Did you know that Montreal and Paris have approximately the same number of skyscrapers? Never mind: less than two weeks ago, the Paris Book Festival welcomed with great fanfare the delegation of honor from Quebec… in what seemed to me to be a beautiful wooden cabin. And if we trust the official illustration of the Parisian festival, the 74 invited authors would have gone there by canoe.
Thus, we can remove Quebec authors from Quebec, but it is impossible to eliminate certain clichés that the French have towards us. (If I ever attend a book fair, I promise to wait for our cousins with baguettes under their arms.) In any case, the party seems to have been a great success with more than a hundred thousand festival-goers. That’s all that matters and there is cause for celebration for the book industry.
But who says abundance and celebration necessarily means “health”?
However, scientists tell us the opposite: to maintain good health, we should consume in moderation. However, according to the National Association of Book Publishers, no less than 6,500 books are published annually in Quebec, all genres and types combined. You would have to read almost twenty of them every day of the year to get the whole story. Abundance and therefore, health? Nothing is less certain.
We can wonder, for example, whether Quebec has the means to achieve its literary ambitions. And if that were the case, one might also wonder why so many publishers rely on subsidies and tax credits. Hint: because culture is not just a commodity, that’s why.
An editor recently told me two interesting things on this subject.
First, a book that sells for $30 would cost more than $50 without subsidies. Who would buy books for 50 bucks? Should the book become a precious object?
This would necessarily reduce access; it would be tragic.
Secondly, he also told me that, without subsidies, small, unknown authors – like me, he was kind enough to point out – would never manage to get anything published: faced with the imperative of commercial success, publishing houses would no longer take any risks and would only publish already known authors or public figures.
A kind of literary universe filled with golden retrievers, and that’s it.
Ultimately, the fragile financial balance on which the little boat of Quebec publishing is tossing, between subsidies and publications, comes down to a question asked a hundred times: are there too many books published in Quebec? In France ? In the world ?
To ask the question, is to answer it.
But who would want to refrain from writing and publishing?
Not me anyway.
And that’s kind of everyone’s answer, I have the impression.
So let’s take advantage of this beautiful diversity and, above all, let’s not take it for granted: the vast majority of publishers are not swimming in money. Having exchanged with a few, most are one success away from making a little money or not making any money at all; to a tax credit for doing it as a job rather than volunteering.
No, abundance and health are not always synonymous. But the first is necessary for a certain vitality and the emergence of small French bulldogs, greyhounds, shibas. We thus treat ourselves to beautiful literature, rich in its diversity. A literature that is not flat. Which has bite.