Uncertainty (What else?)

We made it to February. Congratulations.

My living and dining rooms are currently full of boxes—both those containing a total of around 1200 books, and those waiting to be packed with... books.

Last spring we raised around $31,000 CAD on Kickstarter to finance production of Quilting: A Modern Creative Journey Through an Age-Old Craft, by Andrea Tsang Jackson, which hits shelves on February 18th. I'm spending the first half of February packing and shipping rewards to backers, some of which contain any number of other items, part of exclusive bundles offered during the campaign.

One day, I hope to look back on these days knowing that in addition to all the other ways crowdfunding helped me get the company off the ground, it also gave me an intimate, deep understanding of logistics I wouldn't have otherwise.

Of course, I'm burying the lede. On Saturday, Feb 1, two dear friends came over for hours to help me start packing orders. I fed them lunch. There were Cool Ranch Doritos.

Just as I stepped out to walk the dog in the middle of the afternoon, I saw a text from my husband that Trump's tariffs were coming, for sure.

As I took a slow perambulation around the block while skimming the New York Times, I let my mind go to places I'm usually good at preventing it from going: all the ways the house of cards holding up this fragile startup press could come crashing down.

One of my two major goals for 2025, which I put down in ink as I worked through my reflections and plans back in December, was to work toward establishing sales and distribution for our books in the U.S.

On the upside: I don't have that yet, so I can't lose it.

On the downside, I'm being confronted by all the reasons I want it, and though the tariffs have been delayed a month (whatever that means), confronting these reasons is forcing me to get very, very specific about it. Which is not a bad thing really, but I am very concerned about what I'll find when I finally have time to do it thoroughly.

The American market is ten times the size of the Canadian market, and there is an assumption that seems to underlie the entire way the Canadian book-publishing industry operates that Canadian publishing cannot be sustained by the Canadian market alone. It's why like 90% of our trade infrastructure is designed to lobby provincial and federal governments for more grants, tax breaks and subsidies (to be clear, to the detriment of actually supporting best business practices, innovation, and productive networking within the industry itself).

We released our first full-colour book in April, 2023, after doing a small print run of our first black-and-white book as a test case in the spring of 2022. I've run three successful Kickstarter campaigns to finance production of our first three full-colour books. And I have not taken a dime in salary (insert all kinds of punditry about the state of entrepreneurialism that this kind of thing is considered normal in North America; my business is made possible by my husband's stable job).

Because our full-colour books cost so much to make—upwards of $40,000 CAD a pop—I cannot simply churn out books to quickly build a backlist deep enough to provide vaguely predictable revenue. Though I am beginning to make books that don't require crowdfunding, I don't see myself being able to release more than four titles a year anytime soon.

Which means the option I have for increasing revenue is to sell more copies of the books I've got.

The other major goal I had for 2025, by some stroke of extraordinary luck, was ticked-off in December, 2024: to secure sales representation for our books in Canada, to go along with the distribution we set up last spring. This is the only way for more Nine Ten books to be sold in Canada, and I'm very excited, and trepidatious, about what the results may be; only time will tell.

Accessing the American market is a no-brainer business goal. I came up through American craft publishing; the market for craft books there (eventual economic disaster notwithstanding) is big.

So here I sit, a mere month into 2025, with things up in the air that had seemed so obvious I never questioned them.

I'm talking with other Canadian business owners, within publishing and within the craft industry more broadly, so we can brainstorm and see if there are ways we can support each other, if through nothing else than being in it together.

And I'm doing my best to be transparent and hopeful and realistic with Nine Ten's readers. Here's the update I sent to Kickstarter backers during the one day the tariffs were for-sure. A silver lining is that response to that email was overwhelmingly supportive, and a couple of colleagues have told me it's helped them sort out how to craft messaging to their own customers.

I'm relieved I can send the rest of these Kickstarter rewards, about half of which are going to the U.S., during this 30-day reprieve from tariffs—it removes a lot of confusion and potential disruptions to backers receiving their books.

But however many decades January lasted, thirty days is not a long time. The uncertainty has not been alleviated; the sense of walking a tightrope persists.

For around an actual decade, I've been in the habit of ending my essays/email newsletters with a sign-off of "Onward." One foot in front of the other, even for a teensy weensy baby step. Today it's a reminder to me, and maybe to you, too, that there's nowhere to go but forward, or through, or over or under or around.

Here to chat in the comments or privately, anytime.

Onward.
Kim