by John Ralston Saul
Culture and Foreign Policy
Republished with permission
The written word illustrates perfectly the Canadian situation. First, it is an area of astonishing success. Some 20 writers - Anglophone and Francophone - have won large publics outside of Canada. This involves translations into a dozen or so languages and healthy sales. If you add in the playwrights, the figure is perhaps 25. Many foreigners, when they think of Canada, think first of these writers and books. This is what they know.
Such penetration represents a far greater success than most other countries have achieved. Germany, Italy and Spain would be hard put to match this level of successfully exported writers. Even, if you look at the younger generation, Britain or France, outside of their own language, do not do better.
Yet this success is not matched by publishing structures at home and abroad which can, in a sense, exploit the situation. It is not simply a matter of selling more of that successful group. As with other countries, they are the vanguard for a whole school of Canadian literature. And only an adequate production-distribution system can take advantage of that. To a great extent that requires appropriate and adequate regulations and public-private co-operation. It also means facing up to the unpleasantness which changing the current situation will involve. Foreign policy is an extension of successful internal policies orit cannot succeed. Widespread success abroad is dependent on success at home.
What follows are a few examples of where opportunities and problems lie.
a) Translation Grants Program
There are two translation programs run by the Canada Council. Both have been highly successful, have contributed in a direct and practical way by helping to make Canadian literature available abroad and are suffering now, at the moment of their greatest success, because of financial cut-backs.
The first - the Translation Grants Program - finances translations of Canadian books from English to French and French to English. Between 1972 and 1994,1,362 books have been translated. The annual budget was cut by 10% in 1993-94, to $435,000.
Demands for grants outstrip the budget. The translation rate of 10 cents per word has remained stable since 1984.
It is obvious that this program plays a key role in introducing Anglophone culture to Francophones and vice-versa. However, it also plays an important foreign policy role.
English and French remain the two most important languages in international literature. The translation of a book into the other official language of Canada also makes it accessible to the other international market. This can be accomplished through the selling of foreign rights or through distribution (see 8c).
This program has a direct impact on our internal culture and economy as well as on our international image arid export sales. It is neither abstract nor theoretical. It has a direct impact on readership and sales. If we are serious about our culture at home and abroad there is every reason to increase its budget.
b) International Translation Grants
The second translation program run by the Canada Council translates books from English and French into foreign languages.
Between 1981 and 1994, 528 books were translated. However, the program is now in crisis. It has been cut back along with the other programs of the Canada Council. Also an annual grant of $80,000 from Foreign Affairs has been cut back.
This comes at a time when the work of Canadian publishers at book fairs, the experience of this program and the growing popularity of Canadian literature around the world have led to an increase in demand. In other words, budgeting restraints are strangling the success which people have worked hard to produce.
There is already talk of mitigating the circumstances by modifying the program so that foreign publishers must pay part of the translation costs. Given the growing market for our books this is probably a sensible move.
It should also be noted that authors are far happier not to use this program if foreign publishers will pay the full costs of translation, as many of them do. However this is not always possible. This program gives Canadian literature an economic advantage over others on two specific points: 1) when an author is breaking into a new market and does not have an established public, and the risk is therefore at its highest; 2) when a book, although of importance, presents particular economic problems brought on by translation difficulties or length. It may be that the program will have to concentrate more exclusively on these sorts of priorities.
Nevertheless, this is a concrete tool which places Canadian books in international markets where they stand a good chance of winning a public. It is therefore a very important program which deserves a special funding effort to increase rather than decrease its budget.
c) Distribution Agency
One of the greatest difficulties facing published Canadian books is how to reach foreign readers; that is, how to be available in their book stores on a regular basis. We have a large quantity of books which could win international publics but are at a disadvantage because we have an insufficient distribution system. On the other hand, large foreign publishers are able to distribute around the world large quantities of their books which may or may not be of quality or interest. Their advantage is their distribution system. Theoretically, Canadian publishers' problem is that they are not large enough to create and support such a system.
There are two types of markets.
First there are the other French- and English-speaking countries, such as France, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States, Britain, and Australia. Many Canadian books reach these countries through the simple sale of subsidiary publishing rights. The Programs which enable Canadian publishers to attend international book fairs are helpful on this front. However the rights to many books will not be sold abroad although their quality and/or subject might well win them readers. These are the simple facts of the extremely complex publishing industry. Large publishing groups in the other English and French-language countries deal with this problem by simply distributing those books abroad through their local distributors. In many cases these export markets are the difference between loss and profit. For example, American publishers often calculate the Canadian market as the extra 10% which makes a book worth publishing.
If this profit margin argument is true in France, Britain and the United States, it is doubly true here with our smaller market. And yet most Canadian books are, to all practical purposes, unavailable in these countries unless subsidiary rights have been sold.
It should be noted that we do have one advantage over the others, providing that it is used aggressively. Our two official languages with our translation program provide Canadian books with a natural entry into both of the most important languages in international book publishing. The problem still remains of how to then distribute/hose translated books outside of Canada.
The second market includes all of the non-English- or non-French-speaking countries. And, indeed, the English-speaking countries for French-language books and vice-versa.
In almost every major non-English-speaking city throughout the world there will be one or more English-language bookstores. Equally, in almost every major non-French-speaking city throughout the world there will be a French-language bookstore. This is a large and growing market. Their clients are usually among the most influential people in that city. Canadian books are rarely available to these stores. if the store owner wants a book by a Canadian author they are generally limited to ordering one from the English, American or French publisher who has bought the rig kits, if the rights have been sold. This is an export loss for Canada.
The problem in all of these eases is distribution. The solution is to create a commercial distribution company which, bv actinq for a large number of Canadian publishers could reach the necessary size and cash-flow.
Some Canadian publishers already have more or less successful distribution agreements in Britain, the United States and France with local publishers or distribution agencies. I say more or less because the size of the agreement means that they are neither the primary nor the secondary concern of the local distributor.
The Literary Press Group has established an interesting agreement with a distributor of Alternative Presses in the United States. As a result they have seen their exports grow in the first year from $25,000 to $250,000. In the second year it appears that the figure may double. This government-supported program demonstrates that there is a void waiting to be filled.
These agreements are small examples of what could be accomplished on an international basis if we had a single-source distribution agency. The development of communications through fax, computer and CD Rom make it increasingly easy for smaller groups to organize widespread distribution. A single-source distribution agency would quickly be known in the international bookstore, agency, wholesale business. People would know where to turn when they wanted a Canadian book.
A sensible organization would be part-owned by publishers, part government-owned. It would require government funding for perhaps five to seven years, but there should be other financing groups who could be interested in participating.
The simple act of organizing how and what we offer to the international market would be an enormous step forward. The company would need a small, young, aggressive staff in Canada, who would understand how to make the most of the new communications cataloguing and information methods and who would organize an ordering structure around consolidated shipments. Perhaps a two- to four-person operation in Paris and/or London with, perhaps, some warehousing system. That would be the first step.
There is no reason why foreign owned publishers established in Canada, who have a Canadian publishing program, should not participate with their Canadian books.
Such a distribution system could also include Canadian literary magazines and quarterlies which, o once in the magazine section in bookstores, become a tool for selling Canadian books.
As to whether such a company would be profitable after 5 to 7 years, the answer is perhaps or probably. More to the point, Canadian cultural exports would be developed and with them Canada's profile abroad. The normal result would be a fallout of other benefits in a variety of areas. This situation would also help Canadian publishers to increase their print-runs to the break-even level. it would also help Canadian publishers to organize themselves in a strategic manner to deal with both internal and external markets.
d) Monthly or Quarterly Book Newsletter
It has become common now for large publishing organizations to produce monthly newsletters aimed at the reader and distributed to bookstores around the world.
These are intended to supplement the review pages of newspapers and magazines. They are therefore written positively to draw attention to the publishers' books, but at a high level of discussion, rather than as simple advertising.
Bookstores are happy to have them because they inform the reader.
While most of the Distribution Agencies' work would be done with the tools of modern technology, the production of such a newsletter would be the logical outcome of such an organization. They, after all, would know what orientation to give it and how to distribute it.
e) Literary Agency
There are literary agencies in Canada. Many Canadian writers and publishers also have literary agents abroad. However this still leaves a large gap and many of the current international arrangements of publishers do not serve them well.
A further possible aspect of a Distribution Agency could be an arm devoted to the selling of rights. This does not necessarily mean competing with Canadian agents. It could mean working with many of them as a possible international arm. It could also mean working with foreign literary agents.
The point quite simply is that the large and successful production of books in Canada is inadequately served by the agency system as it currently exists. This would be an opportunity to concentrate the focus abroad and to reach profit-making levels.
The underlying assumption here, as with the Distribution arm of the Agency, is that it would be run as a private business in the book trade, where those who are energetic, enthusiastic, risk-oriented and devoted to a frenetic pace tend to succeed.
f) Educational Publishing
This is a prime example of a sector in which Canadian publishers could have an export market but are held back by the structure inside Canada.
The international market in English and French is a practical possibility for two reasons:
- That market is currently dominated by British, French and American firms. They carry with them colonial reputations and attitudes past and present, which make a more disinterested Canadian approach attractive.
- Our teaching methods are often more advanced than those in Britain and France and are certainly of equal quality.
The problem is, as in other areas of publishing, that just as our creative efforts began to expand (in the '60s and '70s), so the large publishing companies from our three principal competitors also began to expand heavily into Canada, buying up Canadian companies.
The result is that a majority of elementary and secondary textbooks used in both English and French Canada are produced by publishers either wholly or partially (that is effectively) foreign-owned.
Their product is not necessarily inappropriate. In Quebec it seems that the difference between local curricula and those cf France and the United States are so great that there is little room for copy-cat publishing, so the books are locally written and produced. In English Canada the problem is more complex as the size of the U.S. companies often permits them to indirectly shape curricula.
Each province deals with these problems in a different way. Quebec is very precise in its requirements. Ontario, somewhat in desperation, beefed up Circular 14, which lists which books are acceptable for schools to buy. They must be manufactured in Canada and written by Canadians, but may be published by foreign companies.
Publishers are circumventing this by producing what are, in effect, North American: texts with multiple authorship, including a Canadian author and a tacked-on Canadian section. This is the old Time Magazine approach to Canadianization.
The basic problem is that the more wide-open the competition for educational markets, the more the foreign-owned companies are favoured. Their size permits them to be everywhere, to offer multiple choices of texts, to offer free samples.
The end result is that the Canadian publishers remain small and, needless to say, in a poor position to mount export campaigns.
What is needed is a period of fundamental restructuring. Probably the only simple and cost-effective way of doing this would be for the provinces to set a period (a 5-year feed-in period followed by perhaps 10 years) during which only books produced by 100% Canadian publishers could be purchased by schools.
It is a remarkable failure of national (and for that matter provincial) will that a country with such high standards of education, living, and citizenship, should have the education of its citizens dominated in one way or another by foreign interests. This is not. as some might glibly suggest, the inevitable result of globalization. Canada is the only developed nation to be in this position.
Such an interim purchasing policy would give Canadian publishers the time to grow and to restructure. At the end of the 10 years the market could be reopened with the single limitation that the Canadian companies, having benefited from public policy, could only be sold to Canadians. This latter regulation would involve the federal government. The purchasing regulations are provincial, but the federal government is well within its role to pressure the provinces for action and to regulate ownership. After all, the current structure is a drain on the Canadian economy (foreign-owned companies export their profits). It also makes it more difficult to educate Canadians with a clear sense of themselves (i.e., their culture), and so complicates a whole range of federal policy areas, and makes it impossible to develop an export market.
One of the reasons for reopening the market after the five- plus 1 0-year period would be that our own desire to export would not be served in the long term by unnecessary protectionism.
In the meantime, export efforts could begin through co-operation with CIDA. It is strange that we should, for example, invest in educational institutions or structures in the developing world only to provide a market for British, American and French publishers.
What is needed are long-term policies to establish Canadian educational publishers in the developing world in partnership with local entrepreneurs who have not been part of the colonial publishing system.
John Ralston Saul is an essayist and novelist. He is the author of many books, including The Doubter's Companion - A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, Voltaire's Bastards: the Dictatorship of Reason in the West, and Paradise Eater, which won the Premio Letterario Internazionale in 1990. Mr. Saul has a Ph.D. from King's College, London.
