Last Tuesday, Salvador López was cashing in on book sales in the pavilion that Tilde Publishing House has set up at the International Book Fair in Monterrey, the great industrial city in northern Mexico. López was satisfied with the sales of his books, despite the fact that his is a small publishing house and must compete with giants in the field such as Planeta, Oceano or Random House in this space that is making its way as one of the main literary meetings. of the country. The boy is in charge of managing the bookstore of this publishing house that is concerned with promoting northern literature, a space closely linked to the border with the United States. “The fair gives us a lot of visibility,” said López. “There are people who did not know our bookstore or the publishing house and here they know that they can find quality literature,” he added. “Sales have been very good, people look for our books, even though the big publishers are always going to pull, because they handle all the new writers, but we are happy with what we have achieved,” López stated.
Tuesday was a day off in Mexico due to the inauguration of President Claudia Sheinbaum. The booksellers feared that visits to the FIL would decrease and with it sales, because some assumed that people would prefer to spend the day at home, with their family, with the traditional barbecues of this region. What they did not expect was the madness that would be unleashed: packed halls, a swarm of humans that made it difficult to move between the fair’s pavilions, and huge lines at the cash registers to buy books. Although the booksellers consulted affirm that the majority of sales are led by self-help books, publishers like López were also satisfied because there is room for an audience that leans toward well-told fiction stories. The Monterrey FIL is, according to its organizers, the fair with the highest spending on books per person in Mexico, 800 pesos (about 40 dollars) per visitor, higher than that of Guadalajara, the main literary meeting in the country and the second most important of the world.
“Tilde is a publisher that cares about these northern and border stories, the relationship of people with this border, which is a geographical space that unites us. It is important to us to promote these voices in literature that would possibly be overshadowed by the literature that we call more canonical,” López explained. Tilde has managed to have her own publishing successes, as has happened with The structure of Andromeda, a novel by Joaquín Hurtado, whose edition has sold out. “It is a very experimental novel that touches on very serious topics such as childhood sexuality, AIDS or people who live on the margins of society. We have already finished this novel and we are going to print a new edition,” explained the bookseller. Another success has been We queens are normal peoplea compilation of chronicles, essays and narratives from voices of the LGBT community. Tilde will also release a new collection that its editors have called Borderswith books of poetry, essays, criticism and narrative.
If a small, local publisher has achieved satisfactory sales at FIL, the industry’s largest publishers do their business of the year at this fair. Pedro Antonio Roque, bookseller advisor in the Editorial Planeta pavilion, said that since last weekend, when the literary meeting opened, people have flocked to the fair and with great enthusiasm to the Planeta shelves. “It has been quite busy, sales have been quite good,” said Roque. “This fair allows the reading level in this State (Nuevo León) to continue growing and for great authors to come to this region,” he added.
In this edition, Monterrey has brought together names of the stature of the Pulitzer Prize winner Cristina Rivera Garza, Juan Villoro or the Monterrey writer David Toscana, who was in charge of the FIL’s inaugural speech. “We have recorded good sales, we are highly sought after by the public. “We have sold more than in past years,” said Roque, although the large publishers do not present official figures for their sales. What people are looking for in this huge pavilion are mainly self-improvement books, titles like Atomic habitsby James Clear, which gives tips for improving your lifestyle, from exercise to saving. The book is the best seller on the Amazon platform. Children’s and young people’s books are also high on this publisher’s sales list.
Readers also look for the works of great Mexican authors. Roque has stated that a new edition of José Emilio Pacheco’s books has been well received by its visitors in the pavilion, at the entrance to which they have placed a huge image of the Mexican poet, novelist and journalist. “This fair is essential for the State to evolve around the arts. It is important because it helps literary growth in the region. Not only does it have weight in the economic issue, because it is a great support for us and other companies, but it encourages people who do not have the habit of reading to delve into literature,” commented Roque.
Another who was satisfied with the sales was Antonio Solares, from Oceano, one of the large pavilions of the fair. “There is a lot of movement. We are not even halfway through the week and we are already doing very well with sales, because Monterrey is a good place for selling books, a lot of people come,” Solares said on Tuesday, although he did not offer the number of works sold. The most purchased book in this pavilion was This pain is not minea psychological essay that presents tools to heal family traumas. Youth and children’s literature triumphs here, Solares stated, although in the pavilion there is also a large space for the collections of Anagrama, a publisher renowned for the care of the titles and authors it publishes.
Those who have given numbers of their sales are the members of the team at the Fondo de Cultura Económica (FCE), the large Mexican public publishing house. On Tuesday there was hardly any room to move in their pavilion, another of the greats of the FIL. People gathered next to the low-cost editions published by the publisher and children pulled their parents in the children’s literature area. “It is the great sales opportunity of the year for booksellers in northern Mexico,” said Juan Carlos Ramos, head of the FCE delegation in Monterrey. “We had very high expectations and I think they have been met. The first weekend was excellent and today it is bursting at the seams,” said Ramos, who also reported that as of Tuesday they had almost reached 3,000 books sold. “It is 15% above what was sold last year,” he noted. “Visit statistics are increasing. After the pandemic there was an extraordinary boom and it has continued,” Ramos explained in reference to the covid-19 pandemic that represented a hard blow to the publishing industry. “It is one of the platforms that has helped us recover. For us the biggest sale of the year. Last year we sold more than 10,000 copies and this year we hope to surpass that. I don’t think that either the book or the readers are going to become extinct,” the bookseller stated smiling.
The organizers of the Monterrey FIL have wanted to imbue this event with a more international touch, so that it stops being seen only as a local event and positions it as one of the great literary meetings of the year. Behind the fair is the support of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, one of the large private universities in Mexico, and that of the main companies of this industrial city, which see in this fair an opportunity to position their image in support of culture. The FIL also tries to be a bridge that unites the populations of the southern United States and northern Mexico, in a very large region that is one of the richest in this Latin American power. Monterrey wants to break with a prejudice that carries as a city not open to the arts and to this end, public and private initiative has supported the opening of new museums, cultural centers, music festivals and this fair. The governor of the State, Samuel García, participated in the opening of the event, taking a walk through the pavilions full of books.
“We want to enhance the creative industries through books,” Carmen Junco de la Vega, president of the FIL, explains to this newspaper. “Nuevo León is a State with a very strong industrial potential and has a business group very committed to its community, to education, poverty, eradicating hunger, and sustainability. We design projects with each sponsoring company focused on their areas of interest,” says Junco in relation to the relationship they maintain with the strong businessmen of the region to keep the fair alive and grow each year. One of those spaces that support companies like Lego is the Pavilion of the Childhood, a 2,000 square meter space with areas for play, children’s concerts and the promotion of reading in children.
The president of the FIL, who walked proudly through that enormous space on Tuesday, commented that the Fair also wants to position itself as a meeting for discussion and academic, scientific and technological research, promoted by the faculties of the Tecnológico de Monterrey and with relations with other large universities. In fact, this year the guest of honor of the fair is the Autonomous University of Mexico (UAM), which celebrates 50 years of being founded. The university participates with a 200-meter pavilion where more than 2,000 titles are exhibited, including academic works and literary classics, such as a beautiful edition of the complete poetry of the British-American writer TS Eliot.
“We feel very flattered,” said Yissel Arce, general coordinator of UAM Culture Dissemination. “There is a very extensive history of the University contributing to different fields of knowledge and a history also in terms of how the university’s publishing work has accompanied teaching, research and the dissemination of culture,” he commented. Arce and his colleague Marco Moctezuma, deputy director of distribution and publishing promotion at the university, expressed satisfaction with the reception of readers and the sale of the books they publish. “The book fairs were the most important triggering element to revitalize the publishing industry in Mexico after the pandemic hit,” stated Moctezuma.
“Fairs are the element that supports and drives the work done in the publishing industry. It is a fact that being able to have access to this amount of books that you find at a fair is a huge opportunity for readers,” he explained. Moctezuma has said that around 2,500 titles are published each year in Mexico and that it is difficult for bookstores to display them properly, so these events are a luxury opportunity for publishers. “For us this year has been an explosion of sales,” stated the academic. In four days they had sold more than 1,000 copies of the titles published by the university, almost 25% of the material they had brought to the fair, so by mid-week they expected to fill their shelves again. Not bad for a space focused mostly on academic dissemination. “We are focused on academic production, but we try to encourage other narrative possibilities that contribute to the development of critical thinking, such as poetry, fiction or other literary genres,” commented Arce. She and Moctezuma, smiling, were happy to participate in a fair, open until the weekend, with an enthusiastic audience willing to invest in that old technology we call a book.