Self-published author Jill Bobula looks over illustrations for her latest book called Anxious Annie, a story about a young girl with obsessive compulsive disorder.
Writer’s block is only the first snag for would-be authors.
The government grant system for Canadian writers doesn’t help anyone who isn’t already established as an author, says local publisher and owner of Baico Publishing, Raymond Coderre.
“The people who have made it stay there,” he says. “There’s no room for the ones coming up.”
Government grants mostly come in two forms: money for authors to research and write their books, and money for publishing houses to print them, says Grace Thrasher, a representative for the Canada Council for the Arts.
The problem is, to qualify for these grants, you need to have already published one book with a professional publisher.
The Canada Council for the Arts is only one government branch that grants money to Canadian authors, but Coderre says most agencies only consider professionally published writers.
The reason self-published authors are excluded from the council’s grants is simply because they are not part of its mandate, says Thrasher.
“Today, technology makes it easier (for writers) to publish books themselves,” she says. “And sell it out of the back of a car.”
But, Coderre says many good authors with interesting stories are left looking for other ways to get their books out. The rejection rate at big publishers is about 99 per cent for fiction books, he adds from his desk, tucked in behind a tall shelf that acts as a divider between his office and the Albert Street storefront.
In 30 years of working in publishing for the government, he had seen many of his colleagues rejected by multiple publishers. This is why Coderre opened his own small publishing house 11 years ago.
“I exceed all the criteria to obtain a grant,” he says, “but there’s a clause in that grant that says they want to oversee who gets published or not.”
Unlike big publishing firms, Baico reads every submitted manuscript in its entirety, whether in English or in French, and gives all authors constructive criticism.
Getting authors started is his goal.
Coderre prints the books he thinks are worth it, to establish a promising writer as published. Some authors who were denied government funding for their first book have received grants for their second after having been published with Baico, says Coderre.
He also says a couple of the books he’s printed have even been picked up by larger publishing houses. And because authors retain ownership of their stories when they publish with Baico, they can go on to get those same books reprinted by bigger firms.
Other local authors, including Jill Bobula, actively choose to self-publish because they don’t want to give up their rights to an agent or publishing house and therefore don’t qualify for grants for writing and research.
She and her sister started a company called Wildberry Productions to publish their own series of books for kids, parents, and educators about disorders such as Tourette’s syndrome and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
But Wildberry Productions doesn’t qualify for grants as a professional publishing house because it doesn’t print enough books per year and isn’t on the government’s master list.
Bobula says the cost of printing 2,000 copies of one of her books is around $15,000. But she also says she’s lucky that her husband, who works with the printing company Lowe-Martin Group, arranged a deal that lets her delay payments to them until she receives enough revenue from sales.
Bobula says since she can’t get the government to foot the bill, so she’s turned to private companies for sponsorship. For instance, the Brewers Association of Canada covered the cost of her book on fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
Even for established authors, the government simply doesn’t have enough money.
Of the approximately 1,080 eligible authors who applied for funding last year, only 285 received grants.