This content was published on June 29, 2022 – 12:06
veronica dalto
Buenos Aires, June 29 (EFE) .- Youth literature is in “effervescence” in Argentina, where the publishers themselves are surprised by the increase in sales and the weight of the segment and bookfluencers are “very important”, with their recommendations and great call to promote the novelties.
“I read on the collective (bus) for the first time and it was because of this book,” says @america.vespucia. “It was not a very pleasant experience, but for this book… life,” she exclaims on her TikTok account to spread enthusiasm for “The girl who fell beneath the sea.”
“This book is worth every page,” insists @guada.casta in a review set to a Bach violin concerto of “Things We Lost in the Fire,” a horror anthology of empowered women, and warns the reader who is scary and who is going to have a “little bad time”, but warns: “If you read it during the day, I swear that nothing is going to happen to you”.
The direct, untraditional and honest dialogue with their peers characterizes the bookfluencers -most of them women-, who for a decade have been evolving with the platforms -YouTube, Instagram, TikTok- and feeding the youth literature movement that Harry Potter and that grows in Argentina also hand in hand with the adaptation of children’s books to the cinema and streaming.
“There is an effervescence that is happening at the moment,” Cristina Alemany, president of the youth activities commission at the El Libro Foundation, told Efe.
Sales of youth literature grew 48% year-on-year on average in the first five months of 2022, according to the Argentine Chamber of Publications (CAP), but they have doubled in some publishers that have had very large ‘bestsellers’, numbers that stand out after several years in which book sales have generally declined.
And the Argentine bookfluencers “have a very wide audience that is eager to see them and meet them in person,” Alemany described, with an imprint that “is the typical one that Argentines have for everything they do, which is that passion, that desire and that claw” and that in addition “they have fulfilled more of a socialization function through literature”, since the boys become friends: “They start with books and go out together”.
ELBOW TO ELBOW
“Bookfluencers are very important for publishers,” the president of the CAP, María Inés Redoni, told Efe, who said that they constitute “the most important way to spread news.”
The publishers work “side by side” with the bookfluencers, who in Argentina are in their second generation, from 17 to 20 years old, who began with a path made by the first, started ten years ago, with young people who today are between 20 and 30 years
Through one lane of the link run the reviews made by the bookfluencers of the books they choose from the list of novelties sent by the publishers.
“They give you an opinion of the book from their emotions, their feelings, from their empathy,” Alemany described, noting: “The best thing that can happen to you is for a bookfluencer to say ‘I loved this book’, although they can also say no.” They don’t like it at all.”
They have the ability to create a `bestseller`, like @almendrada.books after the review that went up on TikTok of “Matilde must die” went viral, a book that did not sell much, but had to be published. print again and went on to be at the top of sales in bookstores: “It was a flash,” he told the meeting of bookfluencers at the last Book Fair.
Readers like it when someone like them is telling them to read a book, not a parent or teacher.
In addition, bookfluencers have joined publishers to do text evaluation, editing, proofreading or communication tasks, marketing and social networks or are called to make book presentations.
MOTOR
“Today the young reader is very important for publishing companies. Youth literature or fiction occupies a preponderant place that it did not have a few years ago” and, in some cases, “the youth segment drives the sales of the publisher in general”, explained Redoni.
And he added that the “repeated presence” of titles for young people in the rankings of `bestsellers’, which usually occupy books for adults, is striking.
Young people demand books that deal with themes of sexual diversity, romance, fantasy, witches, adventures, science fiction, but also classics and their adaptations or new versions and poetry.
They prefer books in physical format, in part, because they like to “share” the reading experience with their friends, which “also helps make the phenomenon bigger,” Redoni said.
“Many are already reading adult things too. Good for publishers to think that we have readers for a while”, Alemany rejoiced, because “when they start reading at 12 years old they don’t leave anymore”. EFE
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