The Sentimentalists Wins Giller Award, Room Nowhere in Sight

Just yesterday I was reading about Giller Nominee book sales and came across a quote about how the least known of the books was The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud. This is primarily because there are a lack of copies to be sold. The Globe and Mail reported that only 800 copies were printed for the first run, and a second run will be equally as small even though it has won this year's $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize, honoring the best Canadian novel or short story collection in English.

According to the Globe and Mail:  "The Sentimentalists was hand-printed more than a year ago by the tiny publisher in Kentville, N.S., in an edition of 800 copies, most of which had disappeared by the time the three Giller judges announced their short lists. Gaspereau publisher Andrew Steeves subsequently raised eyebrows by refusing a commercial publisher’s offer to produce a second edition for wide distribution. “If you are going to buy a copy of that book in Canada, it's damn well coming out of my shop,” he told The Globe and Mail."


The Giller Long List included:

Nowhere on the list, however, was Emma Donoghue's Room, short listed for the Man-Booker prize and up for Canada's Governor-General’s Literary Award. A representative with HarperCollins Canada, publishers of Room, bemoaning Room's exclusion from the list, stated that they've only sold 30,000 copies of that title. (I'm guessing that statement applies only to Canadian sales).

What does this mean for collectors? Well, you have an award winning book and an extremely low print run. Possibly several extremely low print runs:  

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