I pulled the Department of Canadian Heritage guidelines for the Canada Book Fund to check how publisher subsidies are allocated. The federal program does not finance unread books in a vacuum. Under Publishing Support rules, a publisher must record at least $50,000 in net sales of their own titles to qualify. Base grants are calculated from 'factored sales,' multiplying verified domestic and export sales by category coefficients. An applicant's funding is simply their proportional share of total industry sales. Ottawa does not subsidize books nobody reads. It matches public dollars directly to commercial purchases.
That's not quite true. Those $50,000 in net sales of ALL of a publisher's titles could easily represent just a couple of thousand copies - spread across hundreds of titles. And - as was revealed through testimony in the recent Random House anti-trust trial in the U.S., - 90% of books published by established U.S. publishers sell less than 2,000 copies and - it was suggested - 50% sell less than a dozen.
So $50,000 in net sales is a meaningless threshold.
And, the Canada Book Fund isn't the only source of federal funding...
I pulled the Department of Canadian Heritage guidelines for the Canada Book Fund to check how publisher subsidies are allocated. The federal program does not finance unread books in a vacuum. Under Publishing Support rules, a publisher must record at least $50,000 in net sales of their own titles to qualify. Base grants are calculated from 'factored sales,' multiplying verified domestic and export sales by category coefficients. An applicant's funding is simply their proportional share of total industry sales. Ottawa does not subsidize books nobody reads. It matches public dollars directly to commercial purchases.
That's not quite true. Those $50,000 in net sales of ALL of a publisher's titles could easily represent just a couple of thousand copies - spread across hundreds of titles. And - as was revealed through testimony in the recent Random House anti-trust trial in the U.S., - 90% of books published by established U.S. publishers sell less than 2,000 copies and - it was suggested - 50% sell less than a dozen.
So $50,000 in net sales is a meaningless threshold.
And, the Canada Book Fund isn't the only source of federal funding...