The career novelist

Contracts and income

Clearly the time has come for us to reexamine this issue.
Unfortunately, my talks with publishing executives while preparing
this chapter—most of them, by the way, requested anonymity—
show that current attitudes are just about set in stone.
The biggest rationale that publishers give for lower Canadian roy-
alty rates is the higher cost of making Canadian sales. Many U.S.
publishers do not have Canadian sales forces, and instead work
through independent Canadian reps. These reps take a commission
(up to 10 percent) off the top of the publisher's revenues.
Transportation is also a factor. While shipping books to Canada
may actually involve shorter distances than shipping within the
U.S., transfer to a Canadian carrier at the border is often necessary.
This transfer also hikes up costs.
Publishers also point to inefficiencies in Canadian distribution
channels. In remote areas of the U.S., independent distributors ser-
vice small accounts but that is not so in Canada, one publisher told
me. Another said that Canadian return rates are higher. All the pub-
lishers I spoke to cited the country's bilingual population and a cus-
tomer base that is both smaller and more spread out than that in
the U.S. Canadians are just tougher to reach.
It all adds up, publishers say, to smaller sales that cost more to
make. Canada, I was told, is a truly an "export" market. On top of
that, several publishers also claimed that Canadian authors often
withhold their Canadian rights anyway. Never mind that U.S. pub-
lishers can do a better job, they sniffed; Canadian authors are a
chauvinistic lot, so why cater to them?
Are the publishers right? Canadian authors I've heard from have
plenty of counterarguments. While many of them can and do work
with publishers north of the border, many cannot. Authors of sci-
ence fiction, for instance, have little choice but to sign contracts
with U.S. companies. In addition, they counter, many U.S. publish-
ers insist on keeping Canadian rights.
Currency fluctuation is also a phantom issue, Canadian authors
say. The lower value of the Canadian dollar—generally 15 to 20 per-
cent less than the U.S. greenback—is more than offset by higher
Canadian cover prices, which on average are 30 percent more.