The year 2022 in books: indies rule; BookTok wields ever more influence; in Canada, we bought books again

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was 2022, when the world was opening up again just as writers and bookstores and publishers and readers had become used to the idea of online appearances and never again getting a book personally signed by the author.

It was a liminal time: when people tentatively began getting together, becoming part of a crowd, offering up an apology for being uncomfortable using social skills that became rusty over two or so years of pandemic isolation; when festivals in Vancouver and Calgary and Toronto and Ottawa and Newfoundland celebrated getting people in a room together again, and experimented with how to best connect with a new digital audience, no longer limited to only those in the room. All pointing to a changing social and literary landscape.

Just as we were getting comfortable with the idea of public events, the attack on Salman Rushdie at the beginning of a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state reminded us how risky the world has become. As the Writers’ Union of Canada wrote, “a violent attack on one author is an attack on us all,” hearkening back to the end of the 1980s when the fatwa was first announced by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini and people around the world wore buttons or T-shirts saying “I am Salman Rushdie.”

Maybe we are all in this together after all.

Consolidation breakdown

The biggest story of the year in terms of publishing news was the scrapping of a proposed $2.2-billion (U.S.) merger between Penguin Random House, the world’s largest book publisher (owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann) and Simon & Schuster, the world’s fourth-largest book publisher (owned by Paramount Global) after the United States Department of Justice refused to allow the merger, ruling it “would have reduced competition, decreased author compensation, diminished the breadth, depth and diversity of our stories and ideas, and ultimately impoverished our democracy.” Horror writer Stephen King, who testified on behalf of the Department of Justice, tweeted he was “delighted” with the ruling.

The company decided not to appeal, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t casualties. Marcus Dohl, the head of Bertelsmann, stepped down.

It now remains to be seen whether HarperCollins takes a run at buying Simon & Schuster, as the company’s CEO, Brian Moore, suggested to a judge in August that it might be interested; Moore was a bit more circumspect after the judge ruled against the PRH buyout, noting in October that “the door isn’t closed, either to HarperCollins or Hachette or another big publisher.” HarperCollins, you might know, is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Given that the publisher’s U.S. staff have been on strike since Nov. 10, 2022 for fair wages, this could be the interesting story of 2023.

Mergers and consolidation also had an affect on Canadian book distributor Thomas Allen & Son, which Jim Allen, whose great-grandfather founded the company in 1916 (he’s the fourth Allen at the helm), announced would close in 2023. Several publishers the company distributed were bought out by larger companies who take care of their own distribution, including Workman Publishing, which was bought up by Hachette.

There has been some good news in the industry. In Canada, at least, it appeared readers were actually buying books again. While book sales have fallen over the year in the U.S. — BookScan reported a 4.8 per cent drop in the first nine months of 2022 compared to the same period in 2021, as reported in Publisher’s Weekly — Canadian book sales rose in the first half of 2022, according to BookNet Canada. In the “Canadian English-language trade book market, we’ve found that print unit sales for the first six months of 2022 are up 8 per cent over the same time period in 2021 …” it wrote. “Looking even farther back, print unit sales during the first six months of 2022 are 2 per cent higher than in 2019, signalling the Canadian book market’s recovery from COVID-19 related losses.”

Small centres of culture

If there was going to be a label for the year, Year of the Indie would work — it’s anti-big moves; it would capture the impact small bookstores and publishers have had in the book world this year. As Amazon shut down its experiment with bookstores and as Indigo founder Heather Reisman stepped down, and the stores moved more deeply into the “lifestyle brand” category and further away from books, new indie bookstores opened, supplementing their sales by becoming local centres of culture, a trend recognized in both the U.S. and in Canada. In Toronto, Martha Sharpe’s Flying Books stand-alone bricks-and-mortar store quickly became a book events hot spot this year; The Scribe rare bookstore opened in the city’s east end, with its owner, Justin Daniel Wood, signing a five-year lease; and a new horror bookstore Little Ghosts opened in the city’s west end.

Indies punching above their weight, meantime, have a poster child in Coach House Books. Coach House launched a new imprint to publish Indigenous non-fiction writers: named zaagigin — “an Anishinaabemowin word that describes a sprout coming out of the earth” — it’s looking for narratives of “Indigenous land and life.” (Another big move for Indigenous writing this year: agent Stephanie Sinclair, known for representing writers including Billy-Ray Belcourt, Lee Maracle and Joshua Whitehead, has moved to the editorial side of things, becoming publisher at McClelland & Stewart.)

In 2015 Coach House published “Fifteen Dogs” by André Alexis, which went on to win the Giller Prize; this year, it ended up with two titles on the five-book short list: “Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century” by Kim Fu and “The Sleeping Car Porter” by Suzette Mayr, which won the $100,000 award. That Giller Prize short list featured four women and one man, every one a person of colour. If this proves anything, it’s that CanLit is more inclusive than it’s ever been and short lists can still serve up a few surprises (Ann-Marie MacDonald, Shyam Selvadurai, John Irving, et al were nowhere to be seen on this year’s short or long list).

Getting the word out

As TikTok — or, more specifically, BookTok — reaches an ever-expanding audience, the recommendations from influential BookTokkers are having a direct impact on the bestsellers lists and popular writers are gaining legions of followers. Romance writer Colleen Hoover has dominated the bestsellers lists this year, a boon for her main publisher, Simon & Schuster. She wrote the top six novels on our 2022 bestsellers of the year list (plus, she wrote the 13th-ranked book, “Regretting You”). She has 1.1 million followers on TikTok, 14.7 million likes and her folksy posts generally rack up more than a million views. If, as the saying goes, publishing is all about building relationships — with bookstores, with agents and with readers — then Hoover’s given us all, writers and publicists included, a master class in how to do it.

While things improved for some writers, they only seemed to get worse for literary and arts magazines. Bookforum in the United States shut down. The magazine was launched in 1994; it was devoted to books, publishing a mix of reviews, interviews, and essays and features about the industry. While it won’t create any new editions it will, reported the New York Times, maintain its online archive for a while yet. In a much quieter move, Canada’s Quill & Quire, the book industry’s trade magazine, shuttered its print edition after 90 years; the magazine is now available only online, although it is continuing to publish new editions with reviews, interviews and features.

Meanwhile, Taddle Creek, the little magazine that could, run by Conan Tobias and providing a wide range of comics, features, essays, fiction and poetry from some of the best creative minds in the country, has printed its last edition after 25 years and 50 issues. Tobias told Broken Pencil magazine in an email that it wasn’t because of money or time or inclination, but rather a feeling that the magazine had run its course: “I’m really happy to be ending it on my own terms when it’s still sound, still growing and still good.” There’s something to be said for an elegant end.

Other literary journals — devoted more to new writing than news and reviews — continue to thrive or at least survive: Brick, A Literary Journal, one of the country’s premier book publications, celebrated its 45th anniversary; and Exile Editions, founded and still edited by Toronto writer Barry Callaghan along with his son Michael, is celebrating 50 years.

So long

There were, as there are every year, deaths of prominent writers: internationally bestselling crime fiction writer Peter Robinson, he of the Inspector Banks series; Kingston poet, musician and writer Steven Heighton in April, levying a powerful blow of grief and remembered “for his endless curiosity about humanity”; and the groundbreaking writer Sylvia Fraser at the age of 88 in October — her book “My Father’s House” detailed the sexual abuse she endured from her father while growing up.

On the cover of its 110th issue, Brick featured a note from Heighton, in his own handwriting: “Art is hard & every project is always on the cusp of collapse.”

Those words could sum up 2022 — we’re in a liminal space in a changing literary landscape — and give us a philosophy to live by in 2023: hang in there.

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