Much has been made in the media about the “Giller Effect,” the near-instant sales and exposure impact the Scotiabank Giller Prize bestows upon the five books lucky enough to make it to the shortlist. Media-attention-starved authors are pulled from their studies, dispatched to the local barber or hairdresser for a quick makeover and then packed off for dizzying rounds of TV appearances, Giller-themed public readings and in-depth (ie, more than 300 words) interviews with newspaper and magazine writers. It’s a great story, especially for the sometimes glamour-starved publishing industry. But how much of it is actually true? Does the Giller shortlist transform every pumpkin into a magic horse and carriage? Torontoist Books editor James Grainger recently visited the headquarters of Penguin Canada, a company with two authors on this year’s shortlist, to get the inside story on the Giller effect. (Please note that this article features an interview with a Giller-nominated author who was NOT asked what he will be wearing to the banquet on Tuesday night.)
We chose to focus on Colin McAdam’s Fall, published by Penguin’s new Hamish Hamilton fiction imprint, overseen by Executive Editor Nicole Winstanley, who also shepherded Penguin’s other nominated title, Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared, to completion. (The Disappeared is this site’s sure-fire pick to win the prize, as explained in this post.) With its unreliable, possibly homicidal narrator and its circuitous, unconventional narrative structure, Fall seemed an unlikely and even brave choice for the shortlist. McAdam was certainly surprised to learn his novel had been included. “I was surprised to even be on the longtlist,” he told Torontoist over the phone from his home in Montreal. “So it was pretty heavy to be there in the final five.” Below are three interviews conducted at Penguin’s offices, the first with McAdam, the second with Nicole Winstanley and the third with Yvonne Hunter, VP of Publicity and Marketing.
Colin McAdam
Torontoist: Your novel, which is about the obsessive relationship between a pair of teenage boys in an exclusive boarding school, is probably the darkest (and funniest) title on the shortlist. Do you think a lot of people were surprised that it made it on to the Giller shortlist?
CA: I think a lot of people were surprised. Certainly a lot of people who don’t like me were surprised, since they had dismissed the novel as nothing but teen masturbation and dialogue. Maybe the thing that surprised me the most is that Fall is a story that requires a little bit of work from the reader, who has to piece together what happens. Some might even say it’s an incomplete story. Loose ends aren’t tied up. I don’t really know what people are saying about the other titles on the list. I read Kim Echlin’s book and it’s a really good book but I haven’t read any of the others.
TO: What’s changed since you got shortlisted?
CA: It’s such a generous “complete” award. It’s not just the five grand (that all five shortlisted authors receive) but you get a lot of extra publicity through the award’s affiliations with Scotiabank of course and also through various media outlets such as CTV. I’d been touring and doing the festivals since the spring (when Fall was published) but the extra publicity has given the book a second life. Books disappear from the media and the bookstores usually disappear pretty quickly normally.
TO: Have you found that your getting more attention at the appearances your making since the shortlist was announced?
CA: It’s funny, because the festivals are put together well before the major literary award shortlists are announced. Let’s just say that the festivals probably banked on a number of authors other than me making those lists, judging by the way certain authors were packaged together. So I wouldn’t say that the Giller had a big impact on the attendance of my reading festival appearances. It’s certainly helped sales from what I understand.
TO: Have you been paying much attention to the coverage?
CA: I try to keep from remote from this stuff as I can.
TO: How come?
CA: I find it healthier, really. With the experience of publishing Some Great Thing (McAdam’s first novel, which won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award) I learned to stand back. I learned to ask myself, Why am I caring about this stuff that had nothing to do with why I started writing in the first place? Doing that helps me focus on doing my own thing and not worrying about who’s reading and why they’re reading and what else they’re reading and who else is doing well and why didn’t I get a big ad in the paper? It’s a lot of noise that I don’t need.
TO: Which means you’ll have to prepare yourself for a future experience of not being on the shortlist.
CA: Oh, don’t worry, I am.
Nicole Winstanley
Torontoist: What was your reaction to hearing the news that Fall was on the shortlist?
NW: I had been really hopeful that it would be on the short list. I don’t think you can ever say that you’re one-hundred-percent surprised that a book either makes it or doesn’t make it on to any awards list because jurors can be so fickle. I believed that he would be on the list but I couldn’t be sure, just as I couldn’t be sure about Kim Echlin’s book. Earlier in the fall we hoped and expected and believed he would be on the long list, but we’ve seen the jury go in all sorts of directions over the years so we couldn’t be sure. I felt a great sense of reassurance when he and Kim were both on the long list.
TO: Were you happy to have the books on the long list?
NW: Of course. The long list is a funny thing in itself – it comes out as a press release with very little fanfare. It helps more authors and their books get exposure but it can also hurt those authors who don’t make the long list. Those authors can’t say, “Oh, I was one book away from the short list.” Now you know how far away you were. I was delighted to see Kim and Colin’s names on that list, but then you have the build up to the announcement of the short list. There’s a lot of talk about whether those authors can “hold on,” and this year there was talk in the media about “why the women were winning” this year (only two male authors made it on to the 12-name list). I had several calls about that and I said, “I have one woman and one man on there and they’re both brilliant novelists.” The journalists wanted to talk about Colin being a man and not about the experimental nature of his novel or anything about the novel. It was surprising.
TO: Do you think it was a brave choice?
NW: I do. It’s a daring choice, it’s a worthy choice, particularly in terms of the novel’s craft. Especially in the context of one of this year’s jurors comments about “typical Canadian novels” (go here and scroll down), Fall’s inclusion showed that Canadian authors are doing some very audacious things.
TO: What was it like going to the short list press conference with two titles in contention?
NW: You go there having analyzed every title on the long list and you’re thinking that it’s anybody’s game. From a biased point of view, I believed that Kim and Colin deserved to make the short list. When the jury announced Linden MacIntyre’s name I had to run through the spelling of Colin’s name to remember if he was a Mc or a Mac. Luckily they announced his name a few seconds later.
TO: What do you do here at Penguin to prepare for the short list?
NW: We’d already looked at our stock for both books before the press conference and in this case we knew we were covered. We had enough stock for the book store re-orders that we knew would come if either or both books made the short list. Since they were both spring releases we had the books in the stores. For us and for the authors it meant that stores wouldn’t be sending the copies that they already had back to Penguin to make room on the shelves for new fall titles. It gave the two books better placement in the stores and it gave the books a lot more publicity, which definitely helps sales.
TO: What’s the publicity effect like?
NW: You send out a press release immediately and everyone reads it. You get lots of media pitches from people wanting to do profiles. There’s normally limited real estate for author profiles, but once you become a Giller-shortlisted author the press doesn’t just want to know about the books they want to know about the writers who wrote those books. You also get newspapers wanting to run excerpts from the books, which is very rare these days for a work of fiction. So you get the general public opening the newspaper and actually sampling fiction. You get to put the work in front of the general reader in a way that makes it popular and accessible. Those are very positive words from where I’m sitting.
Yvonne Hunter
Torontoist: Does having one of your books on the Giller shortlist help you with your job?
YH: Oh yeah. You’re helped considerably because of the Scotiabank-Giller marketing machine, which is substantial. This is the biggest national literary prize, and certainly the most glamorous book event. Because of that, when publishers are thinking about their publishing lists they are wondering if a fiction title is a possible Giller contender. We certainly that both Fall and The Disappeared were very strong contenders. When it actually comes to pass, it’s very exciting. It was especially exciting because these were Penguin’s first two Canadian titles published under the Hamish Hamilton imprint.
TO: How do you change your publicity campaigns if you get a shortlisted book?
YH: We already have a campaign in place regardless of the awards short lists and we continue with it regardless. In Colin’s case, we published in March and we did some publicity based on he and Kim being our first Canadian Hamish Hamilton authors. We also did some stand-alone stuff for Colin. There was some profile coverage for both authors in the spring and they had both done lots of events but after the short list it was easy for us to reinvigorate their publicity campaigns, beginning with a press release which we sent out right away. We knew we’d have a lot more publicity possibilities so we met right away to discuss plans for both authors. We work with CTV, who make short films for each of the five titles. They are shown at the actual awards ceremonies. There were also more than a dozen group ads placed for the shortlist and Scotiabank runs the “Guess the Giller” contest. A web hub is created for promotions. Stickers are delivered to the book stores for the five titles. And then we have to have everyone ready for massive campaign if one of our books wins.
TO: How do you do that?
YH: We check our stock levels, we look to see what ad opportunities are still available in the media, we prepare for a possible reprint of the title. We certainly have a press release ready. With Joseph Boyden (who won last year for Through Black Spruce), we had a terrific amount of publicity around the book instantly. It’s the only occasion in the country where you actually see an author surrounded by a media scrum. It was a delight to see Joseph set upon by a hoard of reporters. It was like a sports event or something!
