2025 Recap Part III: Q2 Is Wild

A friend with a formal Canadian education in publishing once told me that the average (or typical? not the same and I can't remember) print run for a new release from an independent publisher here is 500 copies. This gave me my first indication of why industry people have responded so oddly, it seems, to what I'm doing with Nine Ten. Each of our Kickstarters has involved more than 500 books for campaign rewards alone. Because I'd raised the funds and didn't have sales or distribution for our books yet, my print runs for these books ranged from around 2000–2500 copies.

I can't remember why I decided to lead with that context as I lead into Q2 2025, but I realize I forgot an important development from March. Remember how I said I'd planned to apply for distribution with Microcosm once our fifth book came out in fall 2025? Well.

That book, The True Cost of Wool, by Anna Hunter, is about the Canadian wool supply chain, and it was to be Nine Ten's first self-funded (not crowdfunded) black-and-white release since we printed a couple hundred copies of Custom-Fit Hats back when I knew we'd for sure be making our first full-colour book.

In the wake of tariffs and as the nascent Buy Canadian movement took hold, I watched as Anna was inundated with questions on social media about where Canadians could find Canadian yarns. I had three books scheduled for fall release—all self-funded because it seemed like a very good idea at some point to go from one huge-budget full-colour release a year to one huge-budget full-colour release and three lower-budget b/w releases, hold onto your butts—and none for spring. I texted Anna to see if she'd be available and willing to seriously change our editorial schedule to try for a spring release, to capture attention when it was high. She was game.

Next I had to make sure our book designer was available for a last-minute reschedule, because even if Anna and I could get the manuscript finalized months early, it wouldn't make a difference if the designer couldn't lay out the book. Luckily, she'd had another book push its timeline, and we were good to go.

It was intense to get this book out three months earlier than planned, and also I had not budgeted for a print run in the spring. I listed the book for pre-order on our website immediately, hoping to cover as much of the print cost as possible because that spring, for the first time, Nine Ten was in the red. (And my goodness, did people respond. I'd hoped to pre-sell around 150 copies, and more than double that number of pre-orders came in. I was relieved, and excited.)

As we rushed on Wool, I learned that the eight boxes of books I'd sent to Microcosm in the U.S. had been tariffed. All of them. To the tune of something like $1200 USD. Which is a fuck of a lot of Canadian dollars for a tiny startup operating in the red.

The national-security policy Trump is using to impose tariffs exempts informational materials (including books). I had followed advice from a local publishing organization to use a particular tariff code to ensure it would be clear at the border that the shipments were exempt. What I did not know is that UPS is notorious for applying tariffs and duties in error. Like, this happens across sectors, all the time. A colleague in another industry told me how to dispute the charges, and as I waited what I was told could be months to hear about the dispute, I started to think about what my business could look like if I couldn't risk sending more books across the border. Amid this mess the first cracks in my confidence started to spider across the surface. Maybe I had gotten in over my head. Maybe I had made assumptions that were very very wrong. Maybe I wasn't as good as I thought I'd been so far at learning how to do all the things I'd never done before to bring books to a broad market. This doubt consumed me through the spring.

And then Canada Post workers gave strike notice for around the time I'd need to start sending out pre-orders of The True Cost of Wool, many of which were sold with lettermail shipping since the book is thin and lightweight enough that it could be sent within Canada very inexpensively compared to tracked shipping. If our first 2025 release, Quilting, was mired by cross-border shipping anxiety, our second release was mired by domestic shipping anxiety. I could not eat the difference in cost between lettermail and tracked shipping and spent a significant amount of time contingency planning and communicating with pre-orderers.

Some pre-orders shipped before the book's June 10 release date, and I held many dozens of others to ship once the labour dispute resolved, whenever that would be. (Eventually it became clear that while a strike could happen at any time, it didn't seem like it would happen right now, and I took a deep breath and sent those remaining books out. So many ended up lost in the mail for reasons I can't begin to fathom that I committed to not offering lettermail shipping at all in the future. This month I paid off the lease of the postage meter I've had since the spring of 2023 when I had to fulfill the Kickstarter for our first full-colour book, and next month I will ship it back to Pitney Bowes. Good riddance.)

June is a slow month for book releases relative to other times of the year. The True Cost of Wool came out on June 10.

At the end of June, on a rare free Saturday, my husband and I ran some errands and went out for lunch. As I waited for him to sort out his food order, I casually checked my email, which is something I rarely do on the weekend. I saw one from the head of my sales agency and the subject was something like, "You're in the Globe." No joke, my first thought was, "Am I in trouble? Like is my arrest imminent?" This was a very on-brand reaction from me, honestly. Thankfully, she sent a follow-up email right after it with a photo of The Globe and Mail's Canadian non-fiction bestseller list. The True Cost of Wool was #6 on the list.

To say that I lost my shit would be an understatement. After four months of uncertainty, stress, and doubt, this was a massive accomplishment. I was so proud of Anna and the best text I've ever sent was the one I sent to her with the news. (She later replied asking what exactly being on the list means and I had the honour of telling her that for the rest of her life she would be "bestselling author Anna Hunter." She asked if this was a "good list," and I was like, "Anna, this is like the NY Times bestseller list of Canada. There is no better list.").

After lunch we bought six copies of the paper. A few days later, the sales agency head told me most of the publishers she works with never get a book on the national bestseller list. I was gobsmacked. And I realized it was the pre-orders that did it (sales through the Nine Ten Shopify store are reported automatically to BookNet Canada, which compiles national book sales data). Wild.

At this point, the end of June, I had still not heard from the Association of Canadian Publishers about the membership application I'd submitted at the beginning of March. In a more petty moment, I hoped some of their board members saw this unknown press on the Globe list and maybe raised an eyebrow that Nine Ten is like, legit. (Dipping my toe into Q3, in early July I did send them a link to the list hoping it would help my case; I had no idea why it was taking them so long, and I was starting to get very frustrated that I was navigating the trade war as if I do not operate Nine Te within an industry that has a trade organization to support it.)

Next up, I may be daring and just wrap up the whole rest of the year. Coming soon!