Magpie a metaphor for NeWest’s publishing ethos of collecting genres

Sometimes, a publisher needs a bird’s-eye view. For Edmonton’s NeWest Press, there’s a specific one that fits.

“Magpies are all over Edmonton,” says the company’s general manager, Matt Bowes. “They like to collect things, and I think that is reflected in our eclectic publishing program.”

It’s not surprising, given the company’s origins. The NeWest Review was a multi-faceted magazine founded in 1975 by a collective of writers and academics. That led to the founding of NeWest Press in 1977.

“It was kind of a magpie, wanting to publish everything, a quality built in from the ground up,” says Bowes. “The magazine wasn’t just doing fiction, it was doing poetry, it was doing reviews, it was doing all kinds of stuff. So we’ve always wanted to publish everything, regardless of whether that was a good idea – it comes with the territory.”

NeWest publishes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama. Its writers include playwright Sharon Pollock, novelist Angie Abdou, poet Gerald Hill, and many more. Recent titles include Heidi L. M. Jacobs’s novel Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass and Purveyor of Fine Footwear, which won the 2020 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.

There are three employees, including Bowes. Claire Kelly is the marketing and production coordinator and Christine Kohler is the office administrator. A board of directors acts as the publisher.

Bowes joined NeWest in 2012, starting as the company’s marketing and production coordinator. He was impressed with the way the company valued its writers. The general manager then was Paul Matwychuk.

“Paul really cared about the authors’ experience in working with us, and trying to make it so it was enjoyable,” Bowes says, “both in the artistic sense of having your work out in the world, but also in the practical day-to-day sense of just dealing with the office – being respectful colleagues with the authors – so I try to keep that going myself.”

He adds that since many of the people NeWest works with are debut authors, helping them on their publishing journey is important.

In 2015, when Matwychuk stepped down, Bowes succeeded him as general manager.

He says managing the multiple genres NeWest publishes can be a challenge.

In 2017, for the press’s 40th anniversary, they revitalized their poetry presence with the Crow Said series. And while they’ve been publishing mysteries for years, they’re expanding into noir territory, such as Niall Howell’s Only Pretty Damned, which was shortlisted for the Sixth Annual Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. They’ve also moved into magical realism, with books such as Bruce Cinnamon’s The Melting Queen (also shortlisted for the Ratuken Kobo Emerging Writer Prize) and C. J. Lavigne’s In Veritas.

Bowes says that diversity is driven by what is submitted – in part because they focus so heavily on debut writers. Of the roughly 10 books NeWest publishes a year, five to six of them are by new authors, forming the core of the press’s Nunatak First Fiction series.

“It’s a delicate balancing act to get a season together, but I think we have a little bit of something for everybody,” says Bowes.

Another challenge is to get the books into the hands of readers. While he’s happy to see NeWest titles on the pages of the books section of the newspaper, it’s even better when they’re getting coverage in other sections and reaching a wider audience.

And of course, 2020 saw publishers dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. “The coronavirus hit us in almost every single aspect” of the business, says Bowes, including shipping, printing, and organizing book launches and other events. NeWest moved to digital platforms wherever possible, which helped their in-house work flow.

Bowes adds that while they devoted increased attention to ebooks and audiobooks during the pandemic, print copies still make up 90 per cent of their sales.

The pandemic wasn’t all bad. Zoom events were well attended. And digital events, after being streamed live, can be posted later to social networks such as YouTube and Facebook. Bowes adds that for a while, every day he would record a video of himself reading from backlist titles and post it to Twitter. Sometimes there was a direct effect with book orders coming in for the books he read.

“If you look at these events from an accessibility standpoint, we’re probably going to keep doing these things after the pandemic is gone,” he says, “because this is a way for people who maybe don’t have a bookstore close to them, or have a disability that would make it difficult for them to go to a bookstore, [to] essentially have the same experience as everyone else.”