“Invisible has an eye for a quirky story and beautiful writing, which make so many of their books a delight to pick up.” — Toronto Star

Since releasing our first fiction titles in the spring of 2007, our catalogue has come to include works of graphic fiction and non-fiction, pop culture biographies, experimental poetry, and prose. Invisible Publishing is also home to the Bibliophonic series (music bios) and the Throwback series (revived CanLit reissues).

We put design at the forefront of all we do and still hold to our early ideals, presenting titles that express a DIY-done-right style. Our team members get to know new projects inside out, reading drafts and talking with authors and editors. That’s central to both promotion and production. We rarely buy stock art, preferring instead to hire independent photographers and illustrators, and to work with scanners and watercolours to build the images we need. Invisible Publishing isn’t the sort of company that buys an ebook conversion from a printer; we’re the sort of people who write custom HTML code and build bespoke digital editions using text editors and terminal emulators.

Even though we’re small in scale, we take our work and our mission seriously: we believe in building communities that sustain and encourage engaging, literary, and current writing.

Invisible Publishing is a member of the Association of Canadian Publishers, the Ontario Book Publishers Organization, and the Literary Press Group of Canada.

The work undertaken by Invisible Publishing happens on traditional Indigenous territories across Canada, and we are grateful for the privilege to live, work, and create on this land. Our company is headquartered, for example, in Toronto, on traditional land that has been inhabited by the the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. We encourage you to:

1. Learn more about the land you occupy by visiting Native-Land.ca.

2. Explore Indigenous histories and contemporary issues in Canada through the Indigenous Canada MOOC.

3. Read the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s 94 Calls to Action and consider how you might help implement them.

We’re passionate climate stewards — we want to make sure the generations that follow us are able to engage with reading and writing and books.

Invisible is committed to addressing and alleviating the environmental harm caused by manufacturing our books, shipping our goods to distributors and customers, and the countless other actions we take while running our company.

As a small arts not-for-profit, it’s paramount for our environmental actions to remain commensurate with our modest budgets; our goal is to undertake meaningful, lasting and sustainable change to all of our processes.

We also believe that it’s better to start small than to not start at all! So we’d like to share the steps we’ve taken in an effort to inform our customers and (hopefully!) prompt other companies who are interested in addressing the environmental consequences of their work to take the plunge.

Here’s where we are right now in the process:

1. Our books are produced in small batches and reprinted to meet demand and avoid waste. We print at least 90 percent of our books using Rolland Enviro for both covers and interiors. This paper contains 100% post-consumer fiber, is manufactured using renewable energy (biogas) and processed chlorine free. Plus, it’s FSC® and Ancient Forest Friendly™ certified.

Using a ton of Rolland Enviro Print rather than a virgin paper and save the equivalent of: 24 trees; 1,773 gallons of water; and 3,402 lbs of greenhouse gas emissions.

2. For our direct to customer sales, all of our envelopes/boxes are recyclable (or reusable, depending on condition).

3. We offer both finished and advanced PDF and epub copies to potential reviewers first, and offer printed advance copies on demand to reduce overprinting and subsequent waste. And we’ve made the switch to digital only catalogues via Catalist and Edelweiss.

4. We purchase carbon offsets from Less.ca to help with the emissions we can’t cut out, like those generated by car/air travel and shipping.

Our longer-term goals are to further address the emissions associated with the rest of our supply chain — like encouraging print-on-demand companies to embrace recycled, post-consumer papers. We want to purchase green energy for our office space (tricky when you’re a renter) — and find ways to support green energy for our contractors who work from home. We’ll update this space as we progress on our sustainability journey!

Our paper meets permanent standards, so we feel a responsibility to ensure that the planet is around long enough for our books to live up to that promise.

Invisible is proud to be a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA) book publisher.

What does this mean? Benetech’s GCA is the first-ever third party international program to certify the accessibility of ebooks.

The goal of certification is to help publishers build born accessible content to ensure that everyone has equal access to materials. Our ebook files are produced in accordance with the EPUB Accessibility 1.0 Conformance and Discovery specification and standard level of WCAG 2.0 AA.

All books going forward from our Fall 2021 season will meet this standard, and we’ll be working behind the scenes to bring our older backlist titles up to speed.