When Nimbus Publishing’s Karen McMullin was preparing materials for the publisher’s booth at the American Library Association’s annual conference in Chicago earlier this year, she displayed several flyers highlighting different genres and collections on the press’s list. Within an hour, all of the flyers highlighting the press’s books by Indigenous authors were gone.
“To have 100 of them go in an hour, I was dumbfounded that I hadn’t brought 500,” McMullin says. “I have a feeling that over the two and a half days that we were at that conference, they would have all gone.”
The rush on flyers is only one of many moments over the last several years that McMullin, who serves as national publicist and export manager at the Halifax-based press, has noticed an increased demand for Nimbus’s Indigenous-created books in the U.S. In particular, the press’s children’s books, including picture books by Mi’kmaw artist Alan Syliboy and Theresa Meuse and Arthur Stevens’s The Sharing Circle are increasingly in demand. McMullin first noticed this interest at the ALA general conference in Seattle in 2019.
“That was really the first time that we got the opportunity to talk to American librarians,” McMullin says. “We were very, very well received there in a way that pleasantly surprised us, and it was a lot of those librarians who initially told us: ‘We’re looking for Indigenous material, we’re not finding what we want, and we’re really happy to see what you have.’”
McMullin’s on-the-ground observations are matched by the data; U.S. sales of Nimbus’s Indigenous titles are up 10 per cent over last year, and The Sharing Circle is its top-selling title south of the border.
Orca Book Publishers publisher Andrew Wooldridge has noticed a similar increase in demand. Orca’s sales for 2021–2022 were split evenly between Canada and the U.S., Wooldridge says, with books by Indigenous creators accounting for about 35 per cent of total sales. Sales numbers are not yet available for 2023, but Wooldridge notes they are up significantly again this year, with Indigenous titles regularly accounting for eight of the spots in Orca’s in-house weekly top-10 list. Monique Gray Smith’s My Heart Fills with Happiness, illustrated by Julie Flett, for example, has done “incredibly well” in the U.S., according to Wooldridge.
“Our market is largely institutional, in terms of schools and public libraries,” Wooldridge says. “We can all despair about the state of the U.S. and what’s happening there, but … there is still a real desire for diversity and for underrepresented voices.”
Portage & Main Press publisher Catherine Gerbasi says its Indigenous-authored imprint HighWater Press saw export sales double in 2021. U.S. sales have since flattened slightly, but they are still higher in 2022 and 2023 than they were before 2021.
Gerbasi credits Nambé Pueblo scholar and educator Debbie Reese, who founded American Indians in Children’s Literature, for some of the success of HighWater titles in the U.S. On the blog, Reese analyzes the representations of Indigenous peoples in children’s and young adult literature, and was an early champion of HighWater’s graphic novels by David A. Robertson, Jen Storm, and Tasha Spillet.
“These were seminal works in Canada and they’re so progressive and so beautiful, the books themselves, they just spilled over into the U.S.,” Gerbasi says. “Those ideas, those stories, the power in the act of storytelling in book form. Everybody wants to hear about it, they want to understand.”
Indie Indigenous publisher Kegedonce Press wasn’t able to parse out U.S. sales numbers compared to previous years, but says that this year’s U.S. sales are definitely up.
No one is certain what, exactly, accounts for the recent increase in demand for Indigenous-authored Canadian books in the U.S. Gerbasi says many Indigenous people she speaks with in the U.S. say that Canada is about 10 years ahead of the U.S. in its public conversations about truth and reconciliation. Wooldridge wonders whether it is due to the lack of well-established Indigenous publishing programs in the U.S.
For her part, scholar and educator Reese says that the creation of the nonprofit We Need Diverse Books helped spur interest in books by Indigenous authors in the U.S., and that the existing work by Indigenous authors/creators published in Canada made for an obvious source.
“There’s a general sense [in the U.S.] that the Canadian government’s subsidizing small publishers in Canada means that many small Native publishers are able to get books out,” Reese says. “We hear about them and talk about them. Sometimes they get promoted at big conferences in the exhibition halls. Down here we’re starting to see more books coming out.”