The Big Picture?

By Adriana Lopez -- Críticas, 1/1/2005

It’s a new year, and we’ve got a problem—one we can fix with the right New Year’s resolution. While the film, television, and music industries have highly sophisticated data reports on sales, the publishing world is highly secretive. This makes it difficult to accurately calculate the health of the market, and this is even more true of the Spanish-language industry. Publishers, distributors, and booksellers are especially reluctant to share their results. Unfortunately, this self-protection may prompt unwarranted suspicion toward the viability of the Spanish-language market.

Such evasion may be due to a “small fish in a big pond” mindset, where publishers of Spanish material believe their small sales figures don’t measure up to best-selling success stories. They shouldn’t feel so tiny. There are plenty of new releases in English with average marketing campaigns that fare no better than plenty of Spanish-language releases in the United States with relatively no marketing muscle, media attention, or prominent shelf display (if any).

There’s a lot of pressure for the Spanish-language market to perform well, and now. Those working with Spanish materials should begin to closely track their business, if they aren’t already, and share that information with the public for the benefit of the industry. The more we know where everyone stands, the more confidence and investment the market will receive.

The January 17 issue of Publishers Weekly dedicated its feature to exploring our market and questioning where it stood. The article spoke about the murky figures in this relatively young market and its loyal enthusiasts who still proclaim its success and growth. It pointed to the money being invested throughout the industry and the special staffing now being allocated to the Spanish-buying segment of the industry. The big picture looks rosy, but up close it all appears so hazy. The question remains. Has there been growth?

This is hard to say given that there is still little data gauging the Spanish-language book market and its readers. This is what we know: In 1994 Bowker reported that 2,030 titles were published in the United States in Spanish. In 2003, that number is 7,108. But somehow that figure doesn’t seem to include all the pieces of the large and varied pie of sales in español in the States that we are aware of. We know the number of titles has not dropped, that there has been growth in distribution, shelf space, print runs, and titles published domestically. But with few solid figures to go on today, we are all left scratching our heads. Let’s do something about that. Happy New Year!