Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece last month on the death of Dad books, the Father’s Day specials—books about “some little-known chapter of World War II, the sweeping narrative of a shipwreck, perhaps the latest presidential biography.”

Here’s what it gave for evidence. Nonfiction book sales have declined for four years, including an 8 percent drop this year up to May 9.

Sales of Books about politics and current affairs are down 19 percent in those same four months and nine days in 2026. The article quotes, among others, former Simon & Schuster publisher Jonathan Karp saying that “this is a sea change and people should wake up and realize we’re living in a new world.”

The new world is one with “an endless supply of Substack newsletters, Netflix documentaries, YouTube videos and podcasts that offer the kind of fresh reporting, sharp analysis and historical perspective once limited doorstop-size books.”

Jonathan Burnham of Harper Group adds that all these alternatives to books make “the idea of sitting down with a 700-page Ron Chernow book less appealing. You’ve scratched that itch.”

The WSJ noted that Chernow’s recent biography of Mark Twain, published last spring, is underperforming his 2017 biography of Ulysses S. Grant.

There was an obligatory quote from Barnes & Noble CEO James Daunt, who attributed the decline in serious nonfiction sales to the fact that everyday events are all-consuming: “The world is exceptionally interesting right now and when that happens the nonfiction reader is reading the news instead.”

As someone who publishes a lot of Dad books, i.e., serious researched nonfiction, histories and biographies, that sort of thing, I read the article with concern. In fact, I read it twice.

I felt much better after the second reading.

Let’s start with the chart. The first four months and 9 days of 2026 are doing all the work here. A decline of 1 to 2 percent in the years 2023 to 2025 is statistical noise. Circana BookScan numbers don’t include audiobooks, which have been rising steadily in popularity. The very slight decline in sales for the first three years might be entirely attributable to format shifting, hardcopy to digital audio. The 8 percent decline in the first four months of 2026 looks more ominous, but book sales figures are always lumpy, never a straight line. A four-month sample tells you nothing.

The greater problem with the chart is that it is counting adult nonfiction book sales, not Dad books. There are any number of ways to cut Circana BookScan data, but the broad adult nonfiction category contains a vast array of books. Books for men, books for women, books for everybody. Not only serious researched nonfiction, but self-help, how-to, study guides, business and personal finance, psychology and religion books, health and fitness books, parenting books, food and travel books, true crime, sports, military, essays, crafts and hobbies, memoirs, etc. There is no data cut for Dad books. So the story is backing its thesis for the death of apples with stats about oranges.

The report of a 19 percent drop in the narrower category of politics and current affairs also looks ominous, but this is one of the most notoriously cyclical genres in existence. And, again, we’re discussing a short period of four months and nine days. The new Trump era was less than a year old at the start of that period. It generally takes longer than a year to get new books from commission to sale. Ten days after the end of the period under discussion, Andrew Weissmann released Liar’s Kingdom: How to Stop Trump’s Deceit and Save America. It was an instant number-one New York Times bestseller. In so specialized a category as this, Liar’s Kingdom alone might have been sufficient to right the ship.

The only other evidence presented to support the decline in Dad books is poor Ron Chernow’s journey. His Mark Twain, with 119,259 hardcover sales, is underperforming his Ulysses S. Grant, with 381,604 sales.

I don’t know where to start. The Grant book has been out for almost a decade, Twain for a year. Not surprising that it has sold less. Also, you can’t compare major political biographies to major cultural biographies. David McCullough’s biographies of Truman and Adams far outsold his book about American artists and writers in Paris. And while I’m a fan of Chernow, his Twain book isn’t his best work. He received polite and generally positive reviews, but they noted that the book is overly long—the word “exhaustive” surfaces repeatedly—and that he doesn’t entirely succeed in bringing Twain to life. Grant is a superior book, and the more enjoyable read, too, if customer reviews are anything to go by. The Twain sales prove nothing.

So we don’t really have any evidence at all that Dad books are in trouble, that they’re getting swamped by podcasts or current events, and certainly not that there’s been “a sea change” and that we’re living “in a new world.”

Amusingly, the literary world was flooded with hot new Dad books coincident with the WSJ’s declaration of their death.

Just before the Journal’s arbitrary May 9 cutoff, Craig Fehrman published the 550-page, impeccably researched This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark. It debuted on the New York Times bestseller list May 10, along with Last Branch Standing, Sarah Isgur’s new study of the Supreme Court.

I already mentioned Andrew Weissmann’s bestselling Liar’s Kingdom, released May 12. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Take Me to Your Leader came out that same day and instantly made the New York Times bestseller list.

David Sedaris’s The Land and Its People followed by about a week and shot to number one on the Times’ list. Lois Romano’s extraordinary An Inconvenient Widow: The Torment, Trial, and Triumph of Mary Todd Lincoln came out May 19 and also made the list, along with Melissa Murray’s Annotated Guide to the US Constitution, which debuted at number three. Theo Baker’s takedown of the Stanford/Silicon Valley establishment, How To Rule the World, debuted May 19, another instant New York Times bestseller.

H. W. Brand’s American Patriarch, a biography of George Washington, was released May 12. It hasn’t hit the Times list, but it’s selling strong on Amazon and is as much a Dad book as it’s possible to write.

I think retailers should be well-supplied with gift ideas for Father’s Day this year. And there’s more to come. Such proved Dad authors as Candice Millard, David Grann, Erik Larsen, Patrick Radden Keefe, and Walter Isaacson are all still writing. Gladwell’s The American Way of Killing, on US gun violence, Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Rush: California Gold, the Civil War, and the Making of the Modern World, Walter Stahr’s major biography of William Howard Taft, Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon and his Marshalls: Victory, Rivalry, Betrayal, and Michael Lewis’s Blockers: Rebels in the Deep State, promise a particularly strong fall season for Dad books.

As for podcasts, etc., they are mostly a godsend for books, the best substitute we have for lost book review sections in newspapers and magazines. I imagine there will be thousands of hours of podcasts produced to promote the titles mentioned above.

None of the above is intended to suggest there are no problems in the world of serious nonfiction. We discuss them here on the regular. It does appear that while the hits keep coming, the mid-list is thinning, although I’m not sure how to quantify that. It’s certainly more difficult than ever to build a career as a writer of such books. I’d just be hesitant to describe it as a problem of demand. Men will still read good books.

Meanwhile, Father’s Day is coming soon! Here are some of Sutherland House’s most recent Dad books. Order here:

Coming soon from Sutherland Quarterly

Sutherland Quarterly is pleased to announce its latest edition, Tyler Dawson’s exceptionally timely The Republic of Alberta: An Idea that Won’t Go Away:

What could the consequences be if Alberta turned its back on Canada?

In The Republic of Alberta, Globe and Mail journalist Tyler Dawson delivers the definitive history and analysis of Alberta’s long-simmering separatist movement. From its colonial roots and early resentment toward Ottawa, through the oil-fuelled grievances of the NEP era, to the rise of modern populism and convoy protests, Dawson charts a clear trajectory of Western alienation. Blending historical insight with contemporary reporting, he examines the thinkers, politicians, and cultural flashpoints that have shaped the separatist impulse. As Alberta Premier Danielle Smith courts separatist sentiment more openly than her predecessors, Dawson explores the uncertain future of a province increasingly questioning its place in Canada.

Buy your copy now or take advantage of this special offer for SHuSH subscribers: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge.

Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.

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Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)

Ian Coutts’ New Chapters, featuring new Canadian fiction

Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.

The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.

The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”

Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.

Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.

Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.

Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff

Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.

Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)

Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different

Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion

Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world

Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations

Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice

John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations

Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading

Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.

Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Tuesday, June 2, 5-7 p.m.

Book Launch & Conversation
OCAD University Auditorium, 100 McCaul Street, Toronto

Presented by OCAD University and Sutherland House: Alexander Manu, celebrated innovation strategist and author of You Were Never Just Using It (order here), joins futurist and entrepreneur Sinead Bovell to discuss one of the great questions of our time: what if laptops, cell phones, and AI aren’t just changing how we live, but who we become? Reception and book signing to follow.
RSVP link: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/book-launch-you-were-never-just-using-it-by-alexander-manu-tickets-1990019060580

Wednesday June 3, 7 to 9 p.m.
Book Launch at Cameron Hall @ Yorkminster Park Church, 1585 Yonge Street, Toronto

The Canadian Institute for Historical Education and Sutherland House invite you to celebrate the launch of bestselling author John Boyko’s In Pursuit of Tomorrow: The Inventive Life of Sandford Fleming (order here), a sweeping new biography of the visionary engineer and nation-builder Canada—the likes of whom we desperately need today. Reception and book signing to follow.
RSVP link: https://cihe.ca/eventcalendar/john-boyko-on-sir-sandford-fleming/

My friend Anna Porter forwarded me an email this week. It came to her from a “book marketing professional” named Stella Adams. It addressed Anna as the author of eleven fantastic books, a legendary publishing executive, and an “industry titan,” all of which is true and appropriate. It discussed her works with specificity and flattered the hell out of her. Eventually it pivoted to a critique of her digital presence and got to its point:

Given your background, you can spot a templated pitch from a mile away. You’ve likely rejected thousands of them over your career. What I am offering you is not a rigid package. It is a highly tailored strategy built entirely around your unique status as a publisher-author, your extensive catalog, and the gap between where your digital presence currently lives and where it deserves to be found.

Here is what I would build for Anna specifically.

1. The Industry Authority and Speaker Hub
Right now, annaporter.ca serves as your digital portfolio, but your greatest untapped asset is your massive institutional authority. I’ll build a centralized digital destination that positions you not just as a novelist selling fiction, but as the definitive “Master Class” voice on writing, publishing, and the evolution of the book world…

2. The Multidimensional Catalog Campaign
With eleven books spanning different corners of literature and crime fiction, standard retail algorithms inevitably struggle to categorize your footprint. They tend to isolate your newest release, Deceptions, while allowing your deep backlist to gather digital dust. I’ll construct a unified metadata and content framework that connects your entire body of work under a single, commanding author brand…

3. Generative Engine Optimization for the Literary Elite
The future of book discovery belongs entirely to semantic search models. When an industry professional, an event coordinator, or a high-intent reader asks an AI tool to recommend sophisticated Canadian crime fiction, or looks for leading voices who understand the deep history of book publishing and agency dynamics, Anna Porter needs to be the definitive name that surfaces...

Anna, here is why this truly matters.

As a former publisher, you know better than anyone that the old ways of distribution have shifted. The physical gatekeepers you used to navigate have been largely replaced by silent, automated, and often indifferent retail algorithms. If a catalog as rich as yours isn’t backed by an equally sophisticated technical infrastructure, it risks being quietly buried on overcrowded digital shelves. The incredible energy you’ve poured into eleven books—and your lifelong commitment to the world of literature—deserves a digital architecture that fights back with the same intelligence you brought to the printing press. The publishing process doesn’t end when the book hits the shelf. It ends when your entire legacy is rendered unmissable to the modern world.

It’s a classic book marketing scam, albeit better informed than most. The main giveaway was that the sender had a Gmail address rather than a company address (and one that didn’t match the sender’s name, at that).

Three weeks ago, Don Levers, author of our forthcoming The (Almost) Perfect Heist: The Incredible True Story of the Vancouver Safety Deposit Robbery (order here), received an email from the “institutional content outreach team in partnership with Bloomsbury Publishing.” It said nice things about his book, which it couldn’t possibly have read, and claimed to be considering it for international distribution across its network. The sender signed off “Kind regards, Caledonia, Institutional Content Outreach, Bloomsbury Publishing Partnership Team.” Caledonia, too, had a Gmail address.

The publishing world is swimming in scams at the moment. There are Amazon scams where authors’ names are appropriated to sell AI-generated books. There are different Amazon scams where the contents of authors’ books are summarized by AI to create low-cost competitors to the originals. There are any number of fly-by-night shops that will promise to publish your book for a lot of money and deliver squat. But by far the most prevalent scams are of the marketing variety.

As we’ve discussed several times here, millions of books are published in North America every year and the vast majority of them fail to break through. That leaves writers frustrated and vulnerable to marketing scams. They land in an author’s inbox offering welcome praise and lament that said author’s book hasn’t received the attention it deserves. They offer to rectify that grave injustice.

It’s an ingenious strategy: you’ll live a long time before you meet an author who thinks their book got the attention it deserved. Writers all over the world are forwarding these fake emails to their publishers saying “See—this person gets it! Why didn’t you do all this?”

Inevitably, the promises of marketing breakthroughs involve a fee, often several thousand dollars. Victoria Strauss, co-founder of Writer Beware, has done some excellent reporting on these scams. She describes what happened to someone who took the bait:

They reported spending over £2,000 on services, including a video trailer, social media posts, email blasts, and a follower-building effort. Amelia [the scammer] really did deliver those items, taking over the writer’s social media accounts to do so—but they yielded little engagement, and the writer later discovered that most of the follower accounts were fake or inactive, and the email blast recipients consisted primarily of random addresses with no relevance to the writer’s book. The writer wound up having to delete their social media accounts.

More advanced versions of the scams begin with an email purporting to be from a famous author. You think, “wow, Stephen King read my novel and wants to chat!” So you chat, and Stephen wants to introduce you to his agent, who pretends to read your sample chapter and likes it but thinks it needs a little work and has a professional editor in mind who can help, for a fee.

Other variations involve famous authors writing with offers to promote your book themselves. Or random people emailing to urge you to submit to an agent who is right now looking for writing exactly like yours. Some scams contact writers through their Authors Guild member profiles to give them a veneer of authenticity.

There’s an international ghostwriting scam run by an outfit calling itself Harper Book Writers. It targets self-publishing authors, charging them about $4,000 for editing and publishing services, which it never delivers. Apparently it upcharges for Barnes & Noble store placement, which no publisher can guarantee.

The so-called Hachette Book Group scam also preys on the self-published. Authors receive fake emails from Hachette, a real publisher, claiming to have been impressed by their book on Amazon and offering a traditional publishing deal, for a fee. Hachette, according to the Authors Guild, has been impersonated in a number of frauds:

Tactics include fake job interviews and offers using Hachette’s name and logo, fraudulent publishing contract offers from fake agents that promise a large advance from Hachette and involve fabricated documents or claims of working with Hachette employees, and phone calls posing as Hachette staff demanding fees before entering into fake publishing agreements.

We’ve seen a fake literary festival courting authors for appearances. Fake book club invitations are common, usually involving a hosting fee. Another approach is the book-to-screen adaptation fraud, where a few thousand dollars will get your book into the Netflix pipeline. There are fake award scams, fake review scams, fake workshop scams, and fake podcast interview scams.

That’s a staggering amount of grift trained on an industry renowned for its low stakes. But then many of these operations are run out of Nigeria, where a few thousand dollars is a good annual salary. You have to admire the hustle. I’d read a novel set in a literary scam factory in Abuja.

Last week, I got hit myself.

There are a whole bunch of clues in that email, starting with the Gmail address, which I overlooked on first pass. I was busy luxuriating in the praise for my work. It took me a beat too long to think “Rodale does health and wellness—this makes no sense.” I googled Marine Cochran and landed at a site that sells shore power systems to cruise ships. That’s when I noticed that the sender had scraped Marnie Cochran’s email signature and misspelled her name in the body of the message, and sent it to me from a Gmail account.

It’s bittersweet to be scammed by someone with impeccable taste.

The one rule of scam emails is never respond. I told Marine I had a few ideas that I’d be happy to discuss.

How else was I going to determine the nature of the scam? The reply:

So she’s not interested in discussing my ideas. She seems interested in finding me representation, which sounds like some version of the agent gambit. It made me curious as to why Marine couldn’t have done a simple search to find out if I had representation. So I googled “Kenneth Whyte’s literary agent.”

I knew the late Dean Cooke and quite liked him, but we never did business.

Quite a mess we’ve made of our communications environment.

Coming soon from Sutherland Quarterly

Sutherland Quarterly is pleased to announce its latest edition, Tyler Dawson’s exceptionally timely The Republic of Alberta: An Idea that Won’t Go Away:

What could the consequences be if Alberta turned its back on Canada?

In The Republic of Alberta, Globe and Mail journalist Tyler Dawson delivers the definitive history and analysis of Alberta’s long-simmering separatist movement. From its colonial roots and early resentment toward Ottawa, through the oil-fuelled grievances of the NEP era, to the rise of modern populism and convoy protests, Dawson charts a clear trajectory of Western alienation. Blending historical insight with contemporary reporting, he examines the thinkers, politicians, and cultural flashpoints that have shaped the separatist impulse. As Alberta Premier Danielle Smith courts separatist sentiment more openly than her predecessors, Dawson explores the uncertain future of a province increasingly questioning its place in Canada.

Buy your copy now or take advantage of this special offer for SHuSH subscribers: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge.

Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.

Thanks for reading. Please either:

Leave a comment

Share

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Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)

Ian Coutts’ New Chapters, featuring new Canadian fiction

Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.

The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.

The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”

Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.

Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.

Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.

Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff

Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.

Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)

Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different

Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion

Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world

Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations

Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice

John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations

Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading

Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.

Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

I find expectations one of the most difficult things to manage in book publishing.

That includes our own expectations, as publishers, when we release a book. Before we know much about what readers will think of it, we have to determine a new title’s print run. Usually we’re guessing. We can look at how similar books have sold, we can study our pre-order patterns, we can talk to our sales team, and our sales team can talk to retailers, but at the end of the day we’re throwing darts.

I spoke to a large publisher last summer, one who uses all kinds of sophisticated formulae to assess print runs, and he said his executives had just completed an analysis that showed their initial orders of books, across all genres and through many seasons, averaged 20 percent higher than necessary. We do about the same, without the formulae.

I think most publishers err on the side of over ordering. We’re all optimists by nature. We tend to fall in love with our own books. The economics of print runs tempt you to order generously: the more you buy, the lower the cost per copy.

We’re also aware of the pain that comes with under-estimating demand. No one wants to be caught short of stock if a book comes out of the gate strong. Being unable to fulfil orders is bad for business, and it leads to difficult conversations with the author, even if it’s good news in the sense that there’s demand for the book. So estimates tend to be high.

Author expectations are similarly difficult. More difficult, in fact. While some writers are happy to be published and grateful for their readers, even if those readers, in aggregate, wouldn’t fill a concert hall, others aspire to move inventory by the pallet. They have their eyes on bestseller lists.

It’s entirely understandable. Books are an incredible amount of work. Authors invest their whole selves in them. They don’t do that unless they have a strong conviction that their book needs to be written and deserves to be read. Publishers know this, and share the author’s conviction (hence the large press runs). They do all they know how to do, and all they can afford to do, to meet authorial expectations. On occasion, they succeed. Most often they don’t. It’s a recipe for mass heartbreak.

The best guide to reasonable expectations for book sales in North America emerged several years ago from the Department of Justice versus Penguin Random House antitrust trial. An astonishing trove of information came out of that case. If I ran the Author’s Guild, I’d be lobbying congress to make it mandatory for the DOJ to sue one of the Big Five every few years so the rest of us can keep up with how the business really works.

Anyway, a reporter covering DOJ versus PRH quoted a lawyer as telling the court that of the 58,000 books published annually by the Big Five houses, 90 percent sell fewer than 2,000 copies. If that wasn’t shocking enough, the lawyer also said that half of the 58,000 “sell fewer than one dozen books.”

The latter stat went viral. A series of knowledgeable commentaries on book sales challenged it, and it appears to have been incorrect. The reality, however, is scarcely more consoling. Kristen McLean, an analyst for BookScan, the most authoritative of the generally unauthoritative sources of book data available to the trade, studied a year’s worth of newly released physical books by America’s ten largest publishers, 45,571 ISBNs in all. Her findings, courtesy of Jane Friedman’s newsletter, were as follows:

• 0.4% or 163 books sold 100,000 copies or more

• 0.7% or 320 books sold between 50,000–99,999 copies

• 2.2% or 1,015 books sold between 20,000–49,999 copies

• 3.4% or 1,572 books sold between 10,000–19,999 copies

• 5.5% or 2,518 books sold between 5,000–9,999 copies

• 21.6% or 9,863 books sold between 1,000–4,999 copies

• 51.4% or 23,419 sold between 12–999 copies

• 14.7% or 6,701 books sold under 12 copies.

There are a whole bunch of qualifiers to those stats. They represent one year of sales, not lifetime sales, and they are limited to the US, so foreign sales not included. They count bookstore sales, not audiobook or ebook sales or Audible listens. They don’t include books sold directly by the author or the publisher, or books sold outside the usual bookstore channels (gift shops, for instance).

The qualifiers are important.

Some books take a year or more to find their audience and take off. Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles had a respectable literary release in 2011, winning the Orange Prize, but it wasn’t a commercial juggernaut until BookTok discovered it almost a decade later. Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens was published in Hebrew in 2011 and in English three years later. Its peak sales years were roughly from 2017 to 2021.

Other books find the bulk of their audience outside the channels tracked by BookScan. Late last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that the audio edition of Karin Slaughter’s thriller We Are All Guilty Here was outselling the bestselling hardcover edition. Celebrity memoirs, including Brooke Shields’s Brooke Shields is Not Allowed to Get Old, can see similar results.

Independent publishers can be very effective at direct-to-consumer sales—events, targeted campaigns, website sales, bulk sales—that don’t show up in a BookScan survey. These channels can produce double or triple the unit sales of bookstores for their books.

At the end of the day, however, those BookScan numbers are directionally sound. Most books do most of their sales in year one, and most sell primarily through bookstores in physical formats. If the numbers above—showing that two-thirds of books sell less than 1,000 copies—represent an undercount, a better guess is likely that two-thirds of books sell in the range of 1,200 to 1,500 copies.

For author and publisher both, the publication of any book is the triumph of hope over data.

It’s important, then, to have achievable goals and reasonable expectations at the start of a publishing project. A writer grateful for 1,500 or 2,000 readers will find the whole adventure far more satisfying than someone who sold 5,000 and expected 20,000.

It’s more important for authors to take sales as one factor among many in a book’s success. Are you happy with your work? How it reads? Does it say what you want it to say? Will the audience for which the work was intended find meaning in it? Does the book contribute to a debate, reshape how some person or issue is viewed?

An excellent book that sells in three figures can alter the trajectory of an author’s career and win important prizes.

One great review, even one heartfelt response from a reader, can mean far more than a royalty cheque.

It’s the same from the publisher’s perspective. All publishers are grateful for their bestsellers, but all of them can also tell you, with equal enthusiasm, about a great experience with an author who didn’t sell much but wrote a fantastic book and was a joy to work with. And they’ll work with those authors again and again, even if the results are less than stellar.

Coming soon from Sutherland Quarterly

Sutherland Quarterly is pleased to announce its latest edition, Tyler Dawson’s exceptionally timely The Republic of Alberta: An Idea that Won’t Go Away:

What could the consequences be if Alberta turned its back on Canada?

In The Republic of Alberta, Globe and Mail journalist Tyler Dawson delivers the definitive history and analysis of Alberta’s long-simmering separatist movement. From its colonial roots and early resentment toward Ottawa, through the oil-fuelled grievances of the NEP era, to the rise of modern populism and convoy protests, Dawson charts a clear trajectory of Western alienation. Blending historical insight with contemporary reporting, he examines the thinkers, politicians, and cultural flashpoints that have shaped the separatist impulse. As Alberta Premier Danielle Smith courts separatist sentiment more openly than her predecessors, Dawson explores the uncertain future of a province increasingly questioning its place in Canada.

Buy your copy now or take advantage of this special offer for SHuSH subscribers: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge.

Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.

Thanks for reading. Please either:

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)

Ian Coutts’ New Chapters, featuring new Canadian fiction

Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.

The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.

The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”

Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.

Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.

Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.

Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff

Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.

Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)

Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different

Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion

Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world

Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations

Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice

John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations

Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading

Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.

Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”

This is the 323rd edition of SHuSH, the newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new here, press the button—it’s free:

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Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Programming note: this one took a lot of work and things are busy at the office so we’ll be going fortnightly for the next little while.

South Korea, in the latter half of the twentieth century, was building its economy almost entirely by exporting manufactured goods, everything from home electronics to ships to automobiles. That changed, as the story goes, when the country’s Presidential Advisory Board on Science and Technology released a report on digital technology in May 1994. It noted that a single Hollywood film, Jurassic Park, with its computer-generated dinosaurs, generated the same amount of foreign sales as 1.5 million Hyundai cars. The darling of Korean industry, Hyundai was exporting 640,000 cars a year in 1994. So one film was worth more than two years of heavy industrial production requiring enormous plant, equipment, capital investment.

The report stunned Koreans—”literally sent shock waves across the country,” writes Doobo Shim, a Seoul-based professor of media and communication. At the time, culture and entertainment were viewed as ephemeral and unlikely to contribute to Korea’s core mission of “improving the material conditions of the people.” The country decided it needed to change its game in order to thrive in the twenty-first century economy.

It wasn’t a straight line from the Presidential Advisory Report to Parasite, Squid Game, BTS, Blackpink, and Han Kang’s Nobel prize, but it’s straighter than you might think. Seoul is now a top-five world cultural center, and arguably top two if we’re talking pop culture and anything that appeals to under-thirties. How it happened tells us a great deal about Canada’s relative failure to develop home-grown cultural and entertainment industries.

The Presidential Advisory Board report alone did not alter Korea’s strategy. The country was starting from way behind. First came democratic reforms and media deregulation. That birthed new commercial TV channels and a variety of independent publications. Now with an independent (from government) domestic media sector, Korea tried to protect it by limiting the amount of foreign cultural product in its market. That didn’t work. In 1993, 90 of the top 100 video rentals in the country were from Hollywood; only five were domestic. Sound familiar, Canada?

Protection wasn’t going to work, anyway. Another factor at play was the Uruguay Round, an international accord negotiated between 1986-1994 that decisively liberalized the global economy, forcing all 123 signatory countries to open their markets for a vast range of goods and services, including communications services and entertainment product. It was clear to Korea that efforts to protect heritage and culture by shutting out the world had no future. It needed to upgrade its efforts in the cultural sphere if it wanted to avoid being swamped by content from multinational companies, and not just American ones. Satellite television services out of Japan and Hong Kong were already making inroads in Korea.

Another thing: Korea had noticed that Japan, its nearest rival in the home electronics sector, was making investments in content. Sony had bought Columbia pictures and CBS records. It was the nineties, the age of synergy, or vertical integration. Companies making devices—video players, portable music players—also wanted to own what played on them. Korean firms such as Samsung and Daewoo, makers of TVs and VCRs, felt a need to be vertically integrated, too.

So the Presidential Advisory Report landed on fertile ground. Korean businesses felt an imperative to pay attention to content. The Korean government felt itself under siege from foreign cultural and entertainment product. “Gone are the days,” said one expert interviewed in the newspaper Dong-A Ilbo, “when the government could appeal to the people to watch only Korean programs out of patriotism.”

All that notwithstanding, the report mostly resonated because it presented culture as an opportunity. It asked Koreans to recognize the potential of arts and entertainment to improve the material conditions of the people. Instead of resisting the emerging global marketplace, the power of multinational corporations and platforms, and the free movement of talent, it needed to master this new system, compete commercially, and take Korean culture to the world.

The Korean government introduced incentives for the corporate sector to invest in film, television, and related fields. It opened a school of film and multimedia at Korean National University of Arts to train a next-generation media workforce. The chaebol—the four family-controlled conglomerates that dominated Korean business (Hyundai, Samsung, LG, Daewoo)—as well as smaller firms and start-ups all piled into media. The whole country was seized with the notion that cultural production was the strategic industry of the twenty-first century. Dong-A Ilbo ran a thirty-four part series to that effect.

Again, not exactly a straight line. Studios, magazines, music companies, and publishers were launched at a furious pace. The better capitalized firms rushed to complete exclusive licensing agreements with the likes of Disney, Warner, Universal, BBC, Discovery, Canal Plus. It was a feeding frenzy, and when Korea suffered an economic meltdown in 1997, a lot of this initial investment proved unwise.

In return for emergency loans from the International Monetary Fund, the Korean government agreed to structural reforms which, among other measures, reduced the power of the chaebol and forced economic diversification in a manner favourable to the cultural sector.

Post crash, the government continued to focus on success in global cultural markets, providing direct support at every stage of cultural production: training of artists and producers; expansion of libraries and programs to promote reading; public investment in performance spaces and studios; grants and low-interest financing for film, TV, music, and publishing; coordination among mediums and agencies to ensure intellectual property stayed in the country and was exploited by Koreans; screen quotas for Korean films; fixed pricing to protect publishers and bookstores; and aggressive export promotion including relatively enormous subsidies for translation of Korean books. All of it was aimed at putting Korea on the global cultural map.

Most of Korea’s early successes were regional, with Korean films, television programs, and novels finding audiences in China, Japan, and other parts of Asia. In 2012 Psy’s “Gangnam Style” became the first video to hit a billion views on YouTube, and far more sophisticated versions of K-pop followed. Oldboy put Korean cinema on the map in 2003, and sixteen years later Parasite won the best picture Oscar. Han Kang won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian—one of at least five Korean books to make the prize list in the last decade—and won her Nobel in 2024. Korea emerged as a world leader in the video-game industry and Esports, winning three consecutive Overwatch World Cups. Webtoons, the mobile digital comic service, was invented in Korea and found a massive global readership. Seoul is a major outsourcing hub for video effects and animation (including The Simpsons). Korean talent is now everywhere: visual arts, architecture, classical music. It’s extraordinarily impressive.

Canada has a slightly smaller population and slightly higher GDP than South Korea. It faced many of the same pressures to liberalize its trade and adapt to new technologies in the 1980s and 1990s. On the cultural file, its response, in important ways, was the inverse of Korea’s. Rather than building aggressive export industries, Canada retreated to its domestic cultural space. Instead of taking its culture to the world, Canada adopted as its fundamental objective the notion of “telling our stories to ourselves.” We conceded global marketplace dominance to the US and de-prioritized commercial success.

Like Korea, we insisted on certain amounts of Canadian content on our airwaves. We subsidized cultural production at most stages of development, although our levels of public support were relatively scant, calibrated to serve the domestic market, not to compete internationally. We devised ownership rules that were supposed to ensure Canadians remained in control of their cultural production, but these proved difficult to enforce and ineffective in a world of large platforms and global distribution. We were only loosely coordinated, so that even where Canada had success—say, building major film/TV production hubs in Vancouver and Toronto—these were mostly producing foreign intellectual property.

We have produced an extraordinary amount of talent. We can match any K-pop line-up with the likes of Drake, The Weeknd and Justin Bieber. We have at least our share of internationally recognized authors. We’ve launched world-class filmmakers, including James Cameron and Denis Villeneuve. American television and American comedy are rife with Canadian talent. Yet the vast majority of these great artists and performers, even if some choose to reside in Canada, do most of their business outside Canada. They are produced outside Canada. Their intellectual property is owned outside Canada. Their economic benefits are captured outside Canada. Often the world doesn’t even know that our talent is Canadian, and much of its work is not recognizably Canadian, or only incidentally Canadian.

Meanwhile, Canadian consumption of Canadian content is shrinking by the year. We have Canadian media, Canadian-produced books and films and television shows, but they command pathetically small fractions of the domestic audience, like Korean film in the early 1990s. We are also marginal in global markets. There are exceptions, of course. Our children’s lit and TV shows travel well (in part because they’re often scrubbed of overt Canadianism). Once a decade, we create a TV show like Schitt’s Creek or Heated Rivalry. Exceptions that prove the rule.

We are one of the world’s best originators of cultural talent, and one of the world’s worst owners of cultural production and intellectual property. That matters because anyone wanting a big-time publishing contract or film deal or comedy career is going outside the country to realize their dreams. It matters because Canada’s economy is ridiculously dependent on basic extractive industries like mining, forestry, and oil & gas. We could use the diversification.

It also matters because a thriving cultural sector lifts the whole of a country. The main benefit to Korea of massive success in the global cultural marketplace hasn’t come from the export of films, music, TV shows, books, etc. Total K-culture exports amount to $38 billion annually. That’s more than half the value of exports of Korean automobiles—a meaningful contribution to the material conditions of the people, and it’s growing by 5 percent a year. But the real gains come from the halo of cultural success. Korean cosmetics are taking the world by storm. Korean cars and electronics brands are looked at differently these days. Korean tourism has exploded. Cultural success makes everything else in a country shine. The total impact of Korea’s cultural industries has been estimated as high as 5 to 6 percent of GDP.

And that’s in three decades from a standing start, with modest public investment compared to what the Korean government had been throwing at heavy industry. It’s also modest compared to the $40 to $50 billion Canada unwisely invested, at the top of the hype cycle, in subsidizing electric vehicle battery production—a business in which we have no real competitive advantage and no history of success.

This critique of Canada’s approach to culture isn’t original. In 2016, Melanie Joly, as minister of Canadian heritage, said we were doing it all wrong. It was a brave stance given that her party had the biggest hand in building our federal cultural programs.

Protectionism, she said, was futile in an age of global platforms. Confining ourselves to our domestic market was a retreat and a recipe for failure given that Canadian consumers are plugged into those global markets. Too much effort was being directed at subsidizing creation across a fragmented landscape of small producers, leaving us without scale.

The message was that while Canada has abundant talent and can produce strong content, we suck at taking it to the world and capturing value from it. The priority, Joly argued, should be to retain ownership of intellectual property, produce commercially viable content at scale, and build the marketing systems required to export aggressively.

She was especially right that the clear objective has to be commercial success. Without it, we won’t keep talent and intellectual property at home. We won’t create enough jobs to train future generations of talent. We won’t have sufficient resources and opportunities to sustain creators, whether they wish to pursue commercial success or their own artistic visions. There is a real tension in Canadian cultural politics between pursuing art and pursuing commerce. Our leading funding body, the Canada Council, has come down entirely on the side of pursuing art. That’s a mistake. Commercial success supports artistic vitality. It shouldn’t be the sole measure of success, but the healthier the economic environment, the more freedom artists have to do what they want, experiment, take risks.

Unfortunately, Joly didn’t have the political skill to implement her vision. She blew herself up and her successors reversed course and doubled down on the failed policies she’d critiqued.

We need the federal government to start over, or we need a single province to break out and pursue its own cultural agenda. We don’t necessarily want to adopt the Korean model—it has it’s challenges, from factory-style production to political agendas—but it’s a starting point. We just can’t keep doing what we’re doing, shipping our talent and our intellectual property south so America can benefit and shine. We’ll continue to be weak and irrelevant, both to ourselves and the rest of the world.

Coming soon from Sutherland Quarterly

Sutherland Quarterly is pleased to announce its next edition, coming April 28, will be Tyler Dawson’s exceptionally timely The Republic of Alberta: An Idea that Won’t Go Away:

What could the consequences be if Alberta turned its back on Canada?

In The Republic of Alberta, Globe and Mail journalist Tyler Dawson delivers the definitive history and analysis of Alberta’s long-simmering separatist movement. From its colonial roots and early resentment toward Ottawa, through the oil-fuelled grievances of the NEP era, to the rise of modern populism and convoy protests, Dawson charts a clear trajectory of Western alienation. Blending historical insight with contemporary reporting, he examines the thinkers, politicians, and cultural flashpoints that have shaped the separatist impulse. As Alberta Premier Danielle Smith courts separatist sentiment more openly than her predecessors, Dawson explores the uncertain future of a province increasingly questioning its place in Canada.

Buy your copy now or take advantage of this special offer for SHuSH subscribers: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge.

Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.

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Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)

Ian Coutts’ New Chapters, featuring new Canadian fiction

Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.

The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.

The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”

Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.

Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.

Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.

Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff

Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.

Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)

Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different

Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion

Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world

Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations

Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice

John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations

Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading

Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.

Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”

Share

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

I’ve been reading to fill gaps in my knowledge of publishing history, and there have been some big surprises. For instance, I had the origins of modern American publishing all wrong.

I mean, I’d read about the new Jewish publishers of the early twentieth century, the likes of Alfred A. Knopf, Bennett Cerf, Richard Simon, and Roger Straus, and how they disrupted the stodgy, WASPish world of New York and Boston literary publishing. But the images I had in my head were all wrong.

I was picturing these bright, scrappy boys from the streets of Manhattan elbowing their way up in a semi-hostile environment, eventually triumphing, transforming their field, etc. All of it was coloured by my knowledge of the simultaneous rise of Jewish moguls in the film industry.

The Jews who built Hollywood were mostly Eastern European immigrants with little or no education, capital, or social standing.

Adolph Zukor, the architect of Paramount Pictures, was born in Hungary. He immigrated to the US as a teenaged orphan with $40 sewn into the lining of his coat. He got a job as a furrier’s apprentice and began investing in nickelodeons, which led him to movies.

Sam Goldwyn, founder of Goldwyn Pictures, was born in Warsaw. As a teenager, he walked most of the way to England and emigrated to North America, where he worked as a glove salesman before producing his first motion picture.

Louis B. Mayer, co-founder and czar of MGM, was born in a little town outside Minsk. HE immigrated to North America as a child and worked in his father’s scrap metal business, roaming the city with a pushcart that said “junk dealer.” He saving enough money to rehabilitate a run-down theatre.

These guys were outsiders, street traders, who found their way into the emerging and slightly disreputable field of motion pictures. They built it into the most popular and influential medium of their time.

If you listen hard, you can hear the occasional echo of this experience in the lives of the great wave of Jewish book publishers. Max Schuster, for instance, was born in Russia. He emigrated to the US with his family. His father ran a cigar store in Washington Heights. The Schusters were bona fide working-class immigrants, and Max would grow up to co-found Simon & Schuster, one of the great American publishing houses. But Max was not like the other Jewish publishers.

I’m working through Gayle Feldman’s Nothing Random, a biography of Random House founder Bennett Cerf. It’s a slog, even if you love books about publishing. That said, I’m glad it exists. It’s well researched and it explodes a lot of myths about its subject. Or, put another way, it demonstrates that most of what you thought you knew about Bennett Cerf is bullshit, especially if you read his charming memoir At Random.

Cerf lied about everything, and Feldman needs most of her 1,000 pages just to set his invented record straight. She starts exposing fibs right on page one, chapter one, where she notes that Cerf made it a point of pride to tell people that he and his parents and all four of his grandparents had been born on the island of Manhattan.

In fact, none of his grandparents had been born there. Cerf not only lied about where his forebears were born, but their names and occupations, too. He obscured the fact that one grandfather made a fortune in the tobacco trade as a partner of the robber baron James Buchanan Duke. That same grandfather branched out into real estate, making another fortune by using insider information to buy parcels of land on which New York’s proposed Pennsylvania Station was ultimately built. His grandson, Bennett, attended Columbia University and dipped into the family treasury to strip the Modern Library franchise from a financially desperate Horace Liveright. It was a cold-blooded move—Liveright had been a mentor to Cerf (below), giving him his start in the business. Modern Library funded the birth and growth of Random House.

While Alfred A. Knopf’s family was not as wealthy as the Cerfs, it was part of New York’s rising Jewish middle class. His father was an advertising executive and financier. Alfred grew up lunching at the Plaza, attending the Horace Mann School for Boys and Columbia University. He enjoyed a tour of Europe before his father helped him find a job at Doubleday. He leapt from there to Mitchell Kennerley’s firm. He then decided to set out on his own. According to Amy Root Clements’ excellent little book, The Art of Prestige, Alfred (below) was fired by Kennerley for attempting to poach its authors. His father gave him the capital to start his own firm and A. A. Knopf eventually became the most prestigious publisher in America.

Richard Simon, the other half of Simon & Schuster, was the son of a prosperous milliner who sent him to the Ethical Cultural School and Columbia. While Richard paid his dues as a sugar importer and piano salesman, he relied upon family money to publish his first books.

So the trend of family money was already well established before Roger Straus (below), co-founder and longtime head of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, arrived on the scene. He took it to a new level. This is from Boris Kachka’s book Hothouse, a history of FSG: “Roger’s father, Oscar S. Straus, had been the first Jewish member of a US president’s cabinet. His uncle, Nathan, was a partner in two department-store dynasties—Macy’s and Abraham & Straus.” Roger’s bride, Gladys, was the daughter of Daniel Guggenheim, “paterfamilias of the country’s wealthiest Jewish dynasty.” They were married in the grand marble ballroom of the St. Regis, with Roosevelts, Carnegies, and Rothschilds in attendance. FSG was started with a $60,000 advance on Roger’s inheritance granted by his “wary parents.”

So nothing at all like the experience of the Zukors, Goldwyns, and Mayers. These weren’t outsiders who built a new machine, but near-insiders who became complete insiders and cultural aristocrats in an established industry.

I don’t want to make that sound easier than it was for the early Jewish publishers. They were up against real prejudice in both their industry and the literary community. And I don’t want to downplay their talent and cultural impact: they elevated the tastes of American readers and the publishing standards of American firms, and they gave the world some of the best literature it has ever seen. They were pretty much the whole show in twentieth-century American book publishing.

I was just struck by how different their backgrounds and paths were from those of the Hollywood tycoons. These were all brilliant young Jewish men building media businesses in the same country at the same time, yet they were worlds apart. It goes to show that talent is not randomly distributed across industries. It is moved in one direction or another by class, education, social networks, and access to capital. I was guilty of assuming shared identities would produce shared trajectories. A common enough mistake.

Coming soon from Sutherland Quarterly

Sutherland Quarterly is pleased to announce its next edition, coming April 28, will be Tyler Dawson’s exceptionally timely The Republic of Alberta: An Idea that Won’t Go Away:

What could the consequences be if Alberta turned its back on Canada?

In The Republic of Alberta, Globe and Mail journalist Tyler Dawson delivers the definitive history and analysis of Alberta’s long-simmering separatist movement. From its colonial roots and early resentment toward Ottawa, through the oil-fuelled grievances of the NEP era, to the rise of modern populism and convoy protests, Dawson charts a clear trajectory of Western alienation. Blending historical insight with contemporary reporting, he examines the thinkers, politicians, and cultural flashpoints that have shaped the separatist impulse. As Alberta Premier Danielle Smith courts separatist sentiment more openly than her predecessors, Dawson explores the uncertain future of a province increasingly questioning its place in Canada.

Buy your copy now or take advantage of this special offer for SHuSH subscribers: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge.

Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.

Thanks for reading. Please either:

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)

Ian Coutts’ New Chapters, featuring new Canadian fiction

Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.

The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.

The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”

Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.

Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.

Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.

Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff

Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.

Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)

Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different

Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion

Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world

Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations

Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice

John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations

Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading

Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.

Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

A couple of years ago, in SHuSH 229, we discussed the new Penguin Random House CEO, Nihar Malaviya, who succeeded the long-time occupant of that position, Markus Dohle.

Malaviya had just completed his debut interview with The New York Times. The newspaper described him as “an unusual chief executive” for the world’s largest trade publisher, and a stunning change from his predecessor, “who always seemed to be at the center of the action, whether at a conference table or a black-tie gala.”

My take was that “unusual” doesn’t begin to describe Malaviya. The vast literature on corporate CEOs holds that the prototype is a confident, narcissistic, hyper-competitive, extroverted white male, or at least someone who projects that way. He is taller and better looking than average, well dressed, well groomed, and fit. He is likely to have a short Anglo-Saxon name, authoritative gestures and body language, a strong, deep, unaccented voice, and a talent for maintaining eye contact. Markus Dohle ticked a lot of boxes:

I noted that Malaviya might not tick any boxes, except male. Judging by his video appearances, he’s a short, chubby, average-looking Indian man with more of an accent than you’d expect given that he came to the US as a thirteen-year-old. His posture is poor, his gestures fluttery, his voice soft and high-pitched. When he gets excited, he giggles. He is an unassuming, unprepossessing schlump, an absolute freak among CEOs. That is enough to make anyone cheer for him.

The Times failed to interview people who didn’t either hire Malaviya or work for him. It also did a lousy job of explaining why Malaviya got the big job over, say, Madeline McIntosh, the obvious candidate to replace Dohle. McIntosh was Malaviya’s boss and head of PRH’s US division (she has since resigned). She has a deep background in book sales and marketing. She looks and talks like a sophisticated book person. Malaviya is an MBA who rose through the ranks at PRH’s parent company, Bertelsmann, where he had little exposure to actual book publishing. Readers of the Times piece were left with the impression that he got the job because he’s smart, trusted by his owners, and disinclined to meddle in editorial departments.

The story actively downplayed Malaviya’s reputation as a data dude. It didn’t mention that he studied computer science as an undergrad and was top of his class in the finance stream at NYU Stern, a very good business school. Or that he was an analyst at JP Morgan Chase before joining Bertelsmann, where he rose through the ranks largely because of his data science and supply chain expertise. He served on Bertelsmann’s technology and data advisory board before being named CEO of PRH. He is a certified geek.

While underplaying Malaviya’s true nature, the Times piece was at pains to position him as someone qualified to run a publishing company as we’ve traditionally understood publishing companies—firms where the crucial decisions, both day-to-day and strategic, revolve around acquiring talent, gauging popular and literary tastes, providing cultural leadership, etc. Because that’s how the PRH people interviewed by the Times want to be seen. They view themselves as heirs to the great twentieth-century publishing houses whose names are scattered among the firm’s 350 imprints: Knopf, Penguin, Doubleday, Random House, Putnam. So they dressed Malaviya in something approximating a tweed jacket and told us that he actually reads books! He’s not as much a slide-rule as you’d think! All that’s missing is pipe smoke:

It was something of a gaslighting operation, the Times piece. It disguised from the public, and even from PRH itself, the true nature of the company’s business in the twenty-first century. And it did a disservice to Malaviya, downplaying his unusual capacities, the things that make him the man for this PRH moment.

Let me explain.

There have been two Bertelsmann annual reports since Malaviya was named CEO, and they are eloquent, in a corporate-speak way, about the nature of PRH’s business in 2024-2025.

Reading annual reports isn’t for everyone, but I hi

ghly recommend it. Annual reports are an under-rated nonfiction genre. You never know what you’re going to find in them. I mean, how’s this for a plot twist? Child labour among PRH printing suppliers:

In August 2025, a social audit commissioned by Penguin Random House UK identified child labor in the upstream value chain at a print service provider in Laos. As a result, cooperation with this service provider has been suspended until further notice in order to immediately remedy the negative impacts described in section SBM-3 of this chapter. As a preventive measure, the inspection of original identity documents will be mandatory in the future. Further social audits are planned to review the effectiveness of the actions taken.

Oops.

The Bertelsmann annual reports, like most of their ilk, are packed with financial numbers. The 2024 and 2025 versions, in the sections that pertain to PRH, outline the contemporary publishing squeeze: sales are flat to slightly improved, profits are down because costs are rising. That’s what made headlines from the annual reports, although it’s not news. It’s been the publishing reality for some time now.

The reports also contain the usual noise about the year’s bestsellers and prizes. I don’t know why they bother. It’s meaningless—indicative of nothing but PRH’s scale. When you publish 14,500 books a year, and routinely outbid your competitors, agents will bring you their best prospects and you’ll inevitably publish bestsellers and win prizes. It would be mildly interesting if PRH reported whether its share of bestsellers and prize winners went up or down relative to previous years, or relative to what it spent, in a given year, on acquiring books, but it doesn’t do that.

To get a sense of what really matters at PRH, you have to look beyond all this boilerplate to the company’s priorities, and particularly where it’s putting its money. That’s the news. And these two reports tell us that PRH is heavily investing in data and logistics.

This is consistent with Bertelsmann corporate emphases. Bertelsmann, which owns broadcast, music, and digital assets in addition to books, has built a centralized AI Hub, a Tech and Data advisory board, and it’s involved in a bunch of strategic partnerships with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. “The aim is to integrate AI into central value creation processes with a targeted approach, realize economies of scale, and systematically tap into efficiency and earnings potential.” It’s experimenting with “projects for personalized digital offerings, [and] the use of generative AI in content production.”

How does this apply to Penguin Random House? “A core priority remains the responsible deployment of advanced AI-driven technologies to increase commercial capability and operational efficiency,” says the 2025 report.

It’s a bit coy on exactly how AI is being deployed. One initiative is BookBoost, the company’s “first-party, data-driven marketing platform,” which is progressing “toward a fully integrated, cross-channel system, enhancing discoverability and sales across Penguin Random House titles.”

I think that means that PRH is using its own customer data (email subscribers, website visitors, social media activity, etc.) to identify potential audiences for its books and to market books in a unified manner across all of those channels. That would tend to make PRH less dependent on retail chains and Amazon to merchandise its books.

It’s a sensible move. Book publishers, especially in the age of retail chains and Amazon, have had little access to their own reading audiences. Amazon owns the relationship with half the book buyers in North America. It knows far more about their habits than any publisher. PRH is attempting to close the gap and build its own direct relationships with its audiences. Interestingly, the major PRH acquisition announced under Malaviya’s leadership was the UK gift-book publisher Wonderbly, known for its direct-to-consumer sales model.

The company has also developed “proprietary machine learning tools” to “improve demand forecasting, automate print quantities and order flows, and enable data-driven pricing across print and digital formats.” So AI is now instrumental in determining press runs and book prices, lowering PRH’s need for tweed.

A more significant move is PRH’s investment in new, cutting-edge distribution centers in Spain and Australia. “These facilities leverage advanced automation and robotics to significantly enhance the precision, speed, and resilience of Penguin Random House’s end-to-end logistics operations. Additionally, their highly digitalized and centralized infrastructure provides a scalable, future-ready platform that promotes continued process innovation and further strengthens Penguin Random House’s ability to serve readers worldwide.” The kicker to that paragraph is that PRH is framing its job-killing use of robotics as a “sustainable growth” initiative.

This is a signature Malaviya move. Bertelsmann is very big on logistics and supply chain operation. It’s Arvato business, about 20 percent of the company, does this full time. While Dohle spent his last few years at PRH trying to buy another trade publisher (Simon & Schuster), Malaviya is bringing PRH more in line with Bertelsmann priorities.

So what we’re seeing are heavy doses of machine-learning, human-replacing activity designed to monetize vast audiences across markets in the most efficient and profitable way possible. This is what it means to be PRH in the twenty-first century. It’s less of a publisher and more of an Amazon-lite book distribution, sales, and data platform.

Malaviya is the perfect guy to be running this business. PRH needs a CEO with expertise in deploying capital, and leveraging technology and data, to build industrial infrastructure. It does not need someone with discernment, taste, or cultural fluency. It’s got people who do that. Those people spend huge sums to acquire an extraordinary volume of books to add to an already colossal backlist of books. Again, as long as Malaviya permits them to keep paying more than the competition for books, which he can afford to do as the market leader, the hits will come. That part of the business takes care of itself. It’s the cultural equivalent of strip-mining. You move great masses of material knowing that somewhere in there you’ll get what you need.

I don’t mean this to be insulting to the people who work at the PRH imprints. There are a lot of great publishing professionals there. Individual books still matter to the people who work there, and they matter to us as readers. But the business is managed as though they don’t. That’s the view from the top of Bertelsmann, and the logic of the business it is operating. It needs to “realize economies of scale, and systematically tap into efficiency and earnings potential” to secure its position as the world’s dominant trade publisher.

That’s the game. Malaviya is the player.

Start the year informed

As a SHuSH subscriber, you are eligible for this special offer: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge.

Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.

Sutherland Quarterly is also pleased to announce its next edition, coming January 27, will be Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature, a sweeping account of how English Canada once forged a confident literary culture—and how that culture has steadily collapsed.

For decades, books provided the country’s most searching reflections on its history, politics, and identity; they shaped the national conversation and anchored a shared sense of who Canadians were. Author and media executive Richard Stursberg traces how this ecosystem emerged, flourished, and then eroded. He follows the rise of a vigorous publishing industry in the 1960s and ’70s, the period when Canadian writers reached international prominence, and the subsequent decades in which foreign ownership, shifting cultural priorities, fragile institutions, and policy failures hollowed out the sector.

Clear, forceful, and grounded in deep research, Lament for a Literature shows what happens when a nation loses the infrastructure that sustains its stories—and outlines practical reforms, including a Canadian Book Law, to rebuild the foundations of a literary culture capable of renewing itself.

ORDER HERE NOW

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Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)

Ian Coutts’ New Chapters, featuring new Canadian fiction

Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.

The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.

The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”

Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.

Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.

Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.

Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff

Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.

Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)

Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different

Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion

Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world

Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations

Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice

John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations

Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading

Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.

Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”

This is the 320th edition of SHuSH, the newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new here, press the button—it’s free:

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Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

My friend Thad McIlroy just landed the scoop of the year in book publishing. Not that you’d know it. Here’s what happened.

Thad is a publishing consultant, author, journalist, and expert on AI as it intersects with the world of books. SHuSH readers will remember him from our past conversations about AI and other publishing matters. Anyway, Thad was talking about publishing issues with an account executive at Pangram, an AI detection software company. He learned there was chatter on social media, particularly Reddit, about a book called Shy Girl that people believed was generated in whole or in part by AI.

The book was originally self-published by little-known author Mia Ballard. Hachette picked it up and published it in the UK last November and was set to release the “unapologetic, visceral revenge horror novel” in the US in April. This was the Hachette US acquisition announcement:

Thad went to some trouble to track down a UK version of the manuscript, convert it to a .docx file, and send it to Pangram for analysis. The outcome: “78.4% of the document is Al Generated.” Two other services confirmed that result.

Worth noting that even AI acknowledges that AI detectors are not very reliable. False positives are a real problem, something Thad knew well. He nevertheless had the makings of a story. All he needed was an outlet. He thought about Publishers Weekly, where he’s a contributing editor, but “the magazine no longer runs substantial investigative pieces.”

So he went to The New York Times. The Times told him his status as an industry consultant ruled him out as a reporter on the piece. The story was assigned to publishing reporter Alexandra Alter, with the assurance that he would be fully credited as the source. Thad had worked with Alexandra on previous stories and was satisfied with this arrangement. Numerous exchanges and several phone calls later, the Times published the following about Shy Girl:

On Thursday, a day after The New York Times approached Hachette citing evidence that the novel appeared to be A.I.-generated, the company said it was pulling the book from publication. By Thursday afternoon, the novel was removed from Amazon and the Hachette website.

Hachette told The Times that its Orbit imprint decided not to publish “Shy Girl,” which was due out in the United States this spring, after conducting a thorough and lengthy review of the text. Hachette said it will also discontinue the book in the U.K., where it was published last fall and has sold 1,800 print copies, according to NielsenIQ BookData.

A second, longer piece followed in the Times. It ventured that Shy Girl is the first significant novel from a major publishing house cancelled over possible AI use. The article leaves you with the impression that Pangram and The New York Times took the initiative of running the novel through AI detectors. It credits online discussions with surfacing problems in Ballard’s work, which is fair, to an extent (more on this below)—it’s just not how the Times learned about it.

The piece goes on to discuss how publishing houses have been slow to develop policies for the handling of AI and were more or less asking for this sort of controversy. What rules exist are vague. Some writers are leaning heavily on chatbots, others are using them selectively, and still others find them evil. Readers and, it seems, publishers don’t always know what’s written by a human and what isn’t. Thad is briefly quoted on these points as a publishing expert. There’s no recognition that he handed the story to the newspaper. The longer article has racked up 700 comments, a spectacular number for a publishing piece.

So Thad wrote this in his blog:

While it’s great to be quoted in the New York Times, and I think highly … of Alexandra Alter, I’m distraught that I received not much more than a passing mention in the main article (and a quote in the short news piece). None of the news coverage of the Times article even hints at my role, and so there’s near-zero value to me from my involvement.

I brought the story to the paper and was assured that I would be credited as the source. That didn’t happen. I’ve not had any follow-up queries — why would I have? — my role in the story was apparently unimportant.

A great deal has been written about Shy Girl this week. Apart from giving Thad his due, I want to raise a few points I don’t think have received sufficient attention.

First, Hachette may have more to answer for than Ballard, whose career has been damaged. She disputes that she used AI, although she admits “an acquaintance she hired to edit the self-published version of the novel did.” The Kindle Direct world from which Ballard was plucked is rife with AI use, much of it loud and proud. I don’t know if the publisher asked her directly, before signing her up, if she’d used AI (or, if it did, how she answered), but as Thad says, the first accusations of AI use on Shy Girl pre-date Hachette’s acquisition by about six months. The company seems to have been hugely incurious about this. It told the Times that it decided to cancel the book after “a lengthy and thorough analysis” and that the company “values human creativity,” etc. Its lengthy and thorough analysis appears to have been conducted with twenty-four hours of learning that the Times was working on the story.

Second, the first two paragraphs of Shy Girl:

I wear a pink dress, the kind that promises softness and delivers none. Its tulle is brittle and sharp, brushing against my fur like a thousand tiny teeth, a cruel lover that bites with every move. Every scratch keeps me in place, a reminder of what I am: a pet, a thing shaped for looking, for praise, for command. The bows on my pigtails pull too tight, yanking the skin and stretching my head into something neat, into something pleasing, a quiet violence made beautiful. White socks climb my legs, their frills delicate, a whisper of innocence over the bruises beneath, the ones he says shouldn’t happen if the socks are there—but they always do.

The ache is low and rhythmic, a second heartbeat in my ribs, steady and insistent, the kind of pain you get used to until it becomes part of you. Then the door bursts open, and he enters like a storm, dragging the sour stink of liquor behind him, his presence filling the room and turning the pastel air brittle. In his hands is a cake, gleaming, its pink frosting too smooth, like plastic dipped in sugar, like something that belongs on a screen, too perfect to hold.

I’m not the audience for this, but AI or no AI, I have a hard time imagining how Hachette, the second largest trade publisher in the world, home to David Sedaris and Donna Tartt, read that and thought, “I’ve got to have this book.”

The final point, related to both of the above, is one I discussed with Jane Friedman a couple of weeks back. Increasingly, as she has documented, big publishing houses are generating hits by trawling self-published offerings on Amazon and scooping up anything with sales momentum. They are ever so slightly moving away from being reliable curators of fine writing and great storytelling to acting as distribution outlets for whatever is hot, because it’s hot. To borrow a term that was popular in the telecom world I briefly inhabited, publishers are edging toward becoming dumb pipes, carrying data across a network without adding any value or control over it.

I don’t want to overstate this, because much of what is being published is being published as ever it was, but there’s definite movement in the dumb pipe direction. The big houses are increasingly relying on upstream signals—whether Amazon rankings or TikTok virality or Goodreads buzz—rather than editorial conviction in their acquisitions. When they do so, they’re outsourcing judgement and chasing proven demand. They’re acting less as book publishers and more as logistics companies engaged in platform arbitrage.

When you start thinking this way, it’s difficult to apply the brakes. An absolute disaster of a book takes off on Kindle Direct, you have to take it or you’re leaving money on the table, and your competitor will grab it.

If that’s where things are headed, Shy Girl isn’t an aberration, it’s a preview.

Side note: I don’t want to be too hard on the Times because it gives great coverage to books, but if we’re being straight here, it didn’t really break the Shy Girl story. It simply took a story that was live on new media and told it on old media. While the Times should have credited Thad, the real hero of this whole affair is Frankie of Frankie’s Shelf. Frankie, who I think is Canadian, deserved credit in the Times, too. For a riveting devoted two hours, forty minutes, and thirty-three seconds, Frankie’s Shelf dissected Shy Girl line by line, evaluating its slender merits and building the case that it’s AI slop. This was way back on January 29. It makes for spectacular viewing, with special effects and several costume changes. I’m in awe of Frankie. We complain a lot in this newsletter that book reviewing is dead. Frankie is the counterargument, with 1,369,677 views on this show alone.

Final note: An amusing headline, courtesy The Atlantic, hit my feed as I was finishing the newsletter: “How AI is Creeping Into The New York Times: Artificial Intelligence seems to be turning up, undisclosed, in the opinion pages of major news publications.” The story goes on to show how the Times and other news outlets have vague policies and problematic relationships with AI, just like book publishers.

Extra note: A great summary of all the issues around AI and book publishing is here on Jane Friedman’s site.

Start the year informed

As a SHuSH subscriber, you are eligible for this special offer: buy a subscription to Sutherland Quarterly (or treat a friend) and we’ll send you the Sutherland House book of your choice at no charge.

Launched in 2022, Sutherland Quarterly is an exciting new series of captivating essays on current affairs by some of Canada’s finest writers, published individually as books and also available by annual subscription—four great books a year, mailed to your door, for just $67.99. Subscribe now at sutherlandquarterly.com and we’ll immediately be in touch to send you the free book of your choice.

Sutherland Quarterly is also pleased to announce its next edition, coming January 27, will be Richard Stursberg’s Lament for a Literature, a sweeping account of how English Canada once forged a confident literary culture—and how that culture has steadily collapsed.

For decades, books provided the country’s most searching reflections on its history, politics, and identity; they shaped the national conversation and anchored a shared sense of who Canadians were. Author and media executive Richard Stursberg traces how this ecosystem emerged, flourished, and then eroded. He follows the rise of a vigorous publishing industry in the 1960s and ’70s, the period when Canadian writers reached international prominence, and the subsequent decades in which foreign ownership, shifting cultural priorities, fragile institutions, and policy failures hollowed out the sector.

Clear, forceful, and grounded in deep research, Lament for a Literature shows what happens when a nation loses the infrastructure that sustains its stories—and outlines practical reforms, including a Canadian Book Law, to rebuild the foundations of a literary culture capable of renewing itself.

ORDER HERE NOW

Thanks for reading. Please either:

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Our Newsletter Roll (suggestions welcome)

Banuta Rubess’s Funny, You Don’t Look Bookish, reviews five books a week.

The Bibliophile from Biblioasis, an independent publisher based in Windsor.

The Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm, “your weekly dose of exclusive reviews, book excerpts, and more.”

Art Kavanagh’s Talk about books: Book discussion and criticism.

Gayla Gray’s SoNovelicious: Books, reading, writing, and bookstores.

Esoterica Magazine: Literature and popular culture.

Benjamin Errett’s Get Wit Quick, literature and other fun stuff

Lydia Perovic’s Long Play: literature and music.

Jason Logan’s Urban Color Report: adventures in ink (sign-up at bottom of page)

Anne Trubek’s Notes from a Small Press: like SHuSH, but different

Art Canada Institute: a reliable source of Canadian arts info/opinion

Kate McKean’s Agents & Books: an interesting angle on the literary world

Rebecca Eckler’s Re:Book: unpretentious recommendations

Anna Sproul Latimer’s How to Glow in the Dark: interesting advice

John Biggs Great Reads: strong recommendations

Steven Beattie’s That Shakespearean Rag, a newsy blog about books and reading

Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.

Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

This is the 309th edition of SHuSH, the newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. If you’re new here, press the button—it’s free:

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more

Subscribe now

Sutherland House is always happy to receive submissions of manuscripts or proposals for nonfiction books. If you are looking to get published, contact submissions@sutherlandhousebooks.com. Agents welcome, but no agent required.

Read more