Publishers Weekly reports that HarperCollins, faced with a 75 percent decline in profits over last year, has sought to plug the leaky dike by, among other things, gutting Rayo, its Spanish-language US imprint.
Rene Alegria, the pioneering head of Rayo, and Cecilia Molinari were two of the three people let go. Rayo will continue to operate, according to the article, but with far fewer titles.
Gomez has mixed feelings about all this. One the one hand, it was kind of cool to have Rayo pumping out books for a "domestic Latino market," in Spanish. On the other hand, no one was buying those books.
Here's a hint from Gomez to HarperCollins: Latinos in the US read, but we tend to read in English. Those of us in this country who speak primarily Spanish are usually too poor and too busy to read sex-diet books and Univision tell-alls in Spanish. By the time those folks' kids are old enough to read for fun, they are reading in English. It's simple math, really.
Those of us who are fully bilingual and read for pleasure are most likely to read in English, though we do get turned off by the plethora of books featuring us as the bad guys, maids, gardeners, miserable immigrants etc.
Maybe if HarperCollins focused on giving Gomez a more realistic version of ourselves, and stopped doing things like giving Donald Trump seven figures for a book that eventually sold 87,000 copies, they wouldn't be losing so much money.
Just a thought.
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1 comments:
What an excellent observation. It put into words something I innately understood but could not describe. I am an avid reader, largely due to the fact that Mami read to me all the time. As a pre-schooler, I didn't actually know any live people named Dick or Jane, but they were some of my best friends.
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