The Book Scene in Mexico
-- 9/1/98
Gerardo Gally, Director General of Grupo Editorial Pax in Mexico, speaking at the Latino Summit during BEA '98, described two trends in publishing in Latin America today.
"One trend is trying to develop local authors who can promote and sell their books. The other is publishing translations. But where Argentina used to be the leader in this area, because they had the best editors, Mexico is taking over now. Mexico is a very strong market for self-help, health, child and family concerns and sex education, plus the whole range of new age."
Rodolfo Pataki of Fondo de Cultura Economica USA added his view of the globalization of the Spanish language markets. "Latin America and Spain are becoming the same phenomenon, with the big conglomerates active in all the markets. You are seeing back lists vanish, big investments in educational publishing, and a mushrooming of small publishing houses dedicated to quality."
"But I'm not optimistic about big bestsellers or mass market. For us, at least, the key is niche marketing. For example, children's books, which we just started six years ago, have become our main market in the USA, 65% of our sales."
The world lost Octavio Paz earlier this year, Mexico's greatest p t and thinker, and though he was only 60 years old, he left a prolific opus and lived to see great improvements in his lifelong battle for dignity for the common man and for the freedom of expression. As this report will show, publishers all over Latin America complain not of repression, but of the difficulties of reaching more of their people with affordable books."
CERLALC's massive compilation of ISBN numbers for world Spanish language titles on CD-ROM is covered elsewhere in this report. Libromex is currently building a website, the joint effort of a number of Mexican publishers, that will include a database of books in print in Mexico, copyright information on books in Spanish and rights available around the world, a directory of Mexico's editorial industry, their URLs and national book news.
New global technologies are helping book dissemination here, but so are new approaches originating in Latin America, as this report will describe.
Selector is one of those smaller Mexican publishers who have found niche markets in non-fiction adult and juveniles. They offer their titles in distinctive covers at prices to attract new readers, and they have figured out creative ways to reach them.
"We have lower priced books with better distribution than many other Mexican publishers," says Gonzalo Araico, the dashing young President of Selector. He predicts, however, "In the next five years we are going to have more competition from the big international houses. It is hard to find writers now, at our normal royalty rates, and we are doing more Mexican originals than ever before."
Selector's bright yellow reading racks and distinctive covers attract buyers in the many unusual places the company has managed to get them, including the waiting areas of popular restaurants that offer no other books at all. They also have a website, listed along with others in this report on our own website.
Ranging from business to health to humor to children's, among their translated hits this year were the Healing Powers of... series from Prima Publishing, including Garlic and Ginseng. To these Selector has added Mexican originals Nopal (prickly pear) and Juegos (juices). They also have a cooking series from Agatha, in Spain, to which they have added the Latin American regional cooking, and a children's list of scary stores called Con los Pelos de Punta (making your hair stand on end). With 80% of their business in the big cities of Mexico, they are looking now at the rest of the Spanish speaking Americas.
Jose Luis Ramirez C., President of Grupo Editorial Diana is one of Mexico's biggest trade publishers, a master of distribution, and he still lives on his backlist.
"It is 80% of our sales and probably 100% of our profit," he told PW at BEA this year. Ramirez knows how to pick winners. This year he published Frank Sinatra's The Lost Art of Living, bought from HarperCollins before old Blue Eyes' death. With one of the best systems in the country, he also sees distribution improving in Mexico and more confidence among the bookstores, though he has grave concerns about the current world economic situation and its impact on Mexico. In fact, he has plenty of people nipping at his heels right at home.
The giant Spanish Grupo Editorial Planeta has one of their five regional offices in Mexico City, covering Mexico and the Caribbean, with Rene Solis, formerly with ProMexico now in charge and Jesus Ansya, formerly with the Guadalajara Book Fair, now editorial director.
While Mexico is number three in size, following the offices in Spain and Argentina (which covers the southern cone market) each operation can publish what they like of the other lists and buy their own rights independently. That makes each one different. The Brazilian operation is only doing partworks, for example.
"It is all very flexible," says Sulis. "The eight imprints of Spain are under one house here. And we are exclusive for Tachen in Mexico and Colombia, but not elsewhere." The three main categories here are trade, the largest, with separate lists for partworks and door-to-door sales. Planeta also own 50% of Tusquets, another major trade house in Mexico, but they operate separately.
"Even without textbooks and not much in juvenile, we are one of the biggest houses in Mexico," says Solis. "And we are making a new juvenile line with Spain. We will publish 140 new trade titles this year, including all the Planeta lists. Thirty-five percent are translations."
Recent best sellers include Federico Andahazi's El anatomista and Gary Jennings' Otono azteca, as well as Carl Sagan's El mundo y sus demonios.
Rarely d s Planeta Mexico get their non-fiction titles from the USA, according to editor Mirta Ripol. "Usually they come from Spain, or we create them ourselves."
Planeta Mexico's Premio Joaquin Mortiz, a prize for a first novel (unpublished) has been offered for the last three years and is open to all writers in Spanish.
"Joaquin Mortiz is our only Mexican imprint, which we bought in 1991," says Solis. Both Spain and Argentina offer their own prizes and each house publishes all the prize winners, though Mexico's is the only one uniquely for first novels."
Trade publishers have been helped recently in Mexico by a new publication, Hoja por hoja, which runs as a literary supplement in 17 major metropolitan newspapers in Mexico. Just a year old, the monthly has 600,000 circulation.
In part of an on-going strategy for new readers, Grupo Editorial Grijalbo-Mondadori, another Mexican house with international links, has two very important new publishing projects and an expanded distribution business, according to Editorial Director Ariel Rosales. They will be using TV advertising.
"The first project is a pocket book of international best sellers (Danielle Steele, Laura Esquivel, Barbara Wood, Ken Follett, etc), which we offer for 49 pesos each (about $5). We are releasing one book each week for 40 weeks, along with television promotion, our first. The promotion is very expensive, but we have first print runs of 40,000 copies and we hope to carry this on to Colombia and Argentina next year, then to Venezuela and Chile."
"This is the first time these books have been available in mass market editions, according to Rosales, and while most of the rights come from Spain, they are produced in Mexico or Colombia."
"The second project is Soluciones Escolares. These start this September with study helper packs for students that were launched first in Chile. We will sell them in the kiosks and supermarkets, again with intensive TV promotion and every week a new packet. The primary and secondary level packets include guidance for the parents who are helping the child. These we developed ourselves in Mexico."
Under their regular publishing program, the company has 110 new titles this year, 35% of them translations. Grijalbo-Mondadori will print one and a half million books this year, including 500,000 copies of 350 backlist titles. Plus they will sell 800,000 copies of 150 imported titles. They have perhaps the best distribution system in Mexico.
"A big part of our business now is distributing the lists of other publishers, both inside and outside our group," says Gian Carlos Corte, General Director of the company. "We have at least 10% of the market in Mexico outside of textbooks now. That makes us close to Planeta and Diana for the number one spot."
"In addition to our original collections: literature, politics, history, self-help, health, etc., we find new age and spiritual are really big for us now," he says. "And we are negotiating with Llewellyn to do some of their titles in Spanish."
Gerardo Gally's own much smaller Grupo Editorial Pax has had such success with their psychology self-help books for students and teachers, covered in last year's report, they are extending the series with a line for parents at the parents' request.
"Low self esteem is such a problem in Mexico," says Gally. "And we are also getting interest from other countries. There are now local editions in Colombia and Chile, and we have good distribution in Guatemala, Honduras and Bolivia. The impact may even take us to the USA. Our business last year equaled all our past 65 years, because of these books."
One of the motivating forces behind the good sales is Mexico City's new year-around book fair in the subway corridor of the central (Zocalo) station, covered last year. One of the movers on this joint effort for book promotion in the capital, Gally reports that business there is picking up there, for all the 40-some publishers participating.
"We are doing more promotional events now, and people who don't usually read books are stopping to buy. We are now looking at a second spot in the University subway station, which would feature just college textbooks."
Patricia Van Rhijn and her husband, author and partner Francisco Serrano of CIDCLI also attended BEA this year, with new projects from their all-juvenile list. CIDCLI stands for the Center for Information and Development of Children's Communication and Literature in Spanish. They do a small number of high quality books, signing up the best Latin American authors they can find, not necessarily those known for their juvenile work, then matching them to the best illustrators from around the world.
This year their pop-up story book of the Virgin of Guadaloupe was co-published with Ground Books in Canada. The editor, a Guatamalan, adapted the text from 16th century archives. The book was manufactured in Colombia by Cargraphics and sells well in the USA.
"There are more Guadaloupans in the USA than in Spain," Van Rhijn explains. Another new product for CIDCLI this year is a puzzle of sentence structures in Spanish which has to be matched by word and color to get the grammar correct. Van Rhijn plans more co-editions with Latin American colleagues.
This year they are also doing 16 tales of Latin American writers and 24 Latin American p ts, chosen by Serrano, in 10 co-editions in Spanish, including Aigue, Editoral Atica, Norma, Ekare-sur, Piedra Santa, Peisa, Ekare, Huracon and Editorial Taller.
"We each have an exclusive territory and we are all free to distribute in the USA," adds Van Rhijn.
The ongoing problem for children's book publishers in Mexico is the government control of textbooks for grades 1-6. They hand out the printing contracts to the various publishers who have presses, but otherwise the industry is out in the cold. The publishers have been fighting this for years.
Carlos Noriega is General Director and President of the family firm, Grupo Noriega, as well as President of the Education Committee for the Private Sector of the Government.
"We are trying to privatize the industry," he says. "The Government did a good thing with secondary textbooks. They approve them and buy one third from us for free distribution, then offer the teachers a choice from the approved curriculum."
"This way, teachers get a choice and poor people can afford to stay in school through grade nine. We are hoping to have a change with primary textbooks soon. Our next elections are in 2000 and that will mean a different Education Secretary, so we don't want to have to start over again."
California's proposition rescinding bilingual education, which passed last June, will affect many textbook publishers in Latin America, including Noriega.
"We had been working about 20 years in that market and it was our biggest, so it will hurt," he admits. "And Texas may be next to drop bilingual education."
"But we need more English programs here in Mexico, to be able to compete under NAFTA. That is a good future market," he continues. "We've learned that 80% of Americans prefer to have a factory in Mexico than Asia. And we are trying to sign a free trade agreement with Europe, as well. But the really bad thing is, I don't see my country growing in reading habits."
(Mexico is developing remarkable reading development campaigns now and has one of the best publications in Latin America for the industry, Op Cit, just two years old.)
At his publishing house, Noriega says business is growing. "We are adding more university level titles and we had third place in secondary books approved this year. Plus, 42% of our business is in exports, including Puerto Rico and the USA, especially dictionaries and primary and secondary level texts. Exports will grow to 50%, with Spain, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru coming up. We won 27 contracts for South American school markets this year, including Chile."
But the big international publishing groups are moving in, especially in ELT. Pearson (Addison-Wesley/Longman) will be another McGraw-Hill in Mexico and Latin America soon, Noriega predicts. "That will mean more buy-outs. You need to be big to compete, and so we are also looking for alliances. Mexico will be a strategic location for publishers, as much as Spain and Argentina."
Oxford University Press is certainly no new name in Mexico, but their headquarters in Mexico City is less than three years old. They bought HARLA, the old Harper&Row Latin America distribution operation that was then 20 years old. Two former McGraw-Hill employees are in charge. Rolando Lam, formerly with McGraw-Hill Singapore, is President of OUP-Harla in Mexico, with responsibilities for the offices Colombia, Chile and Argentina as well.
Carlos Rios is Director General for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. There is a separate company for OUP Spain.
"Before us, OUP didn't exist in these markets except in ELT distribution," says Lam. "Now we are manufacturing school books all over the region: Argentina, Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico. While 50% of the business is still in ELT, the rest is in textbooks in Spanish, both originals and translations, and we do only our own distribution. We expect to expand to the professional, medical and college markets, too, in Spanish We already have important OUP titles in English in college, professional and reference."
"We are putting more into promotion and editorial here because we see a good future for these markets. I go back to the years when everyone was pulling out of these markets because of the unstable economies. It has really changed now," Lam says, then hesitates. "At least they have rebounded in a better way."
"The Latin Americans have been through what the Asians are going through now; they are much more astute here. It is like Asia was in the heyday. As the leader in the ELT market, we see more and more people learning English, too. We are excited about these markets and we are looking at the long term."
Prentice-Hall Hispanoamericana is long established in Mexico, though they have new elegant offices in the south of the city. Marketing Director Moises Perez and President Guillermo Hernandez run all of Spanish Latin America from here except for Colombia. It is one of the three primary editorial centers in Spanish for the group. The third is Spain.
"We also do 80% of the production for all our markets, here," says Perez. "The rest comes from Spain."
While 90% of the business is in Spanish, 10% is in English, mostly computer and business titles, which also have the strongest element of translations. The school textbooks are all Spanish originals, to meet curriculum requirements. Top markets overall are Mexico, Argentina and Venezuela, in that order, says Perez, with sales both through retail and door-to-door.
"The future of the markets in Latin America is school books," Perez confirms. The company starts with junior high school texts and g s right through college to professional. "Right now Santillana and McGraw-Hill are the big competitors, but we expect to have more competition from AddisonWesley/Longman."
While Prentice-Hall and McGraw-Hill have strong systems in place in the region, there are those countries where little higher educational material has been available. Piracy and economic uncertainties have hampered supply.
Now a new service, started by an American living in Mexico, is providing not just delivery at affordable prices, but banking arrangements for the supply chain.
Rene S. Greenwald and his team at Books, Information & Services (BIS) have grown 27% this year and serve 14 countries, mostly the smaller ones. BIS has just opened an office in Puerto Rico, and the structure there helps explain they way they work elsewhere.
"We have three areas of sales: the high school book market, which is seasonal, the university textbooks in English and Spanish, and the general market, mostly professional books. Publishers were having credit problems with Puerto Rico and they wouldnÃt ship without payment up front."
"Now we have a large warehouse in Puerto Rico. We buy the books and offer them on credit to the retailers, limiting the number of copies they can take until they begin making payments. Everything is available to them, as they need it and can prove they can sell it. Just like with a credit card, when they pay down on their outstanding balance, additional credit is available."
BIS maintains separate accounts at a bank in California for each of the distribution centers in each country. By keeping the accounts in the US and not commingling them, they are able to provide monthly reports to each center on the status of their funds and to make payments to publishers when payments become due. This system also helps protect the country from devaluation in their own currencies.
Greenwald, who has spent most of his adult life in the Spanish speaking world, used to direct the textbook assistance program, RTAC-II, for USAID in Mexico City.
"We also promote the use of books, though we cannot specify titles, of course, since we represent so many different publishers. We are seeing a lot of competition now, and those publishers who invest in promotion have the best opportunity for a high return on their investment. Prentice Hall and McGraw-Hill have already proven that."
Piracy, still the biggest headache in these markets, cannot be stopped completely, Greenwald admits. "Piracy comes from a combination of the lack of books and books that are too expensive. While we can help reduce both of these problems, we also need to have children educated that piracy is wrong."
Manual Moderno, a 40 year old medical importer, retailer and publisher, is now consolidating into one of the most important publishers in medicine and psychology in the Spanish language. Based in Mexico, with three retail stores, they distribute widely and handle the likes of Mosby Doyma and Waverly Masson as well. MD Hugo Setzer explains how BIS helps him. "In Peru you find the Manuel Moderno titles pirated on the street for $10, when the real cost is $50. BIS can offer our legitimate low-priced edition for $30."
Larousse is another international publishing name familiar in Latin America since the 1950s. They stayed through the 1980s when most people left. Their biggest success has been in Mexico, which is 50% of their business in Latin America. Spreading the territory among other offices in Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Venezuela, the company has Dominique Bertin covering Central America, the Caribbean and the USA markets from his Mexico base.
Part of the Havas group of France, the fifth largest publishing group in the world, Larousse sells their own catalogs, as well as Chamber's, Harrap's, Hemma, Nathan and Kingfisher sister brands. So the company offers a wide range of children's titles now (started just eight years ago), including the recent addition of the Barbie titles from Mattel.
Number one in Spanish and bilingual dictionaries, as well as self-learning language and idiom materials in Mexico, their main competition is Mexico's mighty local educational house, Fernandez. They are second only to Fernandez in children's books, too, and only behind Oceano in door-to-door sales systems.
"We had a huge growth in megastores with our impulse purchases," reports Marketing Director Susana Cabrera. "Mainly dictionaries, language self-learning materials and children's titles. We are in more than 1300 stores now in Mexico. But in the rest of Latin America we are still fighting for dominance. Our strategy is to have a wide variety of language-related products so that people can find whatever they want from us at a price they can afford."
Number one in door-to-door in Mexico, and with big offices in Spain, Argentina and Colombia, Editorial Oceano de Mexico was the first in the group to try retail trade lists four years ago. Now Spain is starting, and next will be Colombia. Oceano de Mexico expects to double the size of this list by the end of this year, according to General Director Rogelio Villarreal. It won't surprise readers that they are planning to do so nearly exclusively with non-fiction.
"Retail is the growth area," says Villarreal. "Door-to-door is already established. We have retail three lines: The political topics of Mexico, which include both instant books of current topics and economic analysis, then authors like Oliver Sachs, and finally alternative, self-help titles." Part of the growth will come from new co-edition arrangements. With Losada in Spain they will contribute 40 titles, then add 100 from Losada, including some of the Biblioteca Losada Classico. In a co-venture with Langenscheidt, Oceano will do 18 tour guides for Mexico while Langenscheidt d s 25 in Spain. They also have several exchanges coming with Atlon in Argentina.
Sales are split evenly between bookstores, such as the Gandhi chain, and the supermarket/department stores so successful at book retailing in Mexico, such as Sanborn's. Ricardo Nudelman told PW that Gandhi has the first online bookselling website in Mexico, started two years ago, and next year they will have a total of nine stores. They are part of a new association of book stores to help improve retailing in Mexico.
Jose Ignacio Echeverria was also at BEA last June, talking up his massive backlist at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico), Mexico's national open university. One of the largest publishers in Spanish today, he reports, "Sales are increasing inside and outside of Mexico, at the university level." The press d s 800 new titles a year, and Echeverria was at BEA to sell rights, not to buy.
Another Government run publishing house well worthy of mention is Fondo de Cultura Econumica. Every year PW makes the long taxi journey out to the hills surrounding Mexico City to visit the ultra modern highrise that is the Fondos's editorial offices. Every year we are jolted into a different reality, for here is a publishing house enjoying a publishing mission that is only secondarily economic.
Daniel Goldin works with the children's books division, a relatively new area of publishing for this house that was launched in 1991. It is one of their most successful, in economic terms, as Rodolfo Pataky explained earlier in this report. Fondo is one of the biggest juvenile houses in Mexico now, with 180 titles and sales that doubled last year.
But then Goldin leaves the pedestrian subject of book sales to talk about his real interest, and the reason he is at the Fondo and not another more conventional publishing house.
"My main interest is in good books of good quality," says Goldin. "Because our main business here is making a proper market in Mexico for books. We have 50% of our population under 18 years old. That is 50 million potential readers. Not all of them can read, of course."
"But it is not just a matter of teaching them how to read and write," Goldin tries to explain. "To develop this market wrongly will be bad for the future of Mexico. We at Fondo intend to convert the skills of reading and writing into day-to-day tools for building individual and social understanding."
"To do this, we must change the established ways people learn them. For instance, we have to 'unscholarize' the teaching methods, so that students can take what they are learning beyond the classroom. Because of Fondo's traditional mission towards books, we can approach the reading problem in a deep way."
"Children are the easiest to teach to read properly," says Goldin. "We are hampered in training them by the need to work with a lot of adults: teachers, parents, librarians, authors and illustrators. All of them have a lot of prejudices."
The Fondo has a new reading program, RED de Animaciun a la Lectra, launched in 1995 by Goldin, using the advertising budget for the children's division, and with this remarkable mission in mind.
Such new approaches to the topic of reading development are discussed in the Fondo's Espacios para la lectura, a journal that g s to 40,000 professionals and parents in Mexico, Central and South America, Spain and the USA.
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