Atlantic Books Today COVER FEATURE
Books back better Sometimes a crisis presents an opportunity to rethink and become better by Chris Benjamin
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aomi Klein argued in her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, that free-market opportunists are handy at every disaster with market-liberalization policies to further their way of seeing the world. She said it’s high time the other side of the political spectrum make their own ideas more persuasively and forcefully available during times of crisis. It is when everything goes wrong that our minds open to new ways of seeing things. The left of the political spectrum is not really ignorant of this concept. Peter Beinart, writing for The Atlantic’s December 2018 issue, notes that economic crisis pushed President Roosevelt to the left: “What transformed Roosevelt’s agenda was pressure from populist movements making leftist economic demands.” “Populist movements” that were bolstered by starving Americans. Their pressure led to the New Deal, which lifted millions from poverty and built a social safety net. Crisis created the conditions to build a better society. Wherever your political leanings, you can’t look around your home (let alone the internet) without seeing signs of failure in our society: downtown vacancies or overcrowding, lines at food banks and employment offices, abandoned or crumbling houses, plasticlittered beaches (don’t dare look in the water), abuses of political or judicial or policing power, sick people without access to healthcare, overcrowded classrooms—the list is endless. COVID-19 didn’t create crisis in our world, it exacerbated and exposed it. Now here’s a chance to change things. But how? How do we make it better? Scroll any given Twitter feed and you’re likely to stumble away dazed and confused by the vitriol on all sides of any given political issue. Might I humbly suggest you find solace in books, where analysis runs hundreds of pages deeper? It is incredible, perusing any season’s catalogues from Atlantic Canadian publishers alone, how many of their books tackle these same issues the COVID-19 era has spotlighted. These books, many of them written by Black and Indigenous authors, based on meticulous, probing research as well as lived experiences, offer perhaps the sagest guidance on how the world can build back better from COVID. From them we can better understand our systems of healthcare, education, economics and justice. And we can surely build back better after COVID: stronger, more equitable, healthier and more sustainable.
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How the Atlantic Canadian book industry is building back All of this raises the question of how the book industry, which has suffered major economic setbacks from COVID, can itself build back better. “What’s been reinforced by COVID, and amplified, is the power and importance of all things local,” says Alex Liot, chief marketing officer of Atlantic Publishers Marketing Association, the professional association of Atlantic Canadian publishers (which publishes this magazine). “Buy local campaigns are not new, but they gained importance in a time when international supply chains were disrupted. “With books, we had the products, the expertise, the talent, everything we needed to keep producing great books locally.” Liot calls the global economic impact of COVID-19 a “frog in the pot” moment, meaning it is the time we gain awareness of problems that have long been escalating, but slowly—like a frog in a pot of slowly warming water. “Consider the loss of local bookstores over the years. It was significant, and it reduced the clear availability of local books in retail. Suddenly, when you couldn’t get anything anywhere, the demand for local books went back up.” But the desire for those books, he believes, already existed, it just wasn’t recognized. “People have a special relationship with local books; there’s a long tradition of revering local writers in this region. But we’ve learned that even traditional businesses need to be adaptive to change to survive.” The biggest single change the industry has made is to focus more on the digital side of the business, e-books as well as online marketing strategies, where some authors have found large audiences via social media. The APMA had already begun new online campaigns before COVID hit, working to better catalogue Atlantic publishers’ collections, taking advantage of unique local knowledge to gain an advantage over multinational publishers. The association’s efforts in this regard have ramped up since March. “The community brand has taken prominence,” Liot says. “It’s about Atlantic books.” The prime example is the Time To #ReadAtlantic campaign, which was a two-year plan that became compressed into an intensive two-month period. The atlanticbooks.ca Shopify website was to create 13 thematic mini-collections of new and recent books,
