In this new instalment of our 5 questions with series, we interview Holly Doll, the President of Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited and publisher of Red Deer Press in Toronto, Ontario.
1. Tell us about Red Deer Press. Where are you located and what kinds of books do you publish?
Red Deer Press publishes literary children’s picture books, early readers and early chapter books, middle grade and young adult novels, and children’s non-fiction. We enlist publishing talent from across Canada, publish to the national and international markets, and work with emerging authors and illustrators as well as those established in the field. Our offices are in Toronto, Ontario, managed by our parent company, Fitzhenry & Whiteside. We typically produce 10 books per year.
Red Deer Press projects have won numerous awards, nominations, and citations for excellence, including two Governor General’s Literary Awards, a Printz Honor Book Award, a Bologna Ragazzi Award Nonfiction Mention, the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize, White Ravens International Youth Library Selection of Outstanding Books, an Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival Winner for Children’s Book of the Year, the Alcuin Design Award, and a listing on CBC’s Young Adult Books That Make You Proud To Be Canadian, as well as numerous regional awards.
2. What’s the single best thing you’ve done to promote your books to readers?
From the many manuscripts that come our way, we select only the very best — believing that young readers (and their adults) deserve excellence. To assist us in this process, we read, read, and read — perusing titles about close-to-home and stories set around the world, keeping track of published work from other houses that lead the field, and striving to place our small but exclusive list at the forefront. We believe that when someone picks up a title with the Red Deer logo, it means they have selected something wonderful.
3. What makes your publishing house different from others?
In our fiction, we lean towards projects that illuminate strong, dynamic characters that reflect today’s young people and their world, beautiful, contemporary writing that that engage the heart and the mind. This means keeping up with what kids today are thinking, exploring their modern family structures and current world themes of social and environmental justice, and offering our readers relatable, page-turning stories. We typically publish realistic and historical fiction genres, with some magic realism and fantasy titles selected that are centrally character-driven. Our non-fiction titles strive to present engaging information that kids won’t easily find on the internet, and we enlist the very best designers to shape and showcase all of our titles.
4. What do you wish you had known about publishing when you were starting out?
Our authors are showing us possibilities for ongoing ways our books might soar to new audiences, including the recent success of Caroline Pignat’s 🍁 verse novel, The Gospel Truth appearing in “Truth” — a play produced for its world premiere by Toronto’s Young People’s Theatre, and the flight of A. T. Woodley’s 🍁 middle-grade title, The Boy Who Woke the Sun, as an animated radio commercial.
5. What’s next for Red Deer Press?
We will continue to explore:
genres and forms that offer our readers young and old an avenue for delight (and remembering that children’s literature is for adults as well as kids);
opportunities for readers to learn about themselves and others through literature; and
books that make us laugh, think, and sorrow for characters in trouble and cheer for them in triumph.
BONUS: What topics would you like to see more often in the books you publish?
We seek Indigenous voices, following the path of beautiful books like Waci! Dance! by Sage Speidel 🍁, illustrated by Leah Dorion 🍁. We look for other “own voice” stories of the very highest quality to help the field of kids’ lit move further toward equity and representation of all peoples, a journey where everyone benefits. And we actively look for humour, even when serious and important themes are presented — we all need a healthy dose of sunshine with the rain.
Thank you Holly for answering our questionnaire! Read more instalments of our 5 questions with series here.
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