Publishers Group Canada is the distribution affiliate of Publishers Group West (PGW) in Canada. The PGC office, located in downtown Toronto, represents to the Canadian marketplace approximately eighty of the publishers distributed by PGW in the States, including Avalon Publishing Group, Taunton, Grove Atlantic, New World Library, as well as a number of other publishers from the U.K. and Canada; Egmont and House of Anansi to name a few.

Process PGC represents its client publishers to the general book trade as well as to specialty accounts throughout the country. Depending on a particular title’s appeal and strength, our staff will target the appropriate accounts for the strongest representation. PGC has eight field sales representatives covering independent bookstores and specialty retailers while national accounts such as Chapters/Indigo, Costco, and Amazon are covered from our Toronto office. While we maintain a separate sales and marketing organization from Raincoast, back office functions have been consolidated. This includes warehousing, credit & collections, and customer service. All of this is centralized in Raincoast’s state-of-the-art distribution centers operating in Vancouver, British Columbia and Mississauga, Ontario. As reported in the annual Quill & Quire survey, Raincoast is the premier warehouse/distribution operation in the country.

Principals Sarah MacLachlan, President of PGC, has been running the Canadian company for five years. Prior to her taking the helm at PGC she had been VP of Marketing and Publicity for Little, Brown Canada for 11 years. Sarah has been working in the Canadian publishing industry for 17 years.

Graham Fidler is the National Accounts Director, and has been with the company for five years. He came to PGC from the sales force at General Publishing Group and previous to that he had been with Reed Canada. Graham has been involved in the Canadian book business for 12 years.

Market Overview The Canadian market is comprised of one very large national chain that is composed of a number of different brands; Indigo and Chapters are the superstores that can be found across the country and Coles and Smiths are the smaller locations usually located in malls. The more traditional independent book retailers comprise about 25% of the market. Costco, Walmart, and SAM’S Club are other accounts that we aggressively go after as well as libraries, both school and public. Our market is dominated by the large chains, but we try very hard to get our publishers books into as many other outlets as possible. We have very good relations with all our customers and with Raincoast as our partner on the distribution side our service is second to none.

Quotes “Wonderful books, superb service.”
—John Schneider, Book City, Toronto

“They offer everything an independent bookstore could ask for: great sales people; speedy and accurate service; and a wide range of unique books.”
—Winona McMorrow, Pages Books, Toronto

Sales and Marketing PGC’s sales and marketing processes closely mirror those of PGW in the U.S. PGC participates in all PGW pre-sales meetings as well as the three PGW sales conferences held each year. For our Canadian field reps, PGC conducts two Canadian sales conferences a year. Client publishers are always welcome to participate in the Canadian meetings. PGC also creates catalogs for use in the Canadian market while some publishers may choose to provide their own catalogs.

Publicity & Advertising PGC has an in house publicist who promotes our publishers books to the media and will also organize and execute author tours and events as our publishers desire. We feel that promotion and publicity are essential tools in the marketing and selling of books in Canada and having a publicist devoted to the promotion of our publisher’s titles is a priority. We work to coordinate our promotion efforts with the publishers’ own publicity plans and leverage any momentum built out of the U.S. market.

Capabilities The PGC in house sales support staff provide an essential link with our client publishers. Publishers receive weekly sales reports from our major chain, Indigo/Chapters. Also, publishers are updated on their opportunities to participate in co-op with both independent and chain stores, as well as other advertising opportunities that come up throughout the year.

Operations, Accounting & Finance While our sales office is in Toronto, all warehousing, credit & collections and customer service are based in Vancouver, British Columbia and Mississauga, Ontario. Shared with Raincoast, client publishers and customers both benefit from state-of-the-art distribution centers and information systems. In several years recently, Raincoast has been ranked the number one Canadian distributor/warehouse (by booksellers) as reported in the annual Quill & Quire survey.

Reporting Publishers have 24-hour a day access to their sales and inventory through our state of the art extranet system.

Terms & Conditions Our terms and conditions vary from publisher to publisher. A full draft contract with terms is available for interested publishers.