Lynn Adriani, Publishers Weekly

Lynn Andriani is a senior editor at Publishers Weekly, the international news magazine for the book publishing industry. She writes about publishing trends and authors, and edits the magazine’s popular Soapbox column. In December 2008, she launched the bi-weekly e-newsletter Cooking the Books, covering cookbook news and reviews. Prior to becoming a senior editor at PW, she was a nonfiction book review editor at the magazine. She is a graduate of New York University’s graduate school of journalism and of the Radcliffe Publishing Course. Her writing has appeared on Gourmet.com and TravelandLeisure.com, and in Real Simple, People, the San Francisco Chronicle, Fortune Small Business and Time Out New York. She lives in New York City.

Brazil’s cookbook scene is dominated by books on healthy cooking, tomes by British celebs and a dose of local color

I recently spent a week in Brazil, attending a book fair in Rio de Janeiro and meeting with book publishers in São Paulo. Although the purpose of the trip was for me to get an overview of Brazil’s publishing industry, I also got a fantastic impression of Brazil’s food culture. Like most Latin countries, food is an aspect of any social gathering, even if it’s business-related. For meetings, publishers set out platters of pastries, carafes of Brazilian coffee and pitchers of tropical fruit juices. Lunches were never hurried, beginning with caipirinhas and empadinhas (filled with hearts of palm, cheese or beef), and ending with coconut tapioca pudding. Here’s a look at what I ate in Brazil, how cookbooks are marketed there, and how well one cookbook publisher is doing.

Brazilian steakhouses, or churrascarias, serve meat on massive skewers, with waiters carving it off the bone right onto your plate. I went to Carretão, in Rio’s Copacabana neighborhood, and just like the churrascarias in the U.S., the meat overload was intense. A salad bar offered some modicum of healthy freshness, but really, it was all about the carne. I’d actually chose feijoada over meat at a churrascaria—it’s a classic Brazilian dish brought to South America by the Portuguese, which I had for lunch one day. Brazilians eat the hearty stew made with beans, beef and pork both in restaurants and at home. Cheese puffs called pão de queijo are ubiquitous in Brazil; akin to French gougères, they’re about the size of a golf ball and laced with mild orange cheese (supermarkets sell boxed mixes for making them at home). And then there’s breakfast: a beautiful array of fresh fruits (papaya, pineapple, watermelon and banana, the latter sometimes sprinkled with cinnamon), tropically-flavored yogurts (coconut was my favorite), frothy fruit juices (açai, passion fruit, mango, peach) and coconut water. Of course, the café com leite is fantastic. Brazilians also seem to always have a little something sweet at breakfast, whether it’s a pound cake or their version of the French pain au chocolat.

And what are Brazilians cooking at home? Unfortunately, I didn’t get the opportunity to eat chez a Carioca (resident of Rio) or Paulista (resident of São Paulo), so I can only go on what I saw in the “culinária” sections of the cities’ bookstores. At the swank Shopping Leblon mall in Rio de Janeiro’s Leblon district, just west of Ipanema, amid Armani and Starbucks, is Livraria da Travessa, a gorgeous showpiece of Brazilian publishing, with elegant lighting, small nooks for browsing and nary a price tag (shoppers must scan books themselves at one of the stations around the store for a price check). Two kinds of books dominated Livraria da Travessa’s cookbook section: books on “light” cooking and books by British celebrity chefs, although there were also a smattering of titles on Brazilian cooking, such as 1,000 Receitas de Culinária Brasileira and A Cozinha Amazônica. On the healthy cooking side, titles like Cozinha Light and Comer bem! Como? received spine-out treatment, while books by bestselling Brits Gordon Ramsay, Nigella Lawson and Jamie Oliver were stacked on tables.

Out of the dozen or so publishers I met in Brazil, Senac Editions had the most cookbook-heavy list. I spoke with a few reps from the house at the Bienal do Livro, a massive book fair that’s open to the public and held every year, alternating between Rio and Sao Paulo. Senac has almost 1,000 titles on its backlist, in nonfiction categories ranging from cooking to the environment to fashion. And in a market where 3,000 copies is the average print run, Senac is having terrific success with a few cookbooks this year, going out with a 6,000-copy first printing of Chef Professional, a Portuguese translation of The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America. The hefty book is priced at R$180 (US$100), although it was selling for R$150 (US$84) at the Bienal do Livro. At least two other Senac books, Gula d’África: O Sabor Africano Na Mesa Brasileira and Gastronomia & Historia: Dos Hotéis-Escola Senac Sao Paulo, have won Gourmand World Cookbook Awards.

This story originally appeared in Cooking the Books, PW’s e-newsletter for cookbooks.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6698648.html?q=brazil

As I sipped a delicious cup of coffee Wednesday morning at the Camara Brasileira do Livro, I found myself in the middle of a friendly competition between two of Brazil’s most well-known publishers. The Camara, a group that represents publishers and booksellers in Brazil, had invited us for a breakfast meeting with a handful of its members, and at this moment, I was happily entrenched in conversation with Crisitana Maria Negrao of Cancao Nova, and Sintia Mattar of Cosac Naify. You probably couldn’t pick two more different publishers if you tried, yet these two women were bantering like old friends, each one envious of the other’s success.

You see, Cancao Nova is aligned with a massive Catholic network that includes TV, radio and online properties. In a market where 3,000 copies is the average print run, Cancao Nova typically sells 10,000 copies of its books, and it frequently goes way beyond that (a recent memoir by a well-known priest, who also happens to have a TV show and be a singer, has already sold 400,000 copies). But despite Negrao’s success, she’s envious of Mattar. That’s because Mattar’s house, Cosac Naify, publishes some of the most gorgeous books in Brazil (and probably the world, for that matter). The house began as an art publisher but now publishes fiction, narrative nonfiction and children’s books. Throughout its growth, Cosac Naify’s painstaking attention to producing high-quality books has remained the same. While Cancao Nova never prints in hardcover, Cosac Naify rarely prints in paperback. Cancao Nova prices its books very low, Cosac Naify’s books can run upwards of US$100.

Yet listening to these two women chat on Wednesday morning, their jealous barbs were only thinly disguised as compliments–an impressive testament to Brazilian publishing’s camaraderie.

Visiting the Bienal do Livro in Rio yesterday was quite an experience. The fair is open to the public and draws some 600,000 visitors over the course of 10 days. About 145 Brazilian publishers set up stands and sell their books, often at a 20 to 30% discount. But the scene taking place yesterday in the huge exhibition hall resembled nothing like a giant bookstore. It was more like a rock concert. Hundreds of kids roamed the aisles, flipping through comic books and gawking at a massive Incredible Hulk statue. They came to spend their government-issued vouchers and see Meg Cabot and other well-known American authors. But the real spectacle occurred when Thalita Reboucas stepped onto the floor. The self-help author has a rabid following in Brazil, apparently, so fervent that teens thronged the area where Reboucas was autographing books, shrieking, waving their arms and jumping up and down. It seems Reboucas’ relationship advice for teens has struck a chord with Brazil’s young readers- and at yesterday’s Bienal do Livro, they sang her praises… with screams somewhere around 10 decibels.