arl Siegler's list of affiliations and accomplishments is long. he's one of the founding members of the Association of Book Publishers of BC, founded the Literary Press Group of Canada, has served as the president of the Association of Canadian Publishers twice, and was one of the founding members of the Simon Fraser Centre for Studies in Publishing and its Masters in Publishing Program. and he is the publisher and president of long-running Talonbooks (they turn 40 this year).
cancon
how does a musician and lit major end up being the business manager of a publishing company?
Karl Siegler
Well, you see, I was playing folk & blues before university in a band, & we were all very socially conscious & activists at the time, but I thought I'd better get a "day job." Actually, I went to university in 1965 as a charter student at SFU intending to study physics. However, once there I was seduced by the arts faculty and changed my focus to the study of literature, which I'd always read & loved but had never considered as a "career option." During the 1960s and 1970s, I was a very active participant in the so-called "student movement" -- in my particular case, I was involved in the SFU demonstration that ultimately led to the university's attack on our academic freedom, freedom of expression and freedom of speech. While I in the English Dept., was not one of those fired for it (114 in the Political Science Dept., were) at the time, I remained a vocal critic of my colleagues, primarily, (in any other university, I would have been primarily a critic of the board of governor's & its management, but SFU, being a new university, didn't have all those old institutions, so one's criticism of the institution led very quickly & indiscriminately & by default to a criticism of everyone who was still there after the martyrs were fired and who didn't see anything wrong with it). The long & short of it is that despite an honours Bachelor's degree and a first class Master's, my contract at SFU wasn't renewed & I wasn't hired by any university & college I applied to in North America, and I applied to lots. All my applications were met with dead silence. No responses. Clearly, word had got out that I was "undesirable." So, I built logging trucks at Hayes Trucks in Vancouver for a while (the oldest logging truck company in the world, which happened to be Canadian) which was taken over & shut down by the American competitor Mack Trucks while I was there.
I desperately still wanted a literary / intellectual life, heard that this small Vancouver literary publisher (Talon) was looking for a business manager, and applied. When they found out I didn't have any formal business training or experience, they almost laughed me out the door, until I offered to work for four months for free (I still had 4 months left on my Hayes UIC claim), and that if I made myself indispensable, I'd get the job, right? They all thought is was a big joke & you know what they say about suckers, so there I was, not getting an even break, working for free. I secretly went to night school twice a week at BCIT where I was enrolled in a course called "Accounting for the Manager," put all kinds of systems in place working every waking minute, and, yes, by the end of the 4 months I'd made myself indispensable, and got to stay & keep the job. Eventually, all in their own good time, the five people associated with the press all went on to what they figured were bigger & better things, & I bought them all out over the years as they left and assumed their editorial responsibilities (I didn't get to edit my first book at Talon until 1979). The last one was bought out 10 years ago, in 1993, and I gave 1/2 the shares in the company to my partner in all things, Christy, who had also been working there by then (since 1986, full time, part time before then, when she was a teacher). Here we are.
cancon
your fingers seem to have been in every publishing association and group known - what is it about publishing you enjoy so much?
Karl Siegler
Very early on, having completed my business analysis of Talon and its market, I realized that Canadian literary publishing could never survive selling its Canadian books to Canadian readers at US prices, in a market that was less than 1/10 the size of our chief competitors' who were setting the price points. I also realized, however, that Canadian readers weren't prepared to pay up to 5 times as much for a book by a Canadian author that looked, as a physical artifact, the same as one from an American or British author at one-fifth the price. The numbers & economies of scale & market psychology & competitive factors & price points, none of it made any sense, nor could it be run to make sense, in a globalized market. So, we'd always have to work in Canada in the context of an interventionist market, a protected or protectionist market -- market conditions that could only be achieved through active, organized lobbying of all levels of Canadian government, if we wanted to have what was called "books of our own." In a way, we were back then, the very first "anti-globalization protestors." So my signature is one of five at the bottom of the Association of Book Publishers of BC's founding 1974 charter; and I co-founded, with Dave Godfrey (who had much earlier started House of Anansi in Ontario), a national organization of literary specialists called the Literary press Group in 1975.
cancon
you served as president of the Association of Canadian Publishers (ACP) and had involvement in the "Cultural Industries Exemption" in both the FTA and the NAFTA. can you describe that process and experience a bit?
Karl Siegler
Yes. Until this year, I've always been on one Canadian publishing board or another, chaired most of them from time to time, often repeatedly (the ACP in 1983-84; and for two years in 1992-94, among many others -- by historic accident [or not] during the very periods when both these North American trade agreements were negotiated). Book publishing (unlike magazine publishing, broadcasting, sound recording, film and television production -- i.e. the other cultural industries) had only grant support at the time, while the other cultural industries were supported by the federal government with a whole spectrum of so-called "structural measures" -- quotas, air time restrictions, licensing regulations, content rules, tax measures, etc., and we, as book publishers, had always argued we should have our markets protected by these structural measures as well. So it was, ironically, quite natural for book publishers to take the lead in arguing for the "cultural industries exemptions" in both free trade agreements, because we were the most vulnerable to unregulated competition under such agreements. Of course, we all (the cultural industries) did it together, but there was no question of the lead role of the Book publishers. I remember, we almost lost it in the 11th hour of the NAFTA deal, and I was only able to salvage the situation by flying to Ottawa the night before the talks in Washington were to go to closure, and briefing the Canadian negotiating team. It was incredibly close.
cancon
from your perspective, what have some of the major changes in canadian literature been over the past thirty years?
Karl Siegler
When "we all" (Anansi, Oberon and Coach House in Toronto and Talon in Vancouver, the "founders" of an industry that now numbers in the hundreds of Canadian imprints) started this post colonial literary publishing in around 1963, there was no "Canadian literature" as we have since come to know it, love it, and take it for granted. Certainly the branch plants (foreign owned major publishers operating subsidiaries in Canada) had no interest in anything that might have been described as such, and scoffed openly at the "unbusinesslike" Canadian government(s) that began supporting us with subsidies in 1971 and beyond. Since then, of course, "Canadian literature" has become the current fashionable darling of the international intellectual establishment (we ought not to fool ourselves that this is a lasting interest, however, rather than just this year's intellectual fashion.
Remember "South American literature," all the rage in the 1990s? "Canadian literature" will soon have seen the last of its 15 minute's worth of international attention. I'm betting on Croatian literature [just for fun] as next year's fashion). Of course, in the meantime, the transnationals like Bertelsmann & its subsidiaries and other multinationals like Pearson & Harper Collins have "discovered" Canadian literature, put all the Canadian owned majors out of business by outbidding them, and treat the rest of us like their farm team. How typical that they now line up to trade in what we made possible as their latest hot commodity. Not to worry though. When they lose interest and move on to the Croatian stuff, maybe some of us will still be around to continue the work of getting important Canadian voices published in this country.
cancon
what roles do you feel electronic publishing and online bookselling are going to play in the coming years?
Karl Siegler
The sole role for electronic publishing is for reference and research, since hard-copy publication in both areas is dated the moment it goes on (much less comes off) the press. There are new historic developments all the time. This is where the internet has been so great. Literature is a different story. The book is actually the perfect technology, and medium, for a work of the imagination. It is portable, permanent, lasts more than 90 minutes, and no batteries are required. It can't fry either itself, or you, in the bathtub. And you can give it to a friend in Europe on 220 volts, or in Tibet, where there aren't any outlets in the monastery wall. It doesn't have a type line-length of over 5 inches (beyond which the human eye loses focus, no matter how interesting the content), has a resolution of 2400 lpi (instead of 72, and maybe, with HD monitors, 300) which doesn't tire the eyes without your even being aware of it, and all pages can be displayed simultaneously if you want to. When all the other technologies were introduced (linotype, offset printing, movies, TV, the internet, etc.) what really happened is the stuff that worked better or more efficiently or made more sense with the new technologies went there, and the core remained, more focused, more specialized, in the old technologies. So fine, the hard-copy encyclopedia salespersons are gone (thank God), but The Lord of the Rings is still infinitely better as a book than a movie (or an add-on to your palm pilot).
Online bookselling is another matter. While none of the "books.com" purveyors will ever turn an operating profit (you heard it here first) because the economics just can't be made to work (unless the .com providers start publishing their own books -- see the attached relevant section in the "Standing Committee Report"), there is now ample opportunity for readers in communities not serviced by good bookstores (more and more of them as the chain supermarkets continue their metastasis, killing off the healthy independents), to acquire books directly from publishers.
cancon
i realize the answer to this question isn't simple to answer here, but could you describe, from a publisher's perspective, the basic effects of big box stores such as chapters on canadian publishing?
Karl Siegler
Sure. They've done to the book trade what supermarkets did to food & household goods -- the local egg, produce, butcher, baker, dry-goods and hardware stores in the 1950s -- cut down radically on service, variety, choice, particularity, seasonality, diversity, and all those other good life-affirming & enhancing things & rhythms, and replaced the previous wide array of product and choice with a narrow selection of homogenized, artificially produced & chemically shelf-life enhanced, payola-promoted simulacrum of lowest-common-denominator nourishment that had, ultimately, to be augmented by a whole vitamin & mineral pharmaceutical industry just to keep its consumers from looking and acting too vacant, pasty-faced, malnourished and listless. Welcome to the literary version of wonderbread, and avocado and harvest gold library fixtures. Man (nor woman) does not live by bread alone, as someone also once said. What that's done is put the entire Canadian owned sector at peril, as forecast in the attached documents. Too bad no one was listening, eh?
Further reading from Karl's archives:
- Letter to the Competition Bureau [April 30, 2001]
- An Open Letter to all sectors of the Canadian book trade [June 28, 2000]
- The Emperor’s New Clothes: A Submission to the Standing Committee of the Department of Canadian Heritage on the Recent Past and the Near Future of the Book Trade in Canada. [March 2, 2000]
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