Planeta to Close U.S. Office

by Judith Rosen -- Críticas, 3/15/2008

With more U.S. publishers taking advantage of the boom in Latino publishing, Spanish and Latin American publishers are finding it harder to compete. Close on the heels of Penguin’s announcement that it is launching Celebra, a line of Latino-interest books in English and Spanish, Planeta, the world’s largest publisher of trade books in Spanish, said that it would close its 15-year-old sales and distribution office in Miami at the end of March. Planeta will layoff its eight-member Miami staff and move the management of its U.S. operations to its facility in Mexico City.

For director of sales Marla Norman, who has been in the Miami office for a dozen years, the closing shows that U.S. publishers such as HarperCollins and Random House are in it for the long haul. “It’s a bit of a squeeze if you’re a foreign publisher,” says Norman. “The market’s very much alive and growing, and U.S. publishers are starting to keep rights. The footsteps are getting louder behind us.”

Although Planeta’s Miami office had been hitting its sales goals and achieving substantial increases, as much as 30 percent in ’04 and ’05, it began changing its approach to the U.S. market three years ago. In late 2005, Planeta signed a fulfillment arrangement with Client Distributions Service (now Perseus Distribution Services, or PDS). The following fall at Frankfurt, Planeta and HarperCollins’s Rayo inked a copublishing arrangement, which began with two novels by La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind)author Carlos Ruiz Zafón.

This year the Rayo/Planeta imprint will publish 20 titles, up from 12 last year. They represent the cream of Planeta’s list: new books like Ángeles Mastretta’s Maridos and Gioconda Belli’s El infinito en la palma de la mano, as well as bestselling backlist titles by Jorge Louis Borges, Juan Rulfo, and Ernesto Sabato. The arrangement also gives Harper the option to publish selected Planeta titles in English. Initially the imprint’s small list compared with Planeta’s monthly U.S. output of 30 books a month, was too small to effect sales. “The truth is” says Norman, “if we had stayed open in Miami, the Rayo agreement would have had an impact.”

Like other overseas publishers, Planeta has had to contend with the depressed dollar and high printing costs in the United States. “A $14 book becomes almost double that by the time you factor in the margin and freight cost,” says Norman. Experiments with print-on-demand, she adds, have only been successful for shorter books, fewer than 200 pages in length, because of cost.

Even without a toehold in Miami, it’s unlikely that Planeta will have trouble maintaining its visibility in the United States. In addition to the contract with Harper, PDS will continue to provide fulfillment for approximately 250 titles on the company’s backlist. And Planeta México will follow up on the sales inroads made by Norman and her team.

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