The pressures of trying to make a go of things on the Prairies are as manifold now as they ever were for publishers, due in part to the institutional forces – consolidation in the bookselling sector, decreased funding at both federal and provincial levels – that plague publishers across the country, but also due to a persistent invisibility to media and awards juries outside the region.

“It’s a combination of things,” says Al Forrie, publisher and editor at Thistledown. “I just think the discoverability factor is one thing that has really crippled us in some ways. The highly sophisticated and competitive way in which books are witnessed in the marketplace by readers has changed everything we do. Some for the good, some for the bad. But yeah, for sure, it’s hard to get noticed.”

To a certain extent, the unwillingness of Toronto media to look outside its own backyard is a product of the kind of myopia Stephen Henighan – one of Thistledown’s more outspoken authors – made reference to in an infamous essay titled “Vulgarity on Bloor: Literary Institutions from CanLit to TorLit,” which argued that this country’s national literature had contracted from its heyday in the 1970s and ’80s to a pinched focus on publishers and writers based in Toronto. That essay appeared as a chapter in Henighan’s 2002 book When Words Deny the World (The Porcupine’s Quill), but to hear Prairie publishers talk, things haven’t changed much in the intervening years.

“I really noticed that last year when we had a memoir come out by a Toronto writer,” says Kelsey Attard, managing editor at Freehand. “We had lots of national coverage, primarily because that author was in Toronto. If the author had been living in Winnipeg, it would have been a bit more difficult to get the same sort of national coverage.”

“You do not have to be in downtown Toronto. You’re probably better off in Regina, as a matter of fact” – Bruce Walsh

In some cases, even having the benefit of a Toronto author isn’t sufficient to get a book noticed in that market. “Even people that we publish from Toronto, they don’t get the attention either,” says Forrie. “It really does come down to a lot of traditional ‘centre of the universe’ gazing.”

Given the unprecedented volume of output from the Prairies – fiction, non-fiction, and poetry; trade and academic – it seems odd that there should be such a level of discontent among publishers and writers about the lack of attention paid to their books. In Mierau’s assessment, one possible reason for the lack of notice might actually be the volume of work being produced. Regional publishers, Mierau argues, are too often devoted to a quantity-driven metric focused on local books meant to appease various granting bodies. The result is a kind of “mediocre micro-regionalism” that often buries the more substantial work being done by ambitious or iconoclastic local writers like Séan Virgo. “So, that invisibility in Toronto isn’t just the fault of Toronto,” Mierau suggests.

Then there are those who would claim that invisibility on a national level isn’t really a concern at all. In the two years since he came on board as director of the rebranded University of Regina Press, Bruce Walsh has had not just national but international success with his publishing program. James Daschuk’s book Clearing the Plains was a bestseller (it was a Q&Q book of the year for 2013) and the press has been profiled in the U.S. trade magazine Publishers Weekly.

“We’re trying to be a great Canadian publisher,” Walsh says, “but we’re looking for a footprint on the international stage. And you can be anywhere to do that. You do not have to be in downtown Toronto. You’re probably better off in Regina, as a matter of fact, just because of the innovative nature of the place.”