García Márquez's Stamina Breaks Spanish Record

by Adriana Lopez, PW Daily for Booksellers -- Publishers Weekly, 11/3/2004

Seventy-six-year-old Colombian Nobel laureate and author of 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez has set another U.S. Spanish-language publishing milestone. According to Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta, the author's new erotic novella, Memoria de mis putas tristes, roughly translated in English as Memories of My Melancholy Whores (the translation by Edith Grossman is in the works for next year) is, in less than two weeks, selling at twice the rate of his bestselling autobiography, Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale). That dense 600-page memoir lived on the Críticas bestsellers list for 22 months, climbed the Los Angeles Times nonfiction list in Spanish and has netted 63,000 copies for Knopf to date.

Vintage Español's first printing of the $10.95 paperback edition of Memoria was 100,000; Knopf's hardcover $17.95 edition had a first printing of 25,000. But demand has been so strong that in the last week and a half, Random House has gone back to press for both editions a combined total of seven times. The house estimates that 70,000 Vintage Español's edition and 30,000 copies of the Knopf edition have shipped in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Mehta called Memoria the fastest-selling Spanish-language book in the history of Random House and the fourth-bestselling title in its group at Barnes & Noble--a feat that is all the more striking considering how little publicity the book has garnered in the mainstream media. The short novel, whose risqué theme is sure to raise eyebrows, is about a writer's wish to deflower an adolescent virgin on his 90th birthday.

For Mehta, who just went through the excitement of publishing Clinton's My Life, "releasing a new work of fiction by one of the world's greatest living writer, is an event." In true García Márquez fashion, this book's release didn't come without its own thrills. Last year the publisher lost out on thousands of sales of the author's autobiography because of the illegally imported editions readily available to his fans in the U.S. To avoid that mistake, Random House this time published in sync with the rest of the Spanish-language world, joining with García Márquez's uber agent Carmen Balcell and the book's other publishers for what was originally to be an October 27 release. But when pirated editions of Memoria began being sold overseas, Random acted fast and pushed up the pub date a week. For Vintage director Anne Messitte, releasing the book simultaneously in hardback and paperback and at low price points also lessened the chances of losing sales to imported editions.

The release of Memoria is Random Houses's most ambitious marketing strategy in Spanish ever and has included advertisements in major Spanish- and English-language publications and the distribution of 600 displays to chain stores that include 12 paperback and four hardcover copies of Memoria. Borders's Spanish buyer Aaron Feit said that the title is doing extremely well in both editions in its stores, "and this is without getting all that much publicity from U.S. media." The Los Angeles Times ran a positive review of the novella on October 26, and Mehta said he is sure more media will follow despite the usual challenge of getting a Spanish-language book covered in a market where English is dominant. "It's part of a realization of the existence of a [Spanish] market that most of us have known is a significant new readership available to us as publishers," added Mehta. "And one which has gradually been dawning on our industry for a period of time. We didn't just wake up to it yesterday."