The Future of Hispanic Publishing

By Judith Rosen -- Críticas, 5/15/2006

illus. Dennis Harms

The Spanish-language book category is one of the few bright spots in an industry that is virtually flat. At Barnes & Noble, for example, sales of books in Spanish have tripled since 2000, according to Spanish buyer Amanda Schilling. While at the Borders Book Group, Hispanic books have sold so well that recently departed buyer Aaron Feit sees no end in sight. “We don’t know where the ceiling is,” he tells Críticas.

It’s not just chain superstores that are bullish about Hispanic books; mass merchandisers, price clubs, supermarkets, drug stores, and even record stores are experiencing double-digit sales growth. “We feel very confident of big numbers going forward. We need to rev up,” says Sandra Snow, Spanish-language program manager at Advanced Marketing Services, referring to growth in Hispanic book sales for various customers since the beginning of 2006. Harper’s Rayo imprint saw its sales shoot up 57% over the past year with Anderson Book Distributors, which sells into Wal-Mart, and 94% with Levy Home Entertainment, which supplies books to Target, says associate publisher and marketing director Raymond Garcia.

Given that the library market continues to grow, but at a significantly slower pace, the biggest trend in Hispanic publishing today may well be exponential retail growth. “Before 2002, the retail market was very small,” says Silvia Matute, director of the general books division at Santillana USA. “Now, it is larger than the library market.” She credits this boom with making it possible for Santillana USA to experiment with new ventures like publishing nonfiction in the States under the Aguilar, Taurus, and Alamah imprints. The line will feature 20 books a year on self-help, spirituality, parenting, and sexuality.

With Hispanics’ spending power projected to grow from $490 billion in 2000 to $1,087 billion in 2010, according to a study by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the Univ. of Georgia, Santillana is not the only Spanish-language publisher eager to adjust what it publishes, and how, to appeal to this market.

New Initiatives en Español

This May marks Simon & Schuster’s latest foray into Spanish-language book publishing with the launch of a Latino publishing program under the Atria imprint. “Our goal,” says senior editor Johanna Castillo, who heads the program, “is to publish books written by Latinos in English and, when the market requires in Spanish. I’m also bringing in books from Europe and Latin America and translating them into English” (see our interview with Javier Sierra for an example.) An immigrant herself, Castillo is especially excited about Atria’s five-book “Esperanza” series, which offers practical advice for immigrants on topics ranging from buying a house to becoming a citizen. This year Atria will publish 15 books simultaneously in Spanish and English and another three titles in English.

While some publishers are creating new programs, others are strengthening those already in place. Although Random House Spanish (RHS), the sales and distribution arm of Spanish-language books at Random House, imports between 150 and 175 books a year, the distributor is still a well-kept secret. Business development director Erik Riesenberg hopes to change that by establishing RHS as a brand. At the same time, Vintage Español, which is distributed through RHS, is trying to broaden its customer base. After consistently publishing three or four books a year in Spanish for more than a decade, it will quadruple its list, says Milena Alberti, director of Spanish-language publishing.

Given the success of Vintage Español’s mass market edition of Memorias de una geisha (Memoirs of a Geisha), now in its third printing since its publication in October, Alberti is seeking out more movie tie-ins for books that either read like telenovelas and/or touch on Hispanic themes. She has high hopes for Robert Rigby’s ¡GOOOL! El sueño se inicia (GOAL!: The Dream Begins, Apr.), a novelization of the Touchstone Pictures film of the same name about a poor Mexican American who dreams of playing professional soccer. The book explores issues ranging from immigration to the World Cup and family values.

Grupo Nelson, the newly-launched Spanish-language publishing division of Thomas Nelson, Inc. in Nashville, TN, has been busy staffing up to keep pace with the retail sector. In the past 18 months, its employee list has doubled to 14. For the fiscal year that ended March 31, sales at Grupo Nelson rose almost 25%, says VP and publisher Larry Downs, up slightly from 2004–05. He attributes much of that growth to mass merchandisers, especially Wal-Mart. “The bulk of our U.S. growth has happened at the mass merchandisers sector. Here our sales almost doubled over the past 12 months,” he says, adding that 95% of Grupo Nelson’s sales come from retail.

As for what books will work in the future for Grupo Nelson, says Downs: “I believe that there are core values that every reader looks for: How can I love and be loved?, Is there a God, and if so how can I know Him better? and How can I control my finances?. Where we see larger growth is going after high-profile personalities writing with a Hispanic sensibility.” He singles out writers like Hada María Morales, whose Vístete para triunfar (Dress for Success) was published in April under the division’s Editorial 10 Puntos self-help imprint; and Cara Birnbaum’s guide to beauty, Belleza universal (Universal Beauty), is due out this May. Grupo Nelson, he adds, will continue to publish 80 books a year and maintain a backlist of 400 titles.

Selling Points

The Spanish-language book category, however, goes deeper than movie tie-ins and self-help. “Translations of best sellers are doing better and better all the time,” says Marla Norman, sales director of Planeta Publishing, the largest Spanish-language trade book publisher. “It seems to me that anything that functions extremely well in English does well in Spanish.” Although Thomas Friedman’s La tierra es plana (The World Is Flat) has been a strong seller for Planeta, Norman notes that even in Spanish Da Vinci Code spinoffs are practically a genre of their own. Planeta will publish the hardcover movie tie-in of El código Da Vinci.

Since classics are a key part of the inventory in the Spanish book sections of both Borders and B&N, some publishers are working to extend those classics beyond Don Quixote and 100 años de soledad (100 Years of Solitude). “Our classics always continue to sell,” says IPG Spanish book specialist Carolyn Ramirez, who is hoping to get out a lot of copies of Edimat Libros’s Spanish-language edition of Jane Austen’s Orgullo y prejuicio (Pride and Prejudice) this October with actress Keira Knightley on the cover.

“For us,” says Borders’s Feit, “fiction in general is important. On the nonfiction side, there’s more of a preference toward practical books that provide some benefit for improving lifestyle. It can be self-help or it can be religious or financial.” At B&N, which currently has Spanish-language book sections in 600 stores and will be adding them to all 799 stores by the end of the year, “what’s selling,” says director of merchandise Mike Ferrari, “is a smattering of all the sections in the store. Spanish publishing is very vibrant. We even have Sudoku in Spanish.”

The Value of Simultaneity

While word of mouth continues to be key to the Hispanic book market, simultaneous publishing is one way publishers are capitalizing on the fact that Hispanics want to read the same things their neighbors have in English. Earlier this year, Random House was able to work the media in both languages by simultaneously publishing Sonia Nazario’s La travesía de Enrique (Enrique’s Journey), the story of a 17-year-old boy who crossed the U.S. border in search of his mother. Since Nazario is fluent in English and Spanish, she appeared on Good Morning America as well as four Spanish-language television programs, and gave readings in both languages at bookstores.

Sometimes, says Vintage Español’s Alberti, simultaneity can boost sales for different books in a series. For example, she timed the release of David Bach’s El millionario automático (The Automatic Millionaire) with Broadway’s publication of his newest English-language book in the series, The Automatic Millionaire Homeowner (Mar.).

Of course, getting books into the stores is only half the battle, especially at mass merchandisers, which traditionally give a book only three weeks to take off before returning it. For Rayo’s Garcia, the largest milestone in Spanish-language publishing is the planagram (a diagram that shows how books should be placed on retail shelves) that enables books to stay in the same location in stores for six months. Even best-selling authors like Isabel Allende and Paulo Coelho typically benefit from having more time to build, and Rayo typically releases their books in Spanish two months before the English edition. “The Spanish-language market doesn’t react as quickly,” explains Garcia. “We’ll see the first few weeks not show much growth.”

In addition, when the English edition comes out, the Spanish version frequently gets new life from dual-language floor displays and other promotions, including Internet prominence. “It’s no secret why we work so much with Univision authors,” says Garcia. “Univision.com is the most trafficked Spanish-language site in this country.”

Formats and Price Points

As in English, Spanish-language book publishers continue to tinker with format and price, although the choices are often between mass market and trade paperback rather than hardcover and trade, since hardcovers are seldom published in Spain. Santillana’s Matute finds prices have fallen in the past six years. “In 2000, books in Spanish were imported, a rarity, almost a delicacy, and people were ready to pay a premium,” she says.

To keep costs and prices down, Miami-based Spanish publisher Urano is planning to experiment with a new size paperback. “We are going to switch to what they call a pocket in Spain,” says managing director Lucía Laratelli, who expects the program to get underway in the States in the fall. In another bit of creativity, Urano will publish a movie tie-in edition of El código Da Vinci by jacketing the paperback closer to the film’s release in mid-May.

One typically American area that some booksellers expect to blossom is audio books. “Recently,” says Borders’s Feit, “we’ve seen more audio books in Spanish. It’s still very early, and we need to have more titles so we can create a critical mass. A lot of publishers take their cues from Spain, which doesn’t have a commuting culture, so this might develop in the States and then spread overseas.”

As for other trends, perhaps RHS’s Riesenberg sums it up best: “We’re still at a point where the market is maturing. We have to grow the market before we can talk about trends.”

Judith Rosen is the New England correspondent for PW. Her articles and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post Book World, the Boston Phoenix, and the Boston Herald.