An update on the LPG situation...

An announcement from the Literary Press Group today: 

The LPG's Canada Book Fund Support has been restored

The Literary Press Group of Canada has been given verbal notification that James Moore, the Minister of Canadian Heritage, has overturned the decision to end funding for its sales force, which serves 47 Canadian owned and controlled literary book publishers from seven provinces. 

At this time we are awaiting more formal confirmation, but this is the news we needed to move forward and bring the 200 Canadian-authored books entrusted to us this fall to readers across the country....

Read the rest here.

An important message from the Literary Press Group

Please take the time to read this message from the Literary Press Group and take action:

We want you! If your MP is Conservative, you can help Canadian literary publishing.

All of us at the Literary Press Group, publishers and staff alike, have been overwhelmed and encouraged by the public support that we have received since our loss of Canada Book Fund support was announced.

If you would like to help us, there are a couple of things you can do.

One is buy an LPG book, from your local independent bookstore if you can. Support our members and their authors. But you do that regularly anyway, or you wouldn’t be reading this.

You can also help us gain political support to have this decision overturned.

While there has been plenty of speculation, at this time we don’t know anything about the decision on our support – who made it or why it was made. We don’t know if it was made by a politician, or by someone in the bureaucracy. That’s why we have some hope that the decision can be reversed.

If you have a Conservative MP, in your region or your riding, you can help. Send them a note, letting them know what Canadian literary writing means to you, and what this decision means for it. Be clear and respectful....

Read the rest here.

Find out how to contact your MP here. 

Author Ryan Kamstra turns to crowdfunding to finish his next project

No grant? No problem. Tomboyfriend frontman and author Ryan Kamstra is turning to crowdfunding as way to raise money in order to complete his next book.

According to Kamstra's fundraising campaign site, System's Children, his next book, will draw "on folklore and journalistic reportage to present a J.R.R Tolkien-scale allegory of contemporary globalism", and will present "the story of eight characters, dealing with eight complexly separate modern circumstances, and the accidental influence their eight lives have on one another." You can read an excerpt from the story "Darby and the Angels" on the campaign site.

The concept of crowdfunding is relatively new; it involves using social media to raise money from lots of small donors instead of from one large one. In the past, a wealthy patron of the arts might have financed such a venture, but with this kind of largesse on the endangered list, why not replace one wealthy patron with lots of ordinary ones? I liken it to a kind of literary barn raising. Nova Scotia writer Leo McKay Jr. has already used this process to raise money for his indie Tim Horton's novel Roll Up the Rim.

As the editor of Kamstra's two previous books, Late Capitalist Sublime (2002) and Into the Drowned World (2008), I know that he is a unique and talented writer with an almost limitless ability to surprise and delight while he turns the decay of civilization into a gorgeous work of art, a kind of elegy for the human conscience. I wish him success in this venture, and encourage you to make a small donation (or, if you are wealthy, a larger one).