This month we’re talking with Chandler Jolliffe, owner of Cedar Canoe Books in Huntsville, who pioneered the idea of a Canadian flag bookmark as a way to easily identify which books in his store were Canadian-authored. We also hear from Terilee Bulger, Jim Lorimer, and Howard White who are part of a group of publishers who are taking this program to bookstores from coast to coast.

(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)

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Transcript

Ainsley Sparkes: Welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast. I’m Ainsley Sparkes, Director of Marketing & Communications and the host of this month’s episode.

At BookNet, we've been thinking about the Canadian book publishing landscape since our inception. But, like the rest of the country, all things Canadian have been even more top of mind lately. So when we heard about a program to identify Canadian authors in bookstores, we wanted to learn more about it. In this month's episode I'm chatting with Chandler Jolliffe, owner of Cedar Canoe Books in Huntsville who pioneered the idea, as well as a group of publishers who are trying to take this program coast to coast.

Chandler: Yeah, so my name is Chandler. I own Cedar Canoe Books in Huntsville. We opened in the fall of 2022, so the store's only been open for about two and a half years now. Huntsville is an interesting place to have a bookstore. It's a beautiful little town in the middle of Muskoka. The interesting thing is we have a good, very engaged local population. Our population also grows by 6x for July and August every year, and so it turns into a bit of a zoo here in the summer. We get what I like to call two Christmases. We get all July and August, and then we get the actual Christmas. So, it's a fun place to be. There's constantly new folks in. Everyone's on vacation, so everyone's very relaxed. And the rest of the year, when the cottagers aren't around so much, we just have a really, really lovely local population that's very, very engaged and very supportive.

Ainsley: Can you tell us a little bit about your Canadian Flag bookmark project? Where did the idea of it come from, and how did you start implementing it?

Chandler: Yeah, so we've done this from right when we opened. It's pretty simple. We flag every book in the store written by a Canadian with a little bookmark that has a red maple leaf on the top. And there were some funny things when we started. We would occasionally get people who would arbitrate with us whether someone was Canadian or not, and so we put a rule in that if they had citizenship, they got the bookmark, and we weren't going to arbitrate it past that.

But the idea, for me, came before the store actually opened. I think that in general, long before the Trump trade war, I have always had this nascent belief that Canadians want to support Canadian businesses. They want to support Canadian cultural identity. They want to, in this case, support Canadian authors, but they don't know who's Canadian. And I think while people want to do those things, they're not willing to put in an immense amount of work to make that happen. And I think that's true even today in our fervent environment where people really adamantly want to support Canadian, I still think they're not really willing to go out of their way.

And so my thought was if we could mark every Canadian book in the store, that people would be gravitated towards buying those because they like the idea of buying Canadian authors, and it takes all of the work out of it for them. And what we've seen is that about 27% to 28% of our sales are Canadian authors as a result, versus sort of the industry average of about 9% of book sales in Canada. One of the reasons I liked the bookmarks as an idea, as opposed to having a Canadian author section, which is something I know a lot of stores do, this might just be me, but I feel like by doing a Canadian author section, we're like, "Oh, here are the Canadians," and then the real authors are everywhere else in the store. It almost makes them... By making them an exception, it almost feels degrading in a way to me. Whereas I find when the books just exist in their regular home but are flagged, people are like, "Oh, cool, this romance book was written by a Canadian. This fantasy book was written by a Canadian." It's had a really positive response for us pretty much from the get go. Again, people like the idea of sort of being rah-rah with Canadian culture. It just makes it more accessible for them to do that.

Ainsley: And where are these bookmarks located? Are they like shelf-talker kind of things or in the books?

Chandler: We literally put them in the individual books. So, if we put 20 copies of the same book, all 20 copies have a bookmark in them. We recycle them. So, we take it out of the book when the customer buys the book and reuse it. So, I've only actually, in three years, I've only done two printings of these bookmarks. We throw them out when they get super ratty or sun-damaged from being in the window. And occasionally customers ask for them. And so my staff know, like we give them away when people ask for them. But for the most part, like it's a really low-cost thing for us, because I think each time I print them, I print a few thousand ... It's a few hundred bucks and then we reuse those over and over and over again.

Ainsley: Did you have plans to make bookmarks for independent publishers or local authors?

Chandler: I debated this. At one point, I was like, "Do we do bookmarks for indigenous authors? Do we do bookmarks for local?" And then I thought, as soon as we do it for more than one thing, it will completely dilute the value of the program. It would be like every other book in the store would have a bookmark. Some of them would have three. What happens when it's an indigenous Canadian author who lives locally? Do we put three bookmarks in the book? And by doing it this way, what we're saying is like, we know you want to support Canadians. It's a really broad bucket and it allows us to focus on that. I think once we do it for more than one thing, then we kind of dilute the effect of it altogether and it wouldn't be nearly as effective.

Ainsley: So, you talked a little bit about the willingness of your customers to buy Canadian books even before the tariffs. Have you seen a change in how much more interested people are to buy Canadian authors?

Chandler: On a macro level, no. At the end of the day, you either want to read a book or you don't want to read a book. And you're pretty unlikely to just buy a bunch of Canadian authors just because if you still don't actually want to read the book. And so given how large a proportion of our sales are already Canadian authors, we've seen a small uptick, but I would say nothing meaningful. And being an individual indie store, we can have one bestseller written by a Canadian and that can skew the whole thing. But I would say we have not on aggregate seen a meaningful difference from where we were before. Now, I would be curious for a store that is, let's say, the median store that's doing 9% of their sales in Canadian authors. If by starting this, if they saw an increase, I would be willing to bet that would make sense. But given we were already highlighting it, it just hasn't. It hasn't made a big difference for us since the trade war started.

Ainsley: Speaking of other stores implementing this, there's a project to take your Canadian bookmark project wider. Do you know how that started?

Chandler: Yes. So, James Lorimer just happened to be in our store over the holiday break and saw the bookmarks and called me a couple of weeks later wanting to ask about how we ran it, how we actually got the staff to effectively get them into books, and we can talk about that, and whether we'd seen it as impactful or not. From that, I know he worked with a multitude of Canadian publishers to try and bring a much larger program to life. And they've been successful. I just had an email yesterday saying that the bookmarks are starting to ship out across Canada including to Indigo. So, he's really the one who ran with it. I think we were sort of the spark for the idea, but frankly, we've not really played a role in the broader implementation. So, it's nice to see it taking on a life of its own outside of us.

Ainsley: Yeah, it'll be interesting to see the impact that it might have.

Chandler: I think that the challenge will be for everyone in implementation. It's not an easy program to keep running all of the time. So, every time we are receiving books, the staff have to check as they're going who's Canadian and who's not. It is all tagged in our system, but it means slowing down to go through them. The longer you're around, the better you get at it, the more the authors you know offhand. But also three to four times a year, we do what we call a Canadian audit and the staff go through the store with a 22-page list of every Canadian authored book that we have and they check every single book. It takes a couple of days every time we do it, but we do it three, four times a year as a reset to make sure we've caught everything, and we always find lots of stuff that's been missed when we do that.

So, there is real maintenance to doing it. I think if you do it in sort of a lazy implementation, what's going to happen is the authors that your staff know off the top of their head are Canadian are always going to be marked. But the reality is those are the authors that customers also already know are Canadian. Again, everybody knows Margaret Atwood is a Canadian. And I actually think most of the benefit of the program is for the less mainstream authors, not Margaret Atwood or Louise Penny, but everybody else who people are less likely to know are Canadian. I think that's really where the benefit is. And so we do commit meaningful numbers of hours to maintaining this program.

Hilariously, my staff really like doing the audits. It seems like a really tedious task, but for whatever reason, like my team really enjoys doing it. They like the satisfaction of like checking off the list and going through the books one by one. It also has the secondary effect of them becoming significantly more familiar with who is Canadian in the store. The more times they see the books and the authors and the titles. And so it actually makes them better advocates as well, because it just helps build their own internal knowledge of who's Canadian. So, there's sort of a couple side benefits to it.

I also talked to a bookseller that was like, "Oh, that's a lot of extra hours. How do we fit that in? Do we have to staff over?" The reality is we are not busy all the time. And so this is just a task that my staff fit in when it's quiet in the store. We don't add extra people or schedule extra hours to do this. We just do it when we have downtime. It's not urgent. So, if it takes us two or even three weeks to get through an audit, it takes two or three weeks. So, long as we like check all of it, it's not really important how fast it happens.

Ainsley: You're probably going to have to put up a sign soon, like birthplace of the bookmark project.

Chandler: You know what? My staff have joked about that and said we should put something up that says we did this first. I don't know. I think we did it for the right reasons with good intention of helping to support Canadians. And am I a little bit sad that it will no longer be a thing you need to ask? Of course. Am I pleased if it helps broadly across the board better support Canadian authors? Absolutely. So, the best compliment you can get is copycats, right? And so if this was something that turns out to be really effective and gets adopted really broadly, I think in the grand scheme of things, that's a net positive by a huge margin.

Ainsley: And now let’s hear from some of the publishers who are spearheading the campaign to replicate Chandler’s program across Canada:

Howard White: Okay. I'm Howard White from Harbour Publishing, Douglas & McIntyre, calling in from Pender Harbour, BC.

Jim Lorimer: I'm Jim Lorimer. I'm in Halifax today. I'm the publisher at Lorimer, and I'm the CEO at Formac Publishing here in Halifax.

Terrilee Bulger: I'm Terrilee Bulger. I'm also in Halifax today. I'm co-owner of Nimbus Publishing from Nova Scotia, and I also own Acorn Press from PEI.

Ainsley: So, my first question is how did you hear about the Canadian Bookmark Program at Cedar Canoe and what made you want to replicate it on a broader scale?

Terrilee: I'll say I heard about it from Jim.

Howard: Yeah, Jim has to answer that question.

Terrilee: Yeah.

Jim: Well, and the answer is that my spouse persuaded me that we needed to go to Huntsville during the Christmas holidays to get together with her family, which I wasn't really looking forward to. But when we got to Huntsville, it turns out that there didn't used to be a bookstore there, but there is a bookstore, an independent bookstore there now, Cedar Canoe. So, of course, I tried to figure out how we could all ... I made a family visit to the bookstore just as a sort of something to do because it was foggy, rainy. It was a terrible time weather-wise, no time to be in a resort in Huntsville.

But anyway, so we went to the bookstore, and I walked in the door, and I was dumbfounded because for the first time in my life, I went into a bookstore where first of all, you saw they had a lot of Canadian books, but second, it was very easy to see the Canadian books, to notice them. So, I talked to the clerk. She told me everybody loved it. I said I'd never seen it before. The clerk said, "Well, everybody seems to love it." It is a very nice bookstore over and above the Canadian flag bookmarks.

But then when I got back to work in January, I told my publisher distributor colleagues ... I started out by telling Terrilee about it and asking her whether she thought that was something that we should talk about as a group. And I mean, her reaction was ... The reaction actually seems to have happened from almost everybody, which is, "Wow, that sounds really interesting. That's the sort of thing we've been trying to figure out that dilemma for years about how to give visibility to Canadian books and at the same time, make it easier for people to find them when they're in bookstores."

Ainsley: Yeah, I spoke with Chandler. He was talking about how the program started when he opened the bookstore and it was a very homegrown kind of effort. How does your program work? What are the details?

Terrilee: Well, I'll just jump in on that. I wouldn't necessarily say it's our program. It's sort of a joint program that's based on Jim's idea, which was based on the Cedar Canoe. Everybody can kind of make it their own program, I think. But the idea is that for Canadian authored books, we hope Canadian published books, that the stores will have a little bookmark sticking out of the top in their displays so that people can easily spot where the Canadian authored books are as soon as they go into a bookstore.

So, this is the perfect time for this kind of campaign because not l ong after Jim and I had been talking about this idea, Donald Trump was inaugurated in the U.S. and suddenly started announcing all the tariffs. And the idea of "made in Canada" blew up online on social media forums. And I was following all that going, wow, this is not something that's happened in my lifetime where people really want to put Canadian products first. And a lot of the chatter online was about how do you find out what food at the grocery stores are products of Canada versus made in Canada versus packaged in Canada, all this kind of thing. And there was a lot of that online. And we wanted to be able to make it obvious when people go to bookstores that these ... I mean, of course, we're biased because we're Canadian publishers, but these are great Canadian books that you could choose along with your other shopping or maybe instead of choosing a big American authored book, why not choose a Canadian one?

That was our idea of how that would work. Jim went to ... We actually went to a couple of printers to ask them about printing bookmarks to make this so obvious. And Jim's connection at Copywell came through right away. And we just thought that was the easiest thing to sort of roll something out very quickly so that the bookstores could have easy access to the bookmarks, which would make their displays much better that way. But again, it's kind of up to the bookstores how they want to use the bookmarks.

Howard, do you want to add to that at all?

Howard: Well, I don't have much to add. I mean, you two really took the initiative. Jim called me about it a month or so ago. And I've been watching this upsurge in Canadian branding in the grocery stores, and the gas stations, and the Canadian tire stores, everything but bookstores and sort of feeling left out and thinking, "What can we possibly do?" because we have a really true blue or true red Canadian product. And we need to get on the bandwagon here and draw people's attention to the fact that there are some very interesting Canadian books in every bookstore.

But how do you do that? So, as soon as this idea of what Cedar Canoe did to identify their Canadian books came up, I thought, well, that's not everything, but that's a great start. And so I said, yes, we'll buy in. And we agreed to undertake distribution of the bookmarks for the province of British Columbia. So, we're doing it for British Columbia. Heritage House is doing it for the Prairie provinces. Firefly is doing it for Ontario. Jim, you're doing it, I guess, for Quebec and ...

Jim: And New Brunswick.

Howard: And, Terrilee, you're doing it for the rest of the Atlantic provinces. So, those are the presses that people need to contact if they want to get bookmarks in those areas. And we've had tremendous response. I mean, we originally had 10,000 bookmarks on order. We very rapidly got orders for 16,000 before we even had the bookmarks delivered from the printer. So, we upped our request to 20,000, and we're obviously very soon going to have to print more yet.

Jim: The other thing that I think we should mention Ainsley is that when we talk to Copywell, the printer, about whether they would be willing to contribute the printing of the bookmarks, well, first of all, as Terrilee said, it was an instant yes. There was no hesitation. J.D. Hood, who's the person who deals with book publishers at that company, was just as much on board as everybody else and really did yeoman's service in making this thing happen.

But then the five of us occasionally meet with Indigo and talk to Indigo. Of course, we're constantly trying to get Indigo to do more with Canadian authored, Canadian published books, the books that the five companies all publish and distribute. And it was Andrew who is our contact at Indigo, his reaction was, "Gee, that's an interesting idea. I'll see what the group of people at Indigo think about it." And the very next day, he was back to us saying, "It's a go. The management at Indigo want to do this. They want to highlight the Canadian books in the chain as well as in the independent stores."

And so that resulted in Copywell agreeing to print 290,000, because they printed 90,000 for the indie stores and 200,000 for Indigo. And Indigo now has its 200,000 bookmarks. So, it's great that the indie stores are going to show what books they have are Canadian because they're stronger than Indigo in terms of the stocking that most of them do of Canadian books. But it's also really good for authors and readers and publishers that Indigo is going to do something similar.

So, this is really ... As Terrilee said, this is a complete happen ... We didn't know the beginning of January that Donald Trump was going to start talking about 51st state stuff and threaten Canada, threaten our sovereignty and our independence. But the fact that this was underway once he did that, as everybody's saying, it's clear that we want to respond to the interest that people have now, in thinking about Canadian when they're doing whatever it is they're doing, whether it's reading or whether it's watching TV or whether it's shopping at the grocery store.

Howard: And, Jim, is it true that Copywell has donated all of this printing?

Jim: Yes, it's completely ... It's a donation. And they've made a big point, too, of making sure that they're printing the bookmarks on Canadian paper made from Canadian pulp. So, it's Canadian all the way.

Ainsley: Well, it's nice that the indies are on board and also Indigo. It's nice that we can meet Canadians where they're at in the bookstore across the country. So, you said there's been a really great response from bookstores in terms of the uptake of these bookmarks. Have you heard any feedback from bookstores about the customer reaction to these in store?

Jim: I asked that very question, as I think I mentioned earlier, when I was in Cedar Canoe, and there were two people at the desk that day and they both said, "Oh, as soon as people saw it, they thought it was great." And this is all before Donald Trump, right? And so once the bookstores get the bookmarks in place, because they were only shipped at the beginning of this week and late last week, that I'm sure that the bookstores are going to get an even stronger response from customers. Because one really important thing, Ainsley, is that right now, Canadian authored books make up 11% or 12% roughly of all bookstore sales in English Canada. We know that from BookNet's data. And yet in BookNet's own consumer surveys and in other surveys too, when people are asked, "Are you interested in Canadian books? Are you interested in Canadian authors? How do you feel about Canadian books and authors?" the positive response always runs way ahead of what you see happening in the marketplace.

And our opinion about that is it's because it's hard to find. People can't act on their interest in Canadian books because how do you know what's Canadian? If you're looking at the mystery section, you see lots of interesting new mysteries. How do you know which ones are Canadian? And in a way, the bookmark flag idea is an answer to that dilemma and hopefully will help close the gap between the interest that people already have in Canadian authors and books and what they actually are able to do in bookstores. And if that's the case, that'll drive up that percentage from the 11% or 12% that we have now and the tiny 5% that independent Canadian publishers have of the market to a much higher number, which is our big objective, our big concern. All five of us as publisher distributors see the market as being something that we've absolutely got to capture as more serious marketshare. We've been driven down over the last 15 years, and we have to do everything we can and try and get the government onside, too, to drive that number back up.

Howard: And I think it's worth mentioning too that, you know, we're not trying to entice people into buying fewer foreign books. We had some voices from the importers and booksellers say, "Well, we don't want to discourage that side of our market." And it's not a near zero-sum game. We see this as a possibility for a bright spot in bookselling, taking advantage of this new interest in things Canadian. And we're all heading publishers and booksellers alike into a very questionable market upcoming in the next year or two. So, we really need some gains somewhere. And this is a possible bright spot in the market if we jump on it and make the most of it.

Ainsley: Yeah. And Chandler was saying that their percentage of Canadian sales is much higher than the industry average. And he attributes that to the bookmarks, just having people know who is Canadian. As you said, Jim, if you're trying to decide between two mysteries and there's an opportunity to choose a Canadian author, that might tip the scales in favour of the Canadian content. I mean, at BookNet, we're obviously going to be watching Canadian published book trends and Canadian author trends. But do you have a way that you'll be measuring the success of this campaign?

Howard: Well, if our sales go up, it's a success because, you know, all of our books are Canadian. So, that's a simple metric. But, yeah, it'll be interesting to look at some specific markets. It's wonderful that Indigo is so keen on this and is getting on board with their own bookmarks, which have a slightly different design from the other bookmarks going to independent stores. And, you know, that'll be interesting for us to look and see if there's any bump in Indigo's sales.

Terrilee: Yeah, but we'll also be looking at stores. As our reps go out to see the stores, I think that if the stores start to use these in the stores as part of their displays, then that's success. I mean, eventually all the rest of it will follow. But in the short term, just seeing the bookmarks in the books will be successful for us. Even just changing the mindset a little bit of the buyers, not just the bookstore buyers but the consumers as well, that lets put Canadian out front in our displays, then I think that's success.

Jim: Ainsley, I think that we can already say that this is a huge success because we all know how hard it is to get bookstores to decide to do something that is not easy to do. The idea of going through your whole bookstore and putting bookmark flags in the Canadian, that's not a trivial thing to commit to. And the quick response that all five of us got from the stores that we were offering these for and the quantities in terms of the bookmark numbers that are going out and just the enthusiasm that when people phone to order them or sent in emails to order them, you can tell that people really like this idea. Well, I mean, to me, that's a huge success already.

And I know from talking to Chandler Jolliffe, who is of course the owner of, and the man who thought this up at, Cedar Canoe, he knows that we're going to have a success because he piloted this. He trialed it when the climate wasn't so positive for it to work, and it was successful then. So, it can only be much more successful in an environment where people are looking for this. Instead of being surprised and welcoming it, as we've all been saying, people are now going into stores saying, "I'm going to buy the Canadian stuff, whether it's ketchup or whether it's ... or non-American fruit." And in the bookstores, to be able to answer that in an effective, attractive way, which is what the bookmarks do, there's no doubt this is going to be successful at the consumer level just like it is at the bookstore level.

Ainsley: Is there an email or contact information if bookstores wanted to get in touch, or is it just reach out to your reps?

Jim: You go to the publisher who's responsible for your province. For BC, that means Harbour. For the Prairies and the north, that means the Heritage Group. For Ontario, that means Firefly. For New Brunswick and Quebec, that means Formac. And for Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland, it means Nimbus.

Yeah, the product is on Bookmanager for everybody who's a Bookmanager user. It's there as an ISBN and in the free product section. Yeah. And I think everybody still has some inventory. And I know the Copywell held back the last 10,000 to fill any gap that presents. And if bookstores, if the demand goes well beyond the first 290,000, I fully expect that J.D. Hood and Copywell would happily go back to press so that we can satisfy the demand and really make this as successful as possible.

Ainsley: Well, I think those were all my questions. I feel like you answered many of them in the course of the conversation, which is fantastic. Is there anything else you'd like to add about the campaign that we didn't cover?

Terrilee: Yeah, just the last comment is that it's a great time to support your local bookstore as well as your local publisher and authors. Times are kind of crazy right now. So, the more support that comes towards our Canadian created books, the better, because who knows what's going to happen in the future. So, let's keep the Canadian-ness going.

Jim: And it's great that the booksellers have been so willing to get behind this and to act like... It's just a great gift, and I think those of us who are publishers are really grateful for that reaction and that support.

Ainsley: Keep an eye out at your local bookstore for this simple yet effective way to identify Canadian authors. And thanks to Terilee Bulger, Chandler Jolliffe, Jim Lorimer, and Howard White for speaking to me this month.

Before I go, I’d like to acknowledge that BookNet Canada's operations are remote and our colleagues contribute their work from the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Wyandot, the Mi’kmaq, the Ojibwa of Fort William First Nation, the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations (which includes the Ojibwa, the Odawa, and the Potawatomie), and the Métis, the original nations and peoples of the lands we now call Beeton, Brampton, Guelph, Halifax, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Vaughan, and Windsor. We encourage you to visit the native-land.ca website to learn more about the peoples whose land you are listening from today. Moreover, BookNet Canada endorses the Calls to Action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and supports an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to spacemaking in the book industry.

We'd also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support through the Canada Book Fund. And thanks to you for listening.