Exporter of the week: With the work of Frida Kahlo and Colombian authors, Cangrejo Editores is conquering the world

The publishing industry in Colombia was one of the most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, due to the confinement and virtualization of basic and higher education. As a result, in 2020 and 2021 sales were below the levels recorded in 2019.

Fortunately, in 2022 the situation changed. That year, according to the Colombian Chamber of Books, sales indicators not only reached pre-pandemic levels, but were even surpassed in some of the subsectors that make up the Colombian publishing industry’s offer.

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According to the publishing guild, the sector’s net sales amounted to $900,239 million pesos in 2022, with a growth of 32.9% compared to 2021. This is a real increase, as it is higher than the inflation rate of the previous year.

These figures reveal that the publishing industry has been consolidating its presence in Colombia and the world. A Colombian company born almost three decades ago, whose owners have more than 35 years of experience in the publishing industry, has contributed to this.

This is Cangrejo Editores, a literary culture exporting company, with presence in Latin America, Spain and the Caribbean, which promotes Colombian and Latin American authors of great relevance today.

In this interview with the founder of Cangrejo Editores, Victor Hugo Cangrejo, we highlight the work he has done alongside his sister, Leyla Viviana Cangrejo, which has made them leaders and authorities in positioning exports in the Colombian publishing industry.

Below, you can read the interview, which you can also watch in full in the video located at the top of the page.

How was Cangrejo Editores born and where does the name come from?

Cangrejo Editores comes from the surname of its founders, siblings Leyla Viviana Cangrejo and Victor Hugo Cangrejo.

With 35 years in the publishing business, initially as distributors, we decided to give it a name that would be memorable.

That name could not be other than Cangrejo Editores, which is our surname, because from previous experiences we knew that it was widely remembered in all the fairs we attended.

How did you start the company?

The company started in 1993, initially as a trading company.

As a result of this exercise, we had access to several commercial opportunities, such as international fairs in the publishing industry and important markets in the world such as Mexico, Argentina, Spain and other emerging markets in Latin America. That is how we were inclined to this “little devil” that means to start publishing.

With the experience we had, in the year 2000 we published our first two titles. That same year we started in shape and the family business was consolidated.

Currently, we have around 500 active titles in our catalog under the Cangrejo Editores imprint, and we represent other publishers in the world for Latin America.

What types of books make up this catalog and which are the most outstanding authors?

When we founded our publishing house, one of the premises we set with Leyla was the promotion of Latin American authors.

Especially those who, being very good writers, did not have the opportunity to access the large multinational publishing chains because they did not reach them, due to lack of knowledge or whatever, including, of course, Colombian authors.

Thus, we have dedicated ourselves to being promoters of the very good literature of all Latin American countries.

For example, we have established interesting bridges with several Mexican authors, among them the family of Frida Kahlo, who entrusted us with all the work and the family’s personal archive.

We also have Professor Luis Martín Lozano and Rosa Casanova, director of the National Newspaper Archive of Mexico.

We also have countries such as the Dominican Republic, where we have published anthologies of Dominican authors, and for this we have received recognition from the Dominican Embassy in Colombia.

We also publish Argentinean, Ecuadorian and Venezuelan authors, among others. As you can see, the range of authors is very wide and from different niches, such as children’s, juvenile, general interest, novels, poetry, short stories, essays and journalistic works.

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How does Cangrejo Editores reach these international markets and in which countries does it have a presence?

Another of Cangrejo Editores’ premises was to produce books with great editorial content and high standards.

From the editorial point of view, Leyla Cangrejo does an impeccable job as editor. In addition, we have one of the most important graphic industries in Latin America. This led us to position our imprint for its editorial quality. And, behind this, come the authors.

In South America we are present throughout the subcontinent. In Central America as well, except in Honduras for logistical reasons. We also reach the Caribbean, with Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and Spain. And we are also present in the Spanish-speaking market in the United States, through a distributor in Florida.

The most important markets at the moment are Mexico, Argentina, which is the most widely read country in South America, and a new market we are exploring, which has not been easy, is Brazil, where we already have several of our editions in Portuguese.

How do they arrive?

In the different book fairs, in the meetings we have through our distributors and booksellers in each country.

It has been a process of finding out during these 30 years who are the major distributors and the major players in the book chain in each of the Latin American countries where we are present.

What challenges have you faced with Cangrejo Editores in the process of exporting books and how were they overcome?

Unfortunately, there is no institutional support. Today, we have an entity such as ProColombia that has been supporting exporters, but it has its limitations because it cannot intervene directly in particular disputes. These are the basic challenges.

The other challenges are, for example, language-related. Another challenge has been that of printing; in Colombia we like to print on beige or cream-colored paper, but in Mexico they do not like that color because booksellers assume that it is a paper that has been exposed to the sun and prefer white.

These are the kind of peculiarities that we have had to adjust along the way.

What reproaches do you have from the Colombian publishing industry?

Even when we struggle, Colombian publishers are quite helpless from the institutional, regulatory and political points of view. There is no protection for the Colombian publishing industry, as there is in other countries.

In Mexico, state purchases force a large percentage of resources to go to Mexican publishers. Not in Colombia because there are many multinational players, although thanks to them we have learned many things.

We cannot censure competition or the presence of these foreign companies in the market, but there is a lack of stimulus to the national industry, a lack of institutional support.

What are the challenges facing the publishing industry today in times of artificial intelligence and digital formats?

The answer is: “printed books are not going to disappear”. And I’ll put you in context. About 8 or 10 years ago, at a symposium held at the Guadalajara Book Fair, the electronic book and the e-book were launched with much fanfare, and it was announced that the end of the printed book had begun.

Publishers who loved paper books, the smell of ink, our underlined book with many footnotes and so on, we held our heads and said “My God, this is over”.

But after 10 years we have realized that this was not the case. The e-book has come to occupy an important space and to be an opportunity for a certain type of public that loves reading on a tablet or a computer, but not for all readers.

There are readers who are still seduced by the idea of the printed book on paper. That is why I say that what the publishing industry did was to accommodate and adjust.

The electronic book meant an important advance for the reading of reference books, specific articles and university books, where previously it was necessary to buy the whole book to read half a chapter. Today, it is easily found in an e-book.

What has happened to Artificial Intelligence?

Cangrejo Editores has been adjusting its productions and projects. Today, we already have several books produced in formats such as e-book and e-pub.

These formats are available on our website and on platforms that we have had to reach with them. For example, with Bookwire in Germany, which is a major supplier of electronic content in the world.

This has also led us to think about how we have to complement our production, and we have started the development of audiobooks for Cangrejo Editores.

There are publishers that have been doing it for a long time, but we understood that the audiobook is a necessity. We are already doing it and soon we will have several of our titles available in audiobook.

And on the Artificial Intelligence side, we are going to have a great novelty at the book fair, thanks to a strategic alliance we made with a very important company in the United States.

We are going to incorporate the concept of Artificial Intelligence to our children’s books. Children will even be able to interact, they will be able to get inside the screen of the book project that we are going to present to them and they will be able to practice their languages. They will be able to speak the language they want, practice it, listen to it, read it, pronounce it.

Let’s say that’s what we have, adjusted to this new reality of technology.

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Which is the country that reads the most books in the world and where does Colombia rank?

Until a few years ago, Japan occupied a very important place. A Japanese reads 24 or 25 books a year. Today, the country that reads the most and spends the most hours reading is India, followed by Thailand.

If we look at the ranking of the 20 most reading countries in the world, there is only one from Latin America: Argentina, in 19th place. In Colombia, the average reading rate is 2.4 books a year.

What does Cangrejo do to captivate readers?

Cangrejo Editores has undertaken a very interesting crusade of social responsibility together with an entity called Global Humanitaria, which is working to open, spread, disseminate and captivate readers throughout the Pacific area, specifically in Tumaco.

The objective is to recover these communities that have no other incentive in life than to be captured by irregular groups of whatever tendency, and do not even have television.

We are taking libraries and generating reading promoters, reading workshops, incentives so that more and more children come to read, write and tell us their stories.

What do authors need to be known?

Writers need to be promoted, because unfortunately a phenomenon occurs, and that is that large multinational publishers publish very good authors, but only for the country of origin and leave them there, pigeonholed.

Then, if they are Ecuadorian, they publish the books for Ecuador and make small editions for neighboring countries, but in the rest of the world they are not known. They are part of the catalog, but they are not disseminated.

How do you promote the authors you represent and which are they?

In our case, we promote our authors. Two weeks ago we arrived from Frankfurt, and one of the great sensations was the work of Jorge Eliécer Pardo.

Another of the great books that caught our attention was Los Sabores de mi México, which is the culinary and artistic work of Frida Kahlo, and with that we visualize authors abroad, in Europe, and we make them be seen.

We brought the book by Carlos Jacanamijoy, one of our great Colombian visual artists. We published his work, his retrospective, from 2000 to 2015, and we took it to the Frankfurt Fair this year, and it was a sensation because in Europe they know who Carlos Jacanamijoy is, but they didn’t know he was Colombian.

Now they know he is Colombian. And I reiterate. We must make our Colombian authors more visible. Thanks to the Nobel Prize won by Gabriel García Márquez, the eyes of the world turned to Colombia in terms of literature.

That is why they can look for opportunities and have publishing houses at their service. In addition, there are reading promoters and people in charge of making Colombia’s work and culture more visible in the world.

Other publishing industry figures

According to figures from the Colombian Chamber of Books by subsectors, general interest publications led sales in 2022, with a 41% share of the total amount and followed by education publications, with 29% of the total. Between the two publishing lines, they accounted for 70% of total sales.

In the same year, a total of 46.7 million copies were sold, representing an increase of 51.7% over the previous year. This growth rate is very significant and shows the recovery of the publishing sector after the difficult years of the pandemic, when the demand for publications was severely affected.

According to the Chamber of Books, the publishing industry employed 5,370 people in 2022, an increase of 23.9% over 2021. 89.6% of the staff employed is permanent, while the remaining 10.4% is temporary staff. The largest contribution to employment growth is found in permanent staff, with 16.8 percentage points to the total variation.

Colombia ranked last in the International Tax Competitiveness Index