Gaspereau Press made right call on Giller book

By ROGER TAYLOR Halifax Chronicle Herald Tue, Nov $162012$

Here's a fact that Nova Scotia can crow about. For the second year in a row, a writer who grew up here has won the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize. Linden MacIntyre, from Port Hastings, won the Giller in $2009$ with The Bishop's Man, which was set in Cape Breton. After winning the award, that novel reportedly sold $75,000$ hardcover copies. This year, Johanna Skibsrud, who grew up in Pictou County, won the prize for her novel The Sentimentalists, which has been described as a story of family relationships, memory and loss that integrates her father's Vietnam War experiences.

Gaspereau Press in Kentville was the small literary publisher and print shop that agreed to publish The Sentimentalists and submitted it to the Giller committee for consideration. So this is a time to celebrate not only Canadian but Nova Scotia literature. There was just one problem. The small publishing house established by Gary Dunfield and Andrew Steeves couldn't possibly meet the immediate upsurge in demand for The Sentimentalists. Winning the prize has put enormous pressure on the small business to take advantage of the publicity and increase production to quickly get the book to stores during the holiday shopping season. That caused problems because, even at top capacity, Gaspereau can only turn out about $1,000$ copies in a week, and demand for the winning novel is much more than that. Initially, Gaspereau resisted efforts to bring in a larger printing outfit to speed up production. But on Monday, it announced it sold the Canadian paperback rights for The Sentimentalists to Douglas & McIntyre Books of Vancouver, one of the largest independent publishing houses in Canada.

That means about $30,000$ paperback copies of The Sentimentalists should be shipped to stores this week, with the potential to print an additional $20,000$ copies. Gaspereau will continue to print copies of the original edition. While it's disappointing the small Nova Scotia publishing house couldn't handle all the demand, Dan Shaw, a marketing professor at the Dalhousie School of Business Administration, says Gaspereau was in a difficult position and did the best it could under the circumstances. $"$In order to realize the opportunity, there is a short window. Timing is always one of the key things in marketing, $($which$)$ you can't always control," Shaw told me Monday. To boost production quickly takes a lot of capital, he says. $"$So to get the most out of it$,$ they probably did the right thing."