Small Victories
Pedlar Press publishes indie for 10 years and lives to tell about it
BY Wendy Banks
Photography by Molly Crealock
Nearly a decade ago, when Pedlar Press was in its infancy, Beth Follett used to cram herself, her inventory and her 70-something modern-dancer friend Doris into an inherited car and drive all over Southern Ontario looking for booksellers to take her stock on consignment. “Doris’s words of wisdom for staying alive in publishing were ‘Keep it small, and do it right,’” Follett recalls.
She’s taken that advice to heart. Pedlar Press, which now boasts 36 titles, several awards and a roster of authors including Camilla Gibb, Fiona Smyth, Lorenz Peter and Souvankham Thammavongsa isn’t the bustling operation its vital statistics would suggest.
“I share a fax machine with a friend down in Mirvish village,” Follett explains, leaning on the massive desk that dominates the plant- and book-crowded front room in the sprawling upper half of an Annex mansion she’s been occupying on and off since the ’80s. “If I want to send a fax, I have to go out.” Fax machine aside, this room houses all of Pedlar Press. “Just for the record,” she says, “this is not a job for sissies.”
Fortunately, Follett’s no sissy. A veteran of a social services career, she was between contracts, and on EI recovering from burnout, when a Human Resources officer suggested that she take advantage of the government’s self-employment assistance program and start her own business. “It was a mad leap across a void,” she says. With minimal background in publishing and none in business, she decided to start a small press.
She started out with Sex Libris, a first book of poems by Antonella Brion, and naively printed 1500 copies. “Five hundred is a best-seller,” she explains. “Fifteen hundred is what Michael Ondaatje does in Canada.” That first year used up all of her resources, but the next year she successfully applied for grants from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council to publish three more titles.
Pedlar’s second year was a good one. Wild Mouse, by Derek McCormack and Chris Chambers, won the Toronto Book Award as well as a design award, and went into a second printing. “By year three, I was really feeling like, ‘I can do this,’” says Follett.
But she was also becoming aware of the limitations of the market for books. “I was making $80 a month, and living on my savings,” she recalls.
Then Pedlar published Fishing Up the Moon, by Canadian Living humour columnist Anne Hines. Suddenly Chapters took notice, and Follett received an order for 350 copies. “I became the shipping fool, wrapping up five books to go to Nova Scotia, and five to go to Markham, and I realized that I had to get a distributor and find a sales force.”
Growth brought new restrictions. “I had to start putting bar codes on the backs of my books,” she says ruefully. “The sales teams wanted pithy 50-word marketing handles.” But Camilla Gibb’s first novel, Mouthing the Words, didn’t lend itself to market-friendly synopsis. “Nobody had ever heard of Camilla then, and the handle is: It’s a funny little book about incest? But that’s what it is,” she laughs. “I find the whole idea of marketing unknown authors bizarre. You have to make the covers enticing, try to get reviews, and not publish anything less than quality work and that will sell— but it’s usually by word of mouth.”
This goes against the conventional wisdom, of which she hears plenty. “Most people have no trouble telling a woman who has her own business what to do. People usually want me to make money, because money is the measure of success in our culture. But I don’ t believe in that.
“Success for me is that I’m still here, about to celebrate a 10-year anniversary. Last year, one of my poetry titles won the Trillium Award for Poetry. George Featherling called Pedlar ‘the finest publishing company, from a literary standpoint.’ And sometimes I’m on a plane and somebody is reading one of my books across the aisle, and it’s fantastic.”
She has no illusions about her relationship to the publishing industry at large. “I feel like a mouse going through the legs of the elephant,” she says, “and I think the moment I imagine I would like to be an elephant too, I’m dead.”
