Behind the Books

“They can put a tariff on what Canada makes, but they will never be able to put a tariff on what Canada is made of.” — Tareq Hadhad, founder and CEO of Peace by Chocolate Lately, Canadians have been paying much closer attention to where the things they buy actually come from for a variety of reasons both personal and political and that's great that we have so many choices available for things that it is something that can be a choice, or is it? Sometimes things marked "Canadian", have a shiny maple leaf on them, say "Product of Canada" or "Made in Canada" are not 100% Canadian nor do they have to be. In a high trust society people trust what the labels say - but more and more we are learning that labels are not telling the whole story of these products. 51% is the threshold for "Made in Canada" label which I discovered when I went to research writing this post. That is actually a bit disappointing to see. Buy Canadian Story on CBC The other d...

“A word after a word after a word is power.”  — Margaret Atwood, “Spelling” There are thousands of book publishers operating across Canada, from large publishing houses to independent presses and people publishing under their own imprint names. But where can you find them? In the Canadian ISBN Publishers' Directory of course. The Library and Archives Canada maintains a searchable  Canadian ISBN Publishers’ Directory   containing information about publishers that have registered through ISBN Canada. It is one of those useful Canadian publishing resources that is easy to miss unless you already know it exists. If you're publishing in Canada, it's definitely worth checking to ensure that all of your information is correctly listed and that any links they have are current and working. What Is the Canadian ISBN Publishers’ Directory? The short answer is, this directory contains information supplied by English-language publishers that have received their ISBNs through ISBN Cana...

“Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods.”  — John Updike So exiting that we can share that our books are finally starting to appear on Indigo’s website. After a long stretch of backend setup and waiting, seeing those listings populate feels like a real turning point. We chose IngramSpark intentionally for long term distribution and library access. We will link back to our earlier post explaining that decision in more detail, but the short version is that we wanted a system that supported bookstores, libraries, and print on demand rather than locking us into a single retailer. Our Ebooks Were Already There One interesting contrast is that our ebooks have actually been available on the Indigo site for some time. Because we distribute ebooks through Draft2Digital , they are automatically sent to Kobo , which powers Indigo’s ebook catalogue. That part of the system worked exactly as expected. Once the ebooks were live through Dr...

“Even the smallest one can change the world.” — E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web