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Sixteen months after the start of the pandemic, Spain resumed Sant Jordi, Madrid Book Fair and some of its most important literary festivals and encounters. Compared to other industries, the publishing sector has endured the effects of the health crisis with a much greater margin, and even with slight relief with respect to other areas of cultural endeavor. The performing arts or live music cannot say the same.
According to the figures of the Federation of the Publishers’ Guild, reading grew after the pandemic and with it the sale of books. After an atypical 2020, in which confinement turned everything into a telematic querm, 2021 appealed to other formulas to give a return to the forms of socialization of the book: from signatures through the Internet or conversations via Zoom to meetings with limited capacity or reduced elections of your most important events. Also the labels – whether they belong to large groups or not – rethought and organized their catalogs with a very clear criterion: experiments the just.
All publishers, or at least a good majority, opted for safe stocks. It is about programming and concentrating in its novelties the great returns that will mobilize readers, either because of their career (well-known authors with long careers) or because of their immediately previous successes. There are few experiments on the shelves right now, except Ana Iris Simon and his ‘Fair’ (Chalk Circle), which is actually a book prior to the spring novelties or the autumn ‘rentrée’.
The same publishing season has concentrated on canonical bestsellers such as Maria Dueñas, who returned to the protagonist of ‘The time between seams’ in ‘Sira’ (Planet), with those who ‘confirm alternative’ as Manuel Jabois with ‘Miss Marte’ (Alfaguara); those who had not published for a long time, for example Milena Busquets, which after ‘This too will pass’ (Anagram) returns with ‘Gem’ (Anagram); also a Javier Marias in a state of grace, and that five years after ‘Berta Isla’ he returns with ‘Tomás Nevinson’ (Alfaguara).
The spring concentrated its releases also on names such as Javier Cercas, which reaps success and controversy with ‘Independencia’ (Tusquets) after the Premio Planeta and the change of group; or Sergio del Molino, which upon his landing in Alfaguara with ‘La piel’ has now added ‘Against Empty Spain’ (Alfaguara), an essay that expands and complicates those pages of that Turner essay that ended up becoming argumentative for more than one politician who had the bad taste of changing empty for empty. Autumn also draws on authors with a literary predicament and whose media presence broadens their margin of influence. And how!
The canonical example of the author of weight and known by all is Arturo Pérez-Reverte, which returns in autumn with ‘El italiano’ (Alfaguara); as well as Fernando Aramburu, who presents ‘Los vencejos’ (Tusquets), a novel that critics and readers await after the hurricane ‘Patria’. If you like, the editors do not yet know; What is clear is that all the signs point in the clearest direction: let the numbers come out. After the pandemic, it is clear that they sell and will continue to sell books and even the most punctual of the descriptions of the strategy shows it.
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