Just how many books are written by Canadian authors, anyway? In this episode we take look at why identifying Canadian contributors in book metadata matters for the industry — the work it involves, the impact it has across the supply chain, and how we can measure that change.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
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Further reading/listening
Canadian authors: The whys and hows of identifying them in your data
Easier with BookNet: Calculating your store's Canadian contributor sales
Transcript
Aline Zara: Welcome to this month’s episode of the BookNet Canada podcast. I’m your host, Aline Zara, BookNet Canada’s Research Coordinator.
We’ve been getting a lot of questions about Canadian-authored titles lately, and so this month I’m taking the chance to answer some of the big ones:
How many books by Canadian contributors are in the Canadian book market?
How do we know if the contributor of a book is Canadian?
Why does identifying Canadian contributors even matter?
You might have noticed that all the data we’ll be looking at today talks about Canadian contributors — an author, illustrator, translator, or editor of a collection who is a Canadian citizen or a permanent resident of Canada.
And with that out of the way let’s get started.
So, how many books are written by Canadian contributors?
We included this data for the first time this year in our annual publication The Canadian Book Market.
If this is your first time hearing about it, The Canadian Book Market 2021 is a comprehensive guide to the Canadian market. It includes in-depth data on over 50 top subject categories, as well as top-level book consumer data, and trade book market data about the French Canadian market.
So, if you’re interested or involved in the Canadian Book industry, I’d highly recommend purchasing a copy if you haven’t already. I’ll include a link to the publication in the notes.
That all being said. What did we have to report about Canadian book sales in 2021?
6.1% of all ISBNs that had sales reported to SalesData in 2021 were by a Canadian contributor.
And the sales of Canadian titles were up compared to the year before. The number of ISBNs by Canadian contributors that had sales in 2021 increased 3.6% compared to 2020.
All of this data comes from SalesData, our national sales tracking service for the English Canadian book market. If you’re a subscriber to SalesData, you can discover the sales of titles by Canadian contributors that you publish or sell in your bookstore all on your own. Our Project Manager Monique Mongeon recently wrote a blog post all about this topic that I’ll link in the notes. If you’re not a subscriber to SalesData and want to be, reach out to us to find out more.
At this point, you might be wondering — how can we tell if a contributor to a title is Canadian? The answer is metadata.
In the notes I’m also going to link to some of BookNet Canada’s user docs on the subject and a blog post written by BookNet Canada’s President and CEO Noah Genner on the whys and hows of identifying Canadian contributors in book metadata.
Here’s the gist of it.
Publishers are the ones that can identify whether or not the contributors to the books they publish are Canadian by including a “CA” country code in the Contributor composite's Country Code element in ONIX book metadata. And sometimes this metadata might even include an ISNI (an International Standard Name Identifier) which can also identify someone as Canadian.
And why does identifying Canadian contributors matter?
Last year on our podcast we interviewed Kiley Turner from 49th Shelf. 49th Shelf is an online repository for Canadian authored titles and hosts the biggest collection of Canadian books on the internet. As of Kiley’s interview last year, their website features 130,000 Canadian authored books across all years and subjects.
If you haven’t already heard Kiley’s interview in full I’d highly recommend it. It goes over all the work 49th Shelf does, their role in promoting Canadian literature, and much, much more. I’ll link the podcast in the notes for you for later, but for now, let’s hear from Kiley, interviewed by BookNet’s Marketing Associate Nataly Alarcón, about the importance of metadata and how everyone can use it to highlight and discover Canadian-authored titles.
Nataly Alarcon: Our following question was about, like, what does 49th Shelf offer to publishing people and non-publishing people? But I think that just you went through, like, a lot of different options that even people who are, like, just avid readers and not necessarily involved in publishing can definitely use this tool for. And same thing with publishers, right?
Kiley Turner: Yeah. And I think for readers, it's important because, you know, surveys, historical surveys have found that people are really interested in reading Canadian books, but that they have trouble finding them sometimes. So, it's specifically designed to just help them, help readers, help librarians, help teachers, media, anyone, make it easier for them to find Canadian books. And part of the answer to that question, too, is a data answer, which is there is a way of tagging books as Canadian authored. And so when 49th Shelf was just getting started back in 2011, we only could find about 15,000 Canadian-authored books to put onto this site, because that tag wasn't commonly used. But now we've helped to kind of encourage that country code use. And so that's enabled us to grow this site to where it is, which is 130,000, you know, or so Canadian books, which is very exciting.
And so for publishers, how can publishers use it? They can use it ... it's a marketing platform. It's another way that they can have their authors speak to readers. And, yeah, they can have their authors make lists. We've got, obviously, thousands and thousands of people looking at what's on the site. So, we encourage publishers to reach out to us. We send a newsletter to publishers twice a month, or once a month. And people can talk to us through our editors, so I'm one of the editors. Kerry Clare is our main editor, and she loves to hear pitches and ideas for how to feature books on the site. So, it's a marketing platform.
Nataly: So, there's definitely an opportunity for publishers to use this.
Kiley: Yeah. I mean, they can use it. I mean, that's sort of the active way that they can use it, but the other way that they can use it is that 49th Shelf is also a beautiful way of presenting books, that publishers can present their books and all the data about them. And so the more data that they include on their books, the better they look on 49th Shelf, and the better they look throughout the supply chain as well. So, we're looking for, you know, jacket covers, of course, but also, you know, everything from excerpts to reviews, to whether there's a series, or what category a book's in, what subject. Any information that can help a book be found on the internet is brought into the site and then our designers find a way of kind of making that interesting and attractive, and it promotes reader engagement when they're on the site as well. So, for publishers, it's really important to provide as much data as they can on their books.
Nataly: Definitely. I feel like that's something that we also preach at BookNet — please give us good metadata because that's the only way to put it out there in the world for retailers, for readers, for libraries, for everyone, right?
Kiley: Yeah.
Nataly: It's the best way to sell their books, basically.
Kiley: Yeah. I know, I remember I wrote somewhere else, I think I was telling you, but I wrote somewhere else about, you know, these studies that show the extent to which different levels of data can help to sell books, and that was back in 2017. But when was it? It was, yeah, 2017, a Nielsen book US study had found that just, you know, basic elements, like ISBN, title, format, publication date, all the really basic things would give a book a chance at 75% higher sales than those that didn't have those. And then, you know, as you added on data elements, the boost to sales was just remarkable. And so, yeah, we don't sell books off the site, but we want to make them exciting enough that people want them. And that's a data function as well, right?
Nataly: Definitely, yes. So, keeping track of the books where Canadians have contributed their work is definitely not easy ... especially if they don't include the Canadian marker. And we know BiblioShare, BookNet's quality control data aggregation and distribution system helps with this. But I would like to know if from your perspective on your role at 49th Shelf, if you think of there any additional steps that publishers can take from a metadata-driven point of view to get their books out there?
Kiley: That's a great question. So, yes, 49th Shelf does import data records from BiblioShare, and it also has its own data importer that's built-in to it. And so I guess something to think about, like a core concept to think about is just that a book does not just exist by itself, it's defined by a whole bunch of relationships. And all of those relationships can make it richer and allow it to find its right readers. And not only its right readers but like different kinds of readers and extend its audience. So, you know, data such as contributors, listing all the contributors, the publisher, imprint, series, subject, keyword, other editions of the same work, ebooks or audiobooks. And so on 49th Shelf, we maintain all those relationships automatically. So, we're basically trying to help readers find books by the same author or in the same series or category. And then our job then is to present that, and we have wonderful designers that help us to present that on the site in a beautiful way, in a way that promotes reader engagement.
But, yeah, I just think of like, even a few years ago, because I do the social media on Twitter and Facebook, and I would want to talk about a book ... and this is like, you know, kind of, I don't know, this isn't as relevant now because people are including their book jackets more often now. But I'd go to get excited about a book and there would not be a book jacket. I'm like, "Well, I can't. I can't do that because no one's gonna click on it." And so the more things that you give to have people engage with, the more opportunity you're gonna have to build awareness and have your book sold.
Aline: Interested to hear more from Kiley about 49th Shelf? Again, you can find the link to that podcast in the notes.
And that’s a wrap from me on all things Canadian contributors.
Before we go, I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge that BookNet Canada staff, board, partners, and our makeshift podcast studio, operate upon the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Wendat Indigenous peoples, the original nations of this land. We endorse the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and support an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space-making in the book industry. And we hope that our work, including this podcast, helps to create an environment that supports that shift. We'd also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support through the Canada Book Fund. Thanks to Nataly and Kiley. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
The format preferences of Canadian buyers, borrowers, and readers.