The Mosaico Connection

New Spanish-Language Book Club Gives Insight on the Market

Ed Morales -- Críticas, 4/1/2003

Since the early '90s, when American and international publishers and booksellers began to seriously take on the Spanish-language book market in the United States, a series of steps forward have been followed by two steps back. It's been a learning process, in which the obvious has proved uncertain and surefire strategies turned out to be misconceived. But now, as we push ahead in 2003, a new force has emerged to help expand the market: Mosaico, the Spanish-language book club from the Bookspan group, which also includes the giant Literary Guild and a Book of the Month Club. "The name 'Mosaico' implies the variety of Hispanic culture," says Mosaico's editor-in-chief Sonia Margalef. "It's a mosaic of different cultures united by the same language and the love for the language and the passion for the books. It's a mosaic of all the different countries, traditions, cultures and beliefs of our people that really brings us together." For Margalef, the books Mosaico offers are the glue that brings together the U.S.'s growing Latino community.

Mosaico's parent company is Bookspan, a partnership formed in 1999 between Bertelsmann's Doubleday Direct and AOL Time Warner's Book of the Month Club. The number of traditional, older book clubs, which experienced huge growth in the '80s and '90s, have leveled off, prompting Bookspan, which currently operates 42 clubs, to become interested in finding new growth markets. One of those markets is obviously Latinos--in January, new census figures revealed that Hispanics, numbering 37 million, now constitute 13% of the U.S. population, making it the country's largest minority group, surpassing African Americans for the first time. The success of its Black Expressions Book Club, which began in the year 2000 and now has 220,000 members, was one of the reasons Bookspan started Mosaico.

Margalef, who began her career with Spain's prestigious literary book club Círculo de Lectores, operates Mosaico according to well-known Book of the Month Club strategies. Mosaico sends out a direct mailing of their brochure, targeted to lists of Hispanic-themed magazine subscribers, music club members, donors, book buyers, and beauty and health product buyers. The traditional offer of three books for three bucks lures potential members, and respondents get an introductory shipment with tote bags and the first of 14 yearly newsletters. The newsletters include two main selections (recent choices include Críticas best sellers Jorge Ramos's Atravesando Fronteras and Arturo Pérez-Reverte's La reina del sur), an editor's letter, and capsule reviews of other offerings written by Mosaico staff.

Also included with the mailing is the negative option reply card, which members must use to reject the main selections, or they will automatically be sent to them. "We give them deals to offset the 'pain' of the negative option," says Bookspan's marketing vice president Meg Roe. "Buy two, get free shipping, for example, or buy one at member price and get two books for 50% is another." Members are required to purchase four titles over two years.

Mosaico, which started from scratch, according to Margalef, in the spring of 2000, didn't enjoy immediate success. "The first direct mail campaign we launched was in September 2001, which, unfortunately coincided with 9/11," says Margalef. As a result, the first campaign was a setback, but team Mosaico held on to its convictions and went back to the drawing board. The original editor-in-chief, Carolina Conde, who Margalef supervised, left in September 2002 but stayed long enough to oversee a new round of mailings." We did another round last fall, and we beat our target by 100%, which in my 15 years of direct mail experience is very rare," says Roe. "We did an additional mailing in December, and we're seeing fabulous growth in the market."

Through a combination of aggressive direct mail marketing and increasing advertising in magazines like Ser Padres, People en Español, and Novedades, as well as on Spanish-language cable channels like Galavision and Telefutura, Mosaico expects bigger numbers. Now in its rollout phase, Mosaico claims a membership of about 70,000, fully expecting that figure to increase to 200,000 by 2004. It is this ambitious assessment of membership expansion that the book club banks on to deepen its relationship with publishers and establish itself as a strong core of the market. Mosaico says that its sales projections (over 700,000 books by the end of this year, and over 1 million by year-end 2005) should soon make the book club one of the largest distributors of Spanish-language books in the country.

Although Mosaico's apparent success is a good sign for the long-term growth of the Spanish-language book industry in the United States, the book club can also provide a unique insight into consumer buying patterns that everyone can learn from. Bookspan's market research is incomplete at press time, but Mosaico has put together a provisional snapshot of their average consumer, with a small twist.

"It's a little different from the American market, where we're so accustomed to talking about an average member," says Roe. "As a member, you might get something just on health because you tend to buy this type of book. But with Mosaico we're dealing with a multigenerational household, and the mother is buying. She might buy the books in Spanish for the grandmother, for the children because she wants them to know Spanish, and maybe the mother's bilingual. But they have different levels of language ability within the household. Many of them are probably Spanish dominant."

Mosaico's promotional literature states that its average household consists of five or more adults between the ages of 26 and 54 with low to moderate incomes ($50,000 a year or less), with some possessing a store or bank credit card and some college or graduate education. Mosaico's largest concentration of members is where you'd expect, in the four states with the largest Hispanic populations--New York, Florida, Texas, and California. But Margalef is quick to point out that the club reaches deep into states like Alaska, Iowa, and areas of the Southeast, which have seen the largest percentage of Latino growth in recent years. Mosaico's ability to reach readers who are probably not within driving distance of a store that sells Spanish-language books and are likely to buy on the internet is a major advantage for publishers.

Mosaico's member buying patterns also confirm what many studying the U.S. Spanish-language market have suspected: The most popular titles are mostly self-help and spirituality books, not the mainstream fiction that drives traditional book clubs.

"A few years ago major publishers were thinking, I've been moving the Grishams, so huge sellers like that could be translated into Spanish and sell easily. But that wasn't the case," says Margalef. "The number one selling book is more likely to be one about dreams," says Roe. "From a marketing perspective that was a total surprise."

Although Mosaico hypes titles like Kathryn Mickle's Feng Shui para la vida (Feng Shui For Life) and Dra. Isabel Gómez-Bassols's Los 7 pasos para el éxito en el amor (The Seven Steps to Success in Love), Margalef emphasizes that her members support Latin American fiction as well. "They really like brand names: Gabriel García-Márquez, Isabel Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes," she says. "They're trying to preserve the culture, the language, the tradition. That's something I think that also makes Hispanics very different."

Margalef's assistant, Aída Bardales, agrees, and believes there may be a trend toward younger readers getting more involved in fiction. "I was born here, and my parents are from Latin America, so even if I have friends that are Hispanic, maybe the only thing that you have in common with them is the fact that you both speak Spanish," says Bardales. "I personally suspect that the people that do buy fiction are may be folks like myself. If we want self-help we buy it in English. But if we want literature, then we prefer to read it in Spanish."

Mosaico is under tremendous pressure to accurately gauge the market's appetite in advance. With its four-month lead time and commitment to putting out a newsletter/catalog every three weeks (with hopes to expand to 17 issues a year), this can pose a challenge. One of the key aspects of this task is choosing the main selections. "Usually they are the two strongest books of the catalog," says Margalef. "Our decision is also based on knowledge that a specific author has sold very well or a specific topic or approach that the book takes has strong potential. To determine this, we work very closely with publishers at home and abroad."

Mosaico's special relationship with publishers is one of its strongest selling points. Acting simultaneously as an editorial publication, a distribution network, a publishing partner, and a bookseller, Mosaico is involved in the major aspects of the industry. It's a position that helps the book club act as a bridge between publishing houses and consumers, situating it as a very important nexus of information.

"One of the questions we get asked by publishers all the time is, why should I have to work with you? You're not paying me a huge amount of money," says Margalef. "We have to explain to them that we have a unique business model. We make a very big investment up-front with three books for three dollars, and we're hoping that if they stay in the club for quite a while they buy as many books as they can. We send the magazine every three weeks, and pay all the promotional costs." Even if a club member doesn't buy the book through them, Roe says that publishers see a spike in retail sales immediately after the direct mailings, something that Mosaico says amounts to free advertising.

"A lot of the publishers complain that we have very tight guidelines, and I say, 'Hey guys, I'm not trying to make your life difficult,'" says Margalef. "I want to establish a long-term relationship with our publishers where there is a win-win situation."

But the licensing deals that mainstream book clubs typically strike with publishers may not go as smoothly with a Spanish-language market still in a developmental stage in the United States. "Mosaico has been one of our top accounts," says Marla Norman, Planeta's U.S. sales director based in Miami. "It was clear, almost immediately, that they'd tapped into a completely new readership within the Spanish-language market. Although we're fine with copublishing with Mosaico, we're less open to licensing deals right now." International publishers expressed a reluctance to give up complete control over publication and print runs of a book for a royalty percentage that would yield low returns given the market's current volume.

For the most part domestic publishers are willing to work with Mosaico, but there is some skepticism from smaller international houses. "The magic word is volume," says Margalef. "The higher the quantity of books we plan to sell, the higher the advance (if we print) or revenue (if we buy finished product) will be for the publisher. When we contract a book that we want to print we usually pay an advance to the publisher based on the royalties that the book will earn."

Margalef also extols the virtues of Mosaico's newsletter/catalogs, printed in four-color and totaling 2.8 million pieces a year, with a target of 4 million by 2006. Another advantage for publishers is the ability of a book club to extend the lifetime value of a book, because it can sell backlist titles long after they're done in the trade. "We do thematic offerings that will pull titles together that people haven't seen before," says Roe. "You can get another two or three years out of a book, and sell thousands more copies."

Margalef is also keen on selling Mosaico as a kind of consultancy that can provide crucial information and perspective to publishers even before they go ahead with a book. "We get a lot of phone calls every day from publishers asking us, 'I'm thinking about doing a book about this topic and that's how I'd like to approach it, what do you think? Do you like the idea, do you think I could sell it to you? Can we sell it in the club?'" says Margalef. "I tell them we've done this with another publisher. I don't suggest you go that route because it didn't work, or I think you're right on, that's my advice. They love it because there is no one in this country that has this kind of overview on the market."

The growing pains that the Spanish-language industry has experienced, says Margalef, have a lot to do with lack of knowledge. Many publishers start a Spanish-language division with "an editor who is mostly Spanish speaking, with little understanding of what makes a successful title." Latin American and Spanish publishers, she says, don't know where to start in the United States. "This new channel we're offering to distribute and market their books is a gold mine. We offer them not just the expertise but the infrastructure that they don't have."

The Hispanic book market in the United States will probably go through as many shifts as the Hispanic population itself, and Mosaico will face many challenges. First, there is the question of language dominance. For now, Mosaico is focusing on Spanish-language books. "Based on our experiences we need to wait a little before we include books in English," says Margalef. Bilingual children's books that feature brand names like Dora the Explorer are the exception. But the particular sensibility of the U.S. Latino must always be considered. Last year, a translation of Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas flopped, probably because Hispanics didn't "get" a dark tale about a major holiday, says Margalef.

Mosaico doesn't underestimate its role in keeping the connection Hispanic families have with their culture. While there is a strong drive to keep traditions, the overwhelming force of English-dominant U.S. culture is a consideration. "One of our biggest tasks here is helping our members stay connected," says Margalef. "It's been true for a long time that when people go to visit their relatives in Latin America, often they come back with a suitcase full of books for the whole year. But now things are better for everybody. There's more publishing in Spanish, and we're out there now. The AAP declared this the Year of Publishing Latino Voices for America, and it's an exciting moment for all of us."

A technical problem that Mosaico needs to address is its ability to obtain direct mailing lists. Because mass marketing to Hispanics is a relatively recent phenomenon, much work remains to be done in this area. "The list market is very young and immature. I am restricted by how much I can mail, by how many decent lists there are out there," says Roe. "We can mail two or three times as many for Book of the Month Club because we have good solid lists that you can go to. But for the Spanish market, it's just not there yet. It's a smaller market than we'd like it to be. We need new lists of magazine subscribers, book readers, people who buy Hispanic-oriented products through direct mail to solidify our core market."

While Mosaico has a sizable overlap in fiction titles with Círculo de Lectores, whose trademark was recently purchased by Bookspan, it is just beginning to explore ways it can share stock with other Bookspan clubs. One area where this could happen is encouraging the publishers that work heavily with the Mind, Body, and Spirit Club to translate its titles into Spanish.

But mainly, Mosaico realizes that it has to stay true to its dual purposes of reaching out to and involving the Hispanic community and increasing lines of communication so that both consumers and publishers can profit. "Despite the fact that we're in the rollout phase, we're still learning," says Margalef. "We try to build some kind of a sense of community, a place where we all meet and talk about books. We even encourage members to write us letters. The more we make that kind of personal contact, the more successful we'll be."