Taking the High Road in Publishing

McClelland & Stewart will add the new Terry Fallis novel to a growing stack of books using digital distribution – and succeeding.

In this time of sky-is-falling fear from traditional publishers regarding what might happen should their digitally distributed books be spread by non-paying customers, a Canadian publishing house more than a century old is taking the high road – both digitally and figuratively.

McClelland & Stewart, for the first time in its 104-year history, is allowing an author to podcast his novel (i.e. give the audio version of it away for free via a podcast feed listeners can subscribe to through iTunes) chapter by chapter prior to the book’s release this September.

With chapter one of the Terry Fallis novel The High Road posted on May 30 via the author’s personal blog, a Canadian publisher steps forward into a brave new world.

And it’s my belief that this step was the perfect move, showing strategic brilliance and an embrace of new technology that will result in a resounding success for M&S and this novel.

The relationship between podcasting and selling books is not a new one, and Fallis knows very well what a combination of hard work, a little bit of luck, and the ability to generate a pre-existing audience can do for a novel’s sales and success.

Three years ago, Fallis – then a closet novelist, and a fan of literary greats such as Robertson Davies and John Irving – decided to podcast his first novel, The Best Laid Plans, prior to self-publishing it. A satirical novel of Canadian politics drawn from Fallis’s own experience working on Parliament Hill, the novel gained a worldwide audience. Fallis was stunned to learn that people as far away as Australia were riveted by the humorous tale of an unlikely MP’s rise to power within Canada’s Liberal party.

One of the most wonderful things about the Fallis podcast isn’t just the great writing – it’s the author’s laid-back style and approach. You experience the novel with a bit of perfectly-suiting mood music and a brief and personable introduction by the author. It’s more like sitting in a comfortable armchair near a fire, listening to the author read from his novel, than walking around with an ear-bud and a portable mp3 player in your pocket. It’s high technology meets traditional storytelling at its finest.

When the novel was short-listed for and then won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour in 2008, Fallis landed a contract with McClelland & Stewart to republish the book as well as to publish the sequel, which hadn’t yet been written. This was a brilliant move by M&S, which recognized the potential in this writer and knew it was a good idea to allow a much greater publishing platform and distribution than Fallis had enjoyed using the do-it-yourself method.

The audience for the offbeat characters and hilarious situations that Fallis created has continued to grow as fans discover the novel both through word of mouth from readers and booksellers and by virtue of the fact that they can still access it entirely for free via the podcast.

Fallis isn’t the only author to have used social media and digital distribution to gain notoriety and attention. Author Scott Sigler earned a publishing contract with Crown Publishing for his science-fiction horror-style thrillers, Infected and Contagious, after leveraging a fan-following in the tens of thousands via a podcast. J.C. Hutchins did the same with St. Martin’s Press for his science-fiction thriller The Seventh Son: Descent. The forward-thinking Cory Doctorow has long been giving away digital versions of his novels, published by Tor, via Creative Commons license, quoting the Tim O’Reilly sentiment that his greatest fear isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.

But McClelland & Stewart is the first of the larger Canadian publishing imprints and among the first publishers of contemporary/literary fiction to embrace the new-media approach to publishing, an approach perhaps inspired by Chris Anderson’s viewpoint in his book FREE: The Future of a Radical Price – that, when done with the right strategy and the right end results in mind, free is a model that can work.

Let me go out on a limb here and predict something based on what I believe is an incredibly forward-thinking, strategic approach to publishing. I’ll come back in the fall of 2010 to look back on whether or not I was on-target, and if I was, you can say you read it here first, from Mark Leslie Lefebvre via The Mark News. If I was wrong, I’ll be the first to admit it.

I predict that The High Road by Terry Fallis is going to rocket to bestselling status within the first week of its release – that the pre-existing audience from his first book and this bold venture in podcasting are going to keep this novel on the radar of readers and booksellers everywhere this fall. I predict that this novel and the marketing approach to its release are going to prove that McClelland & Stewart, by taking this bold risk, is embracing the future, taking the high road, and proving that traditional and digital publishing strategies can indeed mix successfully.