HarperCollins Brasil was created in 2015 by combining Thomas Nelson Brasil and Harlequin Brasil, along with the commercial trade list of the Ediouro Group, HarperCollins’ Brazilian publishing partner since 2006. A decade in, the publisher has seen significant growth, especially in the Christian publishing space, where it has 40% of the market share. Sam Coto, the group publisher at HarperCollins Brasil and publisher of Thomas Nelson, spoke with PW about how he’s helped manage the publisher’s growth, and where it’ll go from here.

HC Brasil has quickly become one of the predominant players in Brazilian publishing. How do you view your position in the market?

This ten-year anniversary is coming at a really special moment for us. We’re easily the fastest growing publisher in Brazil right now. We’re growing 50% year-to-date so far versus last year, and we’d been growing at a 20-30% rate before that. The big message we want people to know is that we’re one of the big boys now in Brazil.

One reason for that is that there just aren’t enough publishers in Brazil—people looking at publishing differently and attacking it from different angles—some of these market segments are very big, but often there are only one or two houses serving each.

Before HC Brasil acquired it, you worked for Thomas Nelson locally. You’ve established a strong grip on Brazil’s Christian market. How did you find success in that space?

Brazil is historically a Catholic country, but the Protestant population has grown massively. Our Thomas Nelson imprint deals with Protestant Christian books and a big reason for our success is that there’s a lot of plurality in the Protestant space, and we don’t favor one team. A lot of other publishers are tied to a specific church or to American missionaries. They have a segment of the market that they’re preoccupied with, and, unlike them, we’re trying to speak to everyone.

Of course, the Christian space is one of the places where I’m the most conscientious of our social responsibility. In a Christian country like Brazil, the way that people interpret the Bible has dictated how we make laws and how we, as a society, understand things. Some ideas about Christianity will further stereotypes—and far more complex things than just stereotypes. People will come to us all the time with a narrative that they say is going to sell so much, but we won’t publish it, because it’s simply irresponsible. There’s a myth that the most sensationalized thing—what we call tapa na cara (slap in the face) in Portuguese—is the most lucrative, and that’s not always true.

Where do you see opportunities for the company to grow?

Our dominance in the Christian market is a hard position to maintain in the long term, so there’s consistent work that we need to do there to keep our finger on the pulse of the market. That has a lot to do with developing editors, and people on our team that are the experts in those Christian sub-genres and sub-markets. We also need to consolidate our children’s line, which is still in its infancy.

And there are especially acute needs in terms of retailers. Brazil is a continental-sized country, but only a very small percentage of that is covered by bookstores. Amazon has been working to remedy that, but there are still forgotten places where we need physical retail space. I hope retailers keep seeing the opportunity, and that more outside capital is invested into this market.