Producing an 80-page book costs L50,000 in the capital

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS.- “The writer Matías Funes (father) stated that when he worked in the merchant navy, he went from port to port. Upon returning to Honduras he went from door to door offering books to potential readers,” recalled the renowned Honduran historian Mario Argueta, to imply the various difficulties faced by the writers in the country.

And the path of an author who decides to publish his texts or books Every day it becomes narrower, since production costs in publishing houses are high due to the increase in the cost of materials.

Added to this is the difficulty they face in a society that is not very given to the field of reading. For Argueta, the costs of paper, ink, materials and labor are increasing more and more, leaving the option of publishing only in digital format.

In relation to this topic, the writer Mayra Navarro said that there are a series of challenges for the author when trying to publish their work, mainly when they try to do so for the first time: editorial rejection, competition in the market, an adequate audience, among others.

For the cultural manager Salvador Madrid, the book as an object in Honduras continues to be quite basic because the necessary raw material is lacking, “normally it continues to be produced with low quality cardboard and bond paper, and if one wants to make higher quality books the “The cost is very high,” he considered.

Madrid indicated that the production price of a work depends on the quality of the materials, the length of the book and the design: “Designing a hardcover book with cream editorial paper is not the same as designing it with bond paper.”

For a work to take shape it requires several processes, first of all, there is the selection of an author, then the review of the material, which involves completely editing the text.

“This has a cost that will depend on the length of the book,” he indicated. However, he estimated that a book with a length of 70 to 80 pages costs approximately 40 to 50 thousand lempiras.

For his part, the art critic and author of several books, Carlos Lanza, considered that in the country “there is no editorial policy of publication codes or protocols.

It seems to me that each publisher should have a committee that studies what is published and determines whether it is publishable or not. In addition, he reflected that in Honduras “absolutely no one who is a serious writer can think that they are going to get rich publishing books.

“One publishes books to leave a mark on history and science in Honduras,” he stated.

The Marketing Manager of the MG Editorial Group, Diana Moya, said that although the company’s business is the production of educational texts, “costs increase year after year, there is never a drop,” she stated.

Publishers like MG, which have already been in the market for 34 years, manage to establish themselves with technological tools that serve as support.