Five years in, Ken Whyte’s Sutherland House Books accidentally became home to a national conversation | Canada Voices

Accomplished author and military historian Ted Barris had become disillusioned with his most recent publishing house, HarperCollins, by the time he shopped around his 22nd – yes, 22nd – book a couple of years ago. He had frustrations with his last audiobook; his veteran publisher Patrick Crean retired; and the new team didn’t seem interested in his pitch on Canadians’ contributions to the Battle of Britain during the Second World War.

So on Crean’s recommendation, Barris got in touch with Kenneth Whyte, the soft-spoken erstwhile newspaper and magazine editor and executive who was now running his own narrative non-fiction imprint, Sutherland House Books. Over a video chat, Whyte made it clear he was keen, and signed Barris’s idea quickly.

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Battle of Britain: Canadian Airmen in Their Finest Hour was published Sept. 3. Its journey revealed to Barris all the benefits and baggage that came from working with a house whose publisher carried the confidence of a life spent in non-fiction, but who had the thin resources and inexperience of an early-stage startup founder. Despite having to work through a few stumbles, Barris is impressed with what Sutherland House is pulling off. “Here’s a publisher, right down the street, who gets non-fiction, and understands the passion Canadian non-fiction writers have for their subjects,” he says.

Barris’s book release edged Sutherland House closer to a hallmark 100 titles, and coincided, roughly, with the fifth anniversary of its first book, Joe Berridge’s Perfect City. The milestone put Whyte in a reflective mood. Writing to the 6,000-odd subscribers to his SHuSH newsletter last month, he revealed he’d hit some of the targets outlined in his first five-year plan, such as turning a (smaller-than-expected, eventual) profit and hitting average sales of 2,000 a title.

Most consequentially, he’d gradually, if accidentally, built a destination for money-consuming genres such as biography, investigative journalism and history.

Through history books alone, “you can understand how a country evolved and what challenges it has faced and met,” says historian and author Charlotte Gray, a fierce voice for deeply researched works in the genre. What Sutherland House has been pulling off, she says, “is amazing.”

Whyte stumbled into a publishing strategy that offers an antidote to Canada’s poor support for researched non-fiction. “I’m not a nationalist,” says the 64-year-old, who cut his teeth in long-alienated Alberta. “But we need a literature and a basis for conversations about our public affairs.”

Starting a publishing company was something Whyte had long entertained, but not as seriously as the bookstore he says he almost opened in Edmonton before moving to Toronto. He’s published two books of his own, too, though for decades he was distracted from the publishing industry, editing Saturday Night, the National Post and Maclean’s, before overseeing all of Rogers’s magazine-publishing empire.

But after then-Rogers CEO Guy Laurence shuffled Whyte into a public-policy role in 2014, he found himself distant from storytelling and bored with corporate drudgery.

He started to circle legacy publishers for an acquisition that would give him a backlist of books whose gradual sales could buffer the uneven income he expected as an upstart press. None worked out. The most promising deal, to potentially buy Ontario’s The Porcupine’s Quill, fell through when it became unclear whether the Canada Council for the Arts could guarantee that its grants, which represented nearly half its income, would continue postacquisition.

Whyte pressed on and hoped, at first, to acquire books by Canadian writers that he could sell across North America.

That strategy acknowledged the much larger sales market of the United States, but did not account for how many U.S. publishers he’d be up against. He’d bought some Canadian titles as a hedge, however, and they were selling well. “I kind of resented that,” Whyte says. “I was attracted to the idea that a publishing company should be outward-looking rather than inward-looking.”

Looking inward, however, proved fruitful. When former prime minister John Turner died in 2020, his family proposed that Steve Paikin, the TVO host and serial political biographer, should write Turner’s story with more access to family and confidential documents than any biographer before him. None of the publishers Paikin turned to had much “financial enthusiasm” for the book, including Whyte – but Whyte’s personal enthusiasm hooked Paikin.

Now Paikin believes Sutherland House has been a boon for Canadian narrative non-fiction. He points to former Toronto Star reporter Mary Ormsby’s The World’s Fastest Man*: The Incredible Life of Ben Johnson. “That’s a book that I’m not sure gets published, if not for Ken Whyte,” he says.

And it was published with great interest. “Ken met with me, he asked a bunch of questions, and said, almost right away, ‘I’d read that book,’” Ormbsy recalls.

Whyte’s authors tend to be effusive in their praise and keenly aware of where his startup press can stumble. He is quick to sign a good proposal and then often notoriously hard to get a hold of, a few of his authors told me, despite trying to have a hand in the whole publishing process. He can play chicken with deadlines. His advances to authors rarely match those from big houses.

Earlier this year, Barris discovered he had to race to wrangle maps, photos, an index and more while leading battlefield tours in France. At one point he had to call an in-person meeting with Whyte and his staff to make sure they were actually aligned on what he wanted: “I don’t think anybody had done that with him before.”

This comes in part from the size of the shop: He does a lot on his own, his staff is spread thin and (like some bigger publishers are doing, too) he often relies on freelance editors. He’s trying to figure out whether he should take on outside investment to build the thing bigger, or stay at his current pace, which would still mean putting out a blistering 25 to 30 books a year.

He’s also been trying new things, moving into “co-publishing” books that subject-matter experts want to put out, so long as they front as much as $15,000 in order to share in the costs and profits. And he’s developed a series of sharp texts called Sutherland Quarterly inspired by Black Inc. Books’ Quarterly Essay series in Australia, which could be interpreted as short books or long essays, through both annual subscriptions and traditional bookstores.

“He’s built a more interesting Canadian book market than what was on offer when he turned to publishing,” says Paul Wells, the long-time political journalist who first wrote for Whyte three decades ago at Saturday Night magazine, and who has written two Sutherland Quarterly books, on the Ottawa convoy and Justin Trudeau’s career trajectory.

These efforts have fans both inside and outside of his own shop. “The intellectual life of this country is in some peril,” says Barris’s former publisher Crean, who’s spent 50 years in the industry. Crean sees, in Whyte, something not seen in Canada for decades: “We have not had a voice like Ken’s in our industry since Jack McClelland.”