“The book trade in Latin America- focus on Brazil” e “Networking for a better publishing in Brazil” foram documentos apresentados pela editora Eliana Sá no Forum Internacional de debates da Feira de Frankfurt 2007. Eles são aqui reproduzidos como uma contribuição ao estudo de nosso mercado editorial, tema constante de nossas preocupações e lutas.

THE BOOK TRADE IN LATIN AMERICA – FOCUS ON BRAZIL

Despite Latin America’s common Iberian heritage – Portugal and Spain colonized this part of the world and left as legacy their languages, Spanish and Portuguese, Latin American countries are not homogeneous and from the point of view of the cultural market we find huge differences between them.

Firstly, these differences can be seen at the educational level: the level of schooling of other countries is higher than Brazil’s. For instance, the average number of school attendance years for a Brazilian person is about 6 years; a person from Korea attends school for more than the double. In Argentine and Chile, the average number of school attendance years is more than 50% that of Brazilians.

Most importantly, concerning the economy, income distribution in Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, our closest neighbours, is more balanced than in Brazil. Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Ecuador and Paraguay, colonized by the Spanish people, form an important market, nowadays strongly linked to the big Spanish publishing houses.

In addition, all of these countries still maintain a large native Indian population, with many different cultures and dialects, although the “native Indian??? population does not participate in cultural consumption, except for some special public programs or isolated actions. I remember, 4 years ago I met here, in the Fair, a Paraguayan publisher that focussed on the Guarani Indians, publishing books in their native language and selling books for them. I was very surprised and I’ll tell you why.

Coming from Brazil, a large territory, with a population of 190 million people, the biggest national population in Latin America, I live in a country that maintains a surprising linguistic and cultural identity. Our native population is residual, and the cultural differences inside our territory are relative: a person from the South understands the speech and the way of life of a person from the Northeast of the country, in spite of their being more than 3.000 miles apart.

So, to begin with, the Brazilian publishing market is open for this huge mass of people, and could become one the most important of the world. I said “to begin with???, because the problem is that us, the publishers, and specially the small ones, live in one of the most socially and economically unequal societies in the work.
Let’s take a look at our History. The publishing history in Brazil starts in the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, when John, the Sixth, ran away to Rio de Janeiro with all the Portuguese court, leaving Lisbon for Napoleon’s troops. Arriving in 1808, the king had to allow printing activities to develop in Brazilian lands, as until then these activities had been forbidden in the colony. But, attention to this: printing was only possible in the royal prints!
So, Brazilian printing history began, in fact, just in the Nineteenth Century. At the eve of our independence from Portugal, in 1822, when Paris counted 480 bookshops and 850 printers, Brazil had only 7! And until the second half of the Twentieth Century, Brazil had only 30 bookshops.
Such historical data could explain the country’s current reading rate: 1.8 book per year per person. In Argentina, the reading rate is 5, and in Colombia, 2. In the developed countries, such as France, the annual average number of books read per person is 8.
Brazil has the second highest rate of illiteracy in the Latin America and the Caribbean, and the amount of illiterate people aged over 15 in Brazil totals 14 million.
Currently, the number of publishing houses in Brazil is about 1,500, and the number of bookshops is about 2,000. We need 10,000 for a good balance.
Last month, I read a survey in the newspaper showing that, unfortunately, the number of bookshops has fallen from 1999 to 2006 and that the number of cities with bookshops has decreased by 15,5%. In 2006, only 30% of 5,564 cities in the country had bookshops. In 1999, this percentage was higher, 35.5%.
Perhaps, Brazilian readers are buying books at supermarkets, newsstands and drugstores, or even in the Internet. I hope so!…
Nowadays, there is a huge concentration of publishing houses and bookshops. Major Spanish and American publishing houses have bought some Brazilian groups. Big bookshop groups like FNAC are growing and expanding, and the biggest group – Siciliano – ,with more than 60 bookshops throughout the country, now in economic collapse, will probably be “swallowed??? by Saraiva, with 40 stores. A monopoly could be not good, specially for the small publishers.
The average print run is now 2.000 copies per title. The cover price is not fixed – although we are now starting a big discussion in the market about it.
More than 60% of all the books sold in the country are educational books, and the main buyers are public institutions – sometimes they save our year!
In this universe of fierce competition, we have to learn fast to survive. And we take care of this with professionalism and creativity.
I’ll call your attention to our covers. We have to attract our reader with the nicest covers ever created. Many times I’ve heard from my international authors that my Brazilian cover is the best among 30 other countries where his book was published.
I always look at my schedule thinking about advertising, publicity, book fairs and talks; even though the author is in France, I organize discussion panels and invite specialists just to make noise, have media attention and promote the book.
We are constantly searching for quality in a very competitive market, where consumption does not grow so fast, but the number of offers grows amazingly fast.
We have last year’s balance by the Brazilian Chamber of Books: 310,374,033 copies sold, amounting to about 3 billion reais. The industry has grown almost 15%. But when you take a look at the size of our population, you could see that this is not enough…
So, we do have a market that needs developing and hard work in order to increase the number of readers. For this, the State has created the national program for books and reading (Programa Nacional do Livro e da Leitura). And all aspects such as price, distribution, fairs, media, etc. are sources of concern to the Brazilian publishers and editors.
We have 545 active publishing houses in Brazil – they publish more than 10.000 titles per year – and a big number of small publishing houses that publish a few titles a year but have a great role in our cultural life.
I am a member of LIBRE (the Brazilian League of Publishing Houses) that comprises over 100 small and medium-size publishing houses, specially from the south of the country. In this vast universe, there is me, Sá Editora, fighting for my space, fighting for my choices, fighting for Bibliodiversity.
I believe that the editor has a social responsibility, the responsibility to improve the quality of life. And I do trust that reading books provides people with a better quality of life.

Eliana Sá
Frankfurt, Oct. 2007

NETWORKING FOR BETTER PUBLISHING IN BRAZIL

When thinking about Brazil, with 190,000 inhabitants, with a strong national identity and a surprising linguistic unity, we would imagine a “paradise??? for the publishing industry. No dialects, a single language and a homogeneous culture that allows somebody from the south to have a perfectly clear conversation with somebody in the Amazon, which is about 3,000 miles away. But, in fact, we live in a society with an incredible social-economic rate of inequality, with a reading rate of less than 2 books per person a year.

For my company, a small publishing house in São Paulo, networking is not a circumstance, but a chance to survive. I’d like to present here two experiences: a group experience and another experience I’ve created myself, at my publishing house, Sá Editora.

The networking group experience is called LIBRE (Brazilian League of Publishing Houses) comprising over 100 small and medium-size publishing houses, specially from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Since 2003, when we had our first book fair together, the Spring of Books, we’ve formed a group committed to fighting for a space for the bibliodiversity we could represent in the Brazilian cultural environment.

LIBRE has come into being at the end of a big international book fair in Rio, when a group of small publishers gathered together and thought about a new structure to show our catalogues and sell our production directly to the public. In our case, in Brazil, a traditional existing publishers’ association could not fulfil our needs and new perspectives for the book market.

We said goodbye to the steel and glass stands, big structures that sometimes create a distance from the reader, and opted for stands in raw wood, the same size for all, without giving importance to catalogue sizes or best-sellers rates. We were officially sponsored by the Rio de Janeiro municipality, some banks and insurance companies. The fair’s opening was in the spring of 2003 and now it is part of the official schedule of events in Rio de Janeiro.

Since then, we’ve been having the Spring of Books Fair in Rio and São Paulo and the next one will be held in Rio in November. Moreover, our league started to take shape: a group of discussion was created in the Internet enabling us to talk and discuss about our projects together or even to find out about a bad bookseller or who does a good job of distributing books in the state of Amazon.
We took part in the governmental discussion about book titles to be bought for the National School Program and were able to press them to pay attention to our catalogues and not only to the big companies’ catalogues in the market. Through a special agreement with the Frankfurt Book Fair, we had a representation here for two years. We had some other agreements, such as the one with the French Cultural Services, which allowed us to take part in the French Salon du Livre, publish a book on independent publishing houses and bookshops, and develop a discussion about this theme with our group.

This year, we networked with SEBRAE (Brazilian Small Company Supporting Agency), and they have been coaching us on how to better plan our business, besides giving us support for fairs and exhibitions.

Still, much has to be done in order to develop our identity, plan our way leading us to better professionalism, consolidate our group for direct political action. Recently, LIBRE has had its election, a new group was voted and I’m part of the team – we are engaged in discussing themes such as: a protection law for books, e-commerce, a LIBRE bookshop, participation in fairs, and networking, networking, networking. In fact, I think we are giving a new life for the book market in Brazil, seeking new solutions for old questions, creating new strategies that are certainly contributing to news horizons for our society.

Changing the subject now, I’d like to talk about our experience in publishing the first commercial edition of a Braille book in Brazil, an experience in which I took part personally and professionally.

My only brother is blind, I’m the eldest. Concerning his education, I feel that sometimes I was very helpful and at other times I failed him. In the 60’s and 70’s, there were lots of difficulties with books. Whenever the mail arrived in Fortaleza, where we lived at the time, a city a thousand miles away from São Paulo, we were very happy to receive big boxes with lots of volumes to make up just one book in Braille.
When we were kids, I was used to reading books and my concentration on the reading, my joy and laughs, would upset my brother, as he would not have his sister to play with.

Even nowadays, the situation hasn’t changed that much: books in Braille are still not common, but school books are easier to find because a national foundation takes efficient care of this and there are many offers to be found in educational publishing houses, plus sponsorships and donations.
In the past, any book a blind person had was donated, and this fact must have made them feel as if they were not part of society.

In 2005, I published a book by Sergio, my brother, – CLOSE YOUR EYES TO SEE BETTER. In his book, he speaks about the “senses of the limits and the limits of the senses???. Perhaps this title, a very clever title created by him, inspired me. Talking with Sergio, I learnt more about my own sight and our capacity of reading.

He told me about rhythm, how we could find our own rhythm when reading a text. He told me about imagination, and how much we could create when using our own inner voice. He told me about freedom, about understanding at your own pace, going up and down a page, turning the page to look for something meaningful to you, or trying to find out a secret hidden in a paragraph, phrase or a simple word.

He showed me the pleasure of reading he could have with his fingertips. He also made me understand that having someone reading for him sometimes was not the same. Something with the voice, the speed, the intonation could totally remove the pleasure of reading.

Finally, I realized that blind people would not have access to my brother’s book, a book that talked about them. So, the professional in me came out: by checking the market I could see the “opportunity??? of this project. This way, I started to work in the first commercial non-fiction book in Braille in Brazil. Until recently, it was impossible for a blind person to buy a Braille book in a Brazilian bookshop or even in the Internet, just like any other consumer. I looked for a Braille printing shop, learnt how they layout the pages and revise. I discovered a different printing and editorial process in which the reviewers must be blind. When observing the blind professionals do their job, I remembered myself asking my revisers to work with “open eyes???, however, for the Braille editorial process, the inverse was essential!

Another issue we had to tackle was consumers: as they couldn’t see our ads in bookshops, for our marketing campaign we had to develop new strategies using sound, embossment and the Internet.

The book was presented for the bookshops – a different book, absolutely new for them. It was well-accepted, even when we asked for a minor discount on the cover price, because the printing process was more expensive. Nowadays, books in Braille has become part of the mix of Sá Editora and of the big booksellers in Brazil, inciting reflections about new consumers, patterns of reading, and so forth It also gave us a differential in the market.

Currently, many other initiatives have been developed, especially in the field of children’s books, and as my brother has always said “we must try to use all our senses???. I could feel and now I can share with you this successful experience of “thinking outside of the box???.