While everyone agrees that better advocacy is needed for Canadian independent booksellers, are there enough funds to make it happen?
Most of our US readers are probably familiar with the American Booksellers Association, which is an advocacy group for independent booksellers in the US. For many years, Canada had such an association, too—the Canadian Booksellers Association—but it became part of the Retail Council of Canada in 2012.
Now, Canadian booksellers are looking at re-forming the CBA. According to the Quill & Quire (subscription required) booksellers have been discussing the move because the RCC hasn’t been meeting their unique needs; they’re not accomplishing important advocacy work (especially related to Amazon), plus networking opportunities in the community have suffered.
We asked novelist Janie Chang about this development. She founded Author for Indies—now known as Canadian Independent Bookstore Day. Chang was inspired by similar grassroots work being done by US authors and the ABA, and she launched the annual event for authors to raise awareness of indie bookstores’ importance to communities. When asked about the potential revival of CBA, she said, “I couldn’t be happier with this news. In a market with declining media coverage for books, it’s become harder to discover titles beyond the ones on bestseller lists. This makes independent bookstores more important than ever because they really make the effort to support Canadian authors. Authors for Indies (now Canadian Independent Bookstore Day—run by RCC) was good for one day of the year, but an active CBA led by booksellers would work for bookstores every day of the year.”
Michael Neill of Bookmanager (a point-of-sale provider and inventory program) says that he has long advocated for more Canadian independents to join ABA. Neill tells us, “I was confident that, should our numbers be high enough, there could be a sub-committee within ABA run by Canadian independents to address Canada-only issues. At this time, though, a Canadian-only organization is being attempted because some retailers feel that being Canadian trumps being a bookseller in general (couldn’t resist throwing in that verb, ha!).” He added that, as in the US, booksellers are no longer as concerned about the chain bookstore as they once were because “a loss of that presence could jeopardize the distribution of books for everyone (volumes [could] fall to a tipping point).”
Bottom line: One question, difficult to answer, is how a new iteration of CBA can be successful given that it wasn’t able to continue originally due to dwindling membership and fees. Consistent and effective government relations isn’t cheap. Eleanor LeFave, owner of Mabel’s Fables children’s bookstore in Toronto, told Shelf Awareness, “Advocacy is a big part of being an association, and I don’t know that they would have enough funding.”
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
