by Greg Ioannou
The message from BoldFace said, “We were wondering if you would consider writing a post about your perspective on the state of publishing today . . .”
Starting in 2008
Cool! I gave a keynote presentation about this topic at the 2008 Editors Canada conference. It would be fun, I thought, to try to find the script to that and see how well I did.
Instead, I found an email I sent to a friend about the conference presentation: “I thought my conference session was going to be at 4. At about 1:50, I was talking with Moira White and she asked me what I was going to say. I said I hadn’t thought about it. She said, ‘But you’re giving the presentation in 10 minutes!’ So I sat at a table and mapped out what I wanted to say on the back of an envelope in about a minute flat . . .”
I do remember how I closed the presentation: I predicted that book publishing would be dead by 2018. I was a bit too pessimistic, but . . .
Back to 1977
I also remember how I opened the presentation: I started by describing an old directory called something like Book Publishers of Ontario. When I started my career in editing in 1977, I acquired a copy of this magazine-sized directory and started calling my way through it, looking for freelance work. I found work at Addison Wesley and Collier MacMillan. The day I started calling from the back of the book got me a project from Wiley. When I called Doubleday, they asked if I could come down “right now” to do some proofreading. For several years, most of my work was from companies from the beginning of the alphabet plus Wiley.
That version of publishing was almost gone by the end of the 1980s, although many of the early-1990s graduates from resources such as the publishing program at Ryerson (now known as the Toronto Metropolitan University) found good, long-term jobs or lots of freelance work.
Back to 2008 again
By 2008, that directory was long dead, as were most of the publishers listed in it. A similar directory published then would have been perhaps a third of its length.
I see that I later sent my friend a summary of the 2008 presentation: “I looked at the various functions publishers perform and how each is being transformed – and how for each one, some other type of entity can do it better than publishers can. No alternative system has all the bits together yet, but soon enough someone will. Amazon’s Kindle comes closest so far.”
Strike 1:
The first Kindles were sold in November 2007 – it was very new tech. You didn’t need to read paper books anymore. Kobo launched (in Canada!) in 2011, and I was hooked. I’ve read one print book since 2011 – it wasn’t available as an ebook.
Strike 2:
Far more relevantly: Hello, internet! WebCrawler, Lycos, Yahoo!, and Infoseek were launched in 1994. Google followed in 1998. Wikipedia started in 2001.
Information gathering moved away from book publishing. Goodbye, encyclopedias. Most kinds of information went online, available immediately and for free.
Strike 3:
In 1997, Lightning Source began offering print-on-demand publishing. It took about 10 years to become easy enough, and cheap enough, for authors to use. But . . . hello, self-publishing!
Strike 4 (sigh – there goes the baseball analogy):
Audiobooks became popular in the early 2000s. MP3s playing on portable players moved audiobooks from physical media like cassettes and CDs to downloads and instant access.
According to Google AI, “sales of digital formats surpassed physical ones around 2009.”
How is publishing in 2026?
Now to the current era. I wasn’t right that book publishing would be dead by 2018 – although the industry had shrunk drastically – but it’s in pretty shaky shape in 2026.
One of the most interesting sources of information about book publishing is SHuSH, the blog at Sutherland House, a somewhat eccentric non-fiction publisher.
SHuSH is formatted disastrously. Go to that link, and it doesn’t let you scroll past February 2021. Many of the entries are long paragraphs. However, there’s interesting information hidden among all the self-promotion. Like this (undated!) entry, probably from 2024: the SHuSH page about Canada’s top 20 independent book publishers.
It’s a list of the top Canadian-owned English-language publishers. It doesn’t include the surviving multinationals. Add the French ones, and the list grows by about four companies. Inhabit Media is the only Indigenous one that is big enough to make the list.
That list is of the grants each publisher received. Multiply by about 12 to get their book sales. For example, the merged ECW and Annick had sales of about $8 million.
Who is on the list? Academic publishers and university presses, though pure textbook publishers are gone. Children’s book publishers. A depressingly small number of general trade publishers. “There isn’t a single stand-alone adult publisher” in the list. Notice how they’ve been merging to stay alive (the multinationals have done that, even more so):
To put the scale of those adult publishers in perspective, it would take about six or eight of them combined to make one ECW/Annick, and it would take two or three ECW/Annicks to make one of the bigger independents we lost at the start of the century – Stoddart/General, McClelland & Stewart, Key Porter, Douglas & McIntyre.
Three data points
- In 2024, FriesenPress published its 10,000th title. Its annual sales are not made public, but they are far higher than any of the traditional publishers in the SHuSH list. AmazonKDP, Apple Books, Kobo, and IngramSpark dwarf FriesenPress’s number. About 100,000 books are self-published in Canada each year, and about 1 million are self-published in the US. Sure, many of them are vanity projects and pure junk, but about half the books I read in 2025 were self-published, and they were higher quality than most of the traditionally published books I read in the same year.
- In 2022, Brandon Sanderson used a crowdfunding campaign in order to self-publish four books that his publisher wanted to delay. His Kickstarter campaign raised US$41.7 million. That’s C$57.8 million – which is more than the total annual sales of the top nine Canadian publishers in the SHuSH list. For four books. In a crowdfunding campaign. All four also became best-sellers when they hit the regular market.
- According to my students, none of George Brown College’s 50-ish publishing program graduates in the past year found work in the publishing industry. Zero.
A note about publishers and editors
FriesenPress pays their freelancers today about the hourly rate I was charging in 1984.
I charge my book-publisher customers about half what I charge my corporate and government customers.
I last invoiced a book publisher – any book publisher – in early 2024. They said they expected to have more work for me in the summer of 2025. They went bankrupt instead.
Well, except: I do own a book publishing company, Iguana Books. My editing company, Colborne Communications, charges Iguana for editing at cost. Iguana sort of breaks even. Ish.
Publishing in 2036
Over the next 10 years, I expect book and magazine publishing to continue to get more and more niche. The books I buy and use are now very specialized reference books to do with my hobbies.
Gift books, for children especially, will continue to sell. Anything for children will sell.
People will still need to publish research.
What is changing now?
AI threatens our jobs, if it is ever programmed more effectively. At the moment, the going rate for editing AI texts seems to be about US$80 an hour. There is a lot of that work around. That market, even if it only lasts for a couple of years, will help keep lots of editors fed. And if AI needs editing long-term . . . woo-hoo, eh?
The cultural industries that used to feed most editors are changing, and, for the most part, we haven’t changed with them. They can’t afford us (or they keep us in relative poverty). My three main gigs at the moment are editing a corporate website, writing video game scripts, and editing various random stuff for an ad agency.
Not exactly cultural projects, possibly excluding the really clever video games. (A project that was sent my way by someone I met in Editors Canada, by the way.)
This may be a discouraging perspective, but we have to be honest about our future as editors and especially as freelancers in publishing. In-house jobs are disappearing. Freelance projects are getting harder to find and sustain. AI is a greater and greater threat to both work in general and copyright protection of that work – our own and our clients’.
There is a ton of freelance editing work around – I’ve never been busier, and the projects tend to be long-term – but it isn’t in publishing or other cultural industries.
Readers, how are you dealing with recent trends and possible futures?
Greg Ioannou is a four-time president of Editors Canada; president of Colborne Communications; publisher emeritus, Iguana Books; and head of writing (sometimes known as chaos generator), In-Game Learning. He can also be found at SalesThing, GregIoannou Records.
This article was copy edited by Ren Baron. She is a Toronto-based freelance editor who specializes in academic editing for scholars around the world.
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