Fredericton publisher says Canada Reads pick brings exciting boost in sales

Searching For Terry Punchout by Tyler Hellard will be championed by podcaster Steve (Dangle) Glynn during the CBC's Canada Reads debates, and for a Fredericton-based publisher, the impact is huge.

Invisible Publishing brought Hellard's novel out in 2018, and it "had a good first life," publisher Norman Nehmetallah told Informatioin Morning Fredericton.

After seven years, however, things had died down, and only a few copies were kept in the warehouse.

Then Searching for Terry Punchout was announced this month as one of five books that will get celebrity scrutiny in April during Canada Reads, the competitive celebration of books put on every year by the CBC.

"Once we got the news, we had to print many thousand copies and send them out to bookstores," Nehmetallah said. 'Now we're getting flooded with orders to our websites directly. It's all a bit overwhelming but very exciting."

One of the things that Nehmetallah noted, specifically, was that Searching for Terry Punchout is a "very Atlantic and Maritime book."

The book is about a sportswriter from the Maritimes named Adam Macallister, who loses his job because of cost-cutting by the newspaper that employs him.

"Adam Macallister is trying to be a sportswriter, but he's limited to doing things like covering high school volleyball," Hellard told the CBC's The Next Chapter in 2019. "The book takes place in 2006, so newspapers are laying people off, and he loses his job." 

Macallister finds salvation by contacting his estranged father, a reclusive hockey player and "goon," known as Terry Punchout, to set up a high-profile interview.

"His dad is an infamous hockey player who's disappeared from the limelight, and Adam hasn't really talked to him for over a decade," Hellard said.

"In order to save his career, he goes back and reconnects and convinces his dad that he should write about him to pull him out of obscurity while saving his own career."

The reunion requires returning to Macallister's small hometown in Nova Scotia, which he begins to see and appreciate differently as the book unfolds.

"It's a book about hockey, yes" Nehmetallah told Information Morning. "But it is really a book about small-town life … [and] realizing that the people who raised you, the people in your small town and the town itself all maybe held a little bit more than you remember."

For Nehmetallah, one of the biggest things to note about the book is how its selection has boosted sales.