it from 1928 boasts: "Rockbound, called by critics the greatest Canadian novel since Maria Chapdelaine."

 

[jwmorrice]

'Canada Reads' Winner - Part II

But Rockbound never reached the height of Maria Chapdelaine's fame (indeed, even Louis Hémon's plucky French-Canadian, snowfaring heroine is no longer quite the Canadian literary icon it once was). The book languished in out-of-print status until 1973, when the rights were acquired by the University of Toronto Press, which at the time picked up the occasional work of classic Canadian fiction to dot its catalogue of predominantly academic texts.

Today, Rockbound is UTP's only fiction title. The book was enjoying modest sales, says the publisher, of around 200 copies a year when Morrissey volunteered to champion it for Canada Reads. Sales orders jumped up to 7,000 copies over the past four months leading up to the program and UTP is bracing itself for another flood of requests.

"We're doing a big reprint with a winner-logo sticker, and we'll sit back and see how the orders come in," said Bill Harnum, senior vice-president of scholarly publishing at UTP. "We're preparing for sales that are pretty high. We're very excited."

The success of Rockbound won't steer UTP into publishing more fiction, however.

"I've been around this business long enough to know that publishing Canadian fiction is a good way to go quickly bankrupt," said Harnum. "We're delighted that this has happened, it's unusual for us, but it's not going to change anything."

All of the Canada Reads finalists experienced a jump in orders from bookstores, although the surge in demand for the lesser-known titles, such as Rockbound, No Crystal Stair and Volkswagen Blues, all around the 7,000-mark for orders, was more profound than for those books that were previously bestsellers or otherwise well known, such as Oryx and Crake, whose orders doubled, and Beautiful Losers, whose orders increased tenfold, according to their publishers.

Canada Reads began in 2002 as a radio broadcast, but has since become a major literary event, spawning a television version, a French edition of the show and numerous follow-along programs in libraries, schools and book clubs across the country. Previous winners of Canada Reads include In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje in 2002, Hubert Aquin's Next Episode in 2003 and Guy Vanderhaeghe's The Last Crossing last year -- all of which experienced significant increases in sales after triumphing on the program.

"I really think the show is a gift to publishers, a gift to us as booksellers, and a gift to readers because they are suddenly presented with these interesting new books, albeit recommended by celebrities whom you wouldn't normally go to for that sort of advice. But it's still fun," said Holly McNally, co-owner of Canada's largest independent book chain, McNally Robinson Booksellers.