Brett Popplewell’s latest book, Outsider, which explores the life of a marathon-running hermit, spent weeks on Canadian bestseller lists when it was first released in 2023. Two years later, he experienced something that rarely happens to authors, let alone to those who write non-fiction: Outsider returned to the charts.
This was, in large part, thanks to the book’s reissue as a mass-market paperback. The release was part of a recent campaign by Indigo Books & Music Inc. to reintroduce the cheaper, compact book format to readers. “From the writer’s perspective, it gave the book a longer lifespan,” says Popplewell, a Carleton University professor and long-time journalist. “It was almost a second life.”
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Mass-market paperbacks have been in their death throes for years. Canadian non-fiction has been persistently struggling. Indigo is trying to bring them together to boost both categories’ fortunes.
Since last May, Canada’s biggest physical book retailer has been partnering with Canadian publishers such as Dundurn Press and Harbour Publishing, as well as the domestic wing of multinational HarperCollins, to put out non-fiction paperbacks in smaller four-by-eight-inch editions. They’re selling at price points that might shock the reading public: less than $20.
Outsider, one of the first HarperCollins books in Indigo’s mass‑market program has since been joined by other popular titles like Pageboy.Christie Vuong/The Globe and Mail
The 30 or so reissued titles generally live on the discounted two-for-$20 shelf, but Indigo has already sold thousands of copies across the country, says category manager Brandon Forsyth, who is overseeing the new mass-market program.
“We’ve found that there have been quite a few publishing partners that are enthused by what they’re seeing,” Forsyth says. He echoes Popplewell’s thought: “In a lot of cases, it’s giving a book a second life it might not have had otherwise.”
The push into non-fiction “pocket paperbacks,” as Indigo is calling them, is currently not much more than an interesting, if ambitious, experiment. Mass-market paperbacks aren’t likely to see a true resurgence to their halcyon days of the mid- to late 20th century. For one, the format has traditionally seen success with genre fiction, as opposed to non-fiction. The bigger issue, however, is that readers and publishers have been abandoning the small books in droves – to the extent that it’s stopped making economic sense to print them.
Sales of the format accounted for 12 per cent of the country’s book market in 2012, according to data provided by BookNet Canada. In 2025, they accounted for 4 per cent of the market. This slide has been partly attributed to the rise of e-books, which are often in the same price range and are similarly easy to carry around.
The U.S. distributor ReaderLink said last year that it would no longer carry mass-market paperbacks to non-bookstore retailers such as department stores, pharmacies and airport shops – which prompted some in the publishing industry to declare the format all but dead.
Indigo sees its program, however, as a chance to put non-fiction, particularly by Canadian authors, in front of new readers – especially as larger, splashier trade paperbacks, a format that is a couple decades younger than mass-markets, tend to retail in the $25 range. Many readers already longingly recall that as the price point for hardcovers, while hardcover editions can now surge past $40.
With the success of Outsider’s new format, Popplewell now wonders whether a book’s traditional journey from hardcover to trade paperback is worth questioning: “Maybe some should just really start as mass-market,” he says. “There might be some logic to that.”
Outsider was one of the first HarperCollins titles printed as part of Indigo’s mass-market program last year. It’s now been joined by popular titles such as Ken Dryden’s hockey memoir The Game, actor Elliot Page’s memoir Pageboy and self-help book Let That Sh*t Go by Nina Purewal and Kate Petriw.
Christie Vuong/The Globe and Mail
Dundurn has offered up Linda McQuaig’s The Sport and Prey of Capitalists, while Harbour has reprinted Paul McKendrick’s The Bushman’s Lair, among other titles.
Smaller publishers often depend on their catalogues of past works, called backlists, for reliable revenue, as a hedge against the risks of new titles they’re putting on the market. Getting these books in front of fresh eyes can be helpful. “Each time we can expand the market with backlist titles, we’ll take advantage,” says Annie Boyar, sales director for both Harbour and Douglas & McIntyre.
The low cost of a mass-market’s size is offset by its cheaper construction, with type often shoved so close to the spine that its glue wears away upon reading, making them prone to falling apart. It’s not just the format’s physical margins that are tight, though.
Boyar acknowledges that the reissued runs have “quite slim” margins, but that new readers and boosted author royalties make the reprints worthwhile. She says the titles chosen were already successful in their first editions, reducing production and marketing costs, and largely limiting new expenses to printing and distribution.
At Dundurn, publisher Meghan Macdonald says her team was able to pull off a 3,000-copy mass-market print run of McQuaig’s The Sport and Prey of Capitalists through its Indigo exclusivity.
Like many non-fiction authors, McQuaig has noticed there aren’t as many avenues to promote her books in recent years. Introducing her work to audiences with a mass-market edition – a format her books haven’t seen in many years – has been helpful, she says.
Indigo’s non-fiction effort might be better viewed as a fun experiment than a wholesale resuscitation of the format.Christie Vuong/The Globe and Mail
The timing has also been beneficial for getting her name on more Indigo shelves at the right time. The mass-market release of The Sport and Prey of Capitalists roughly coincided with the publication of her next book, Cancelling Billionaires Before They Cancel Us, co-authored by Neil Brooks.
“It was an interesting way for us to market the author, and by extension, both books,” Macdonald says.
King’s Co-op Bookstore in Halifax only carries a handful of mass-markets at a time, manager Paul MacKay says. In cases where the store has cheaper editions, as well as flashier, hardcover versions of the same title – MacKay cites the numerous Penguin editions of Moby-Dick – he finds customers gravitate to the more expensive ones.
Smaller books aren’t what customers are looking for these days, he says, partly because smartphones already offer a world of information that fit in a person’s pocket. “I look at mass-markets as an old, retired utilitarian workhorse,” MacKay says. “You did your time. You can rest now.”
Indigo’s new effort, he says, is a curious one. “If it gets people reading more non-fiction, I’ve got nothing bad to say about that,” he says. “But I don’t know if it will really pay off.”
Ben McNally, a long-time Toronto bookseller whose family runs a shop bearing his name, remembers working at another shop decades ago, when mass-market paperbacks made up almost the entirety of its science fiction and mystery sections. Then, in 1991, the Mulroney government introduced the goods-and-service tax applying to books. “We were peeved,” he says, because customers could no longer buy four mass-markets for a cool $20.
Smaller books are no longer in high demand, partly because smartphones already provide a vast amount of information that fits in a person’s pocket.Christie Vuong/The Globe and Mail
Eventually, McNally says, “publishers realized they could get more money for a trade paperback and sell as many.”
At a 40-per-cent margin per sale, it makes more sense to carry a $25 book instead of a $12 one, he says. Even with Indigo’s push into non-fiction mass-markets, “I don’t think there’s going to be enough product to make an impact,” McNally says. “I don’t think we’ve carried more than five mass-market paperback titles in 20 years.”
Which is why Indigo’s non-fiction effort might be better viewed as a fun experiment than a wholesale resuscitation of the format. Its project leader, Forsyth, says that mass-markets account for less than 1 per cent of non-fiction sales at the retailer. But it’s a way to get titles to new audiences, such as Dryden’s The Game, which sold nearly 3,000 mass-market copies over six months, giving more budget-conscious readers a chance to celebrate his work since his death last year.
“We’re all struggling to sell non-fiction,” Forsyth says, “so here’s a thing we haven’t tried in a while.”