Journalist Trip to Brazil: 14-18 September

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

My visit to the 28th Bienal do Livro, which took place from the 10th to the 20th September in Rio de Janeiro, got off with a real bang when the arrival of teenage self-help author Thalita Rebouças caused Brazilian schoolchildren up and down the fair’s numerous aisles to scream, shout and stampede with the volume and hysterics usually reserved for pop stars. Sore eardrums aside, it was a real privilege to see children en masse get so excited about an author, and their enthusiasm really set the tone for the whole fair while I was there.

Out of the 600,000 public visitors at this year’s fair about 200,000 were children and for the fair’s main organisers Sindicato Nacional dos Editores de Libros (SNEL) this high number is essential to success, as the fair itself is less about selling foreign rights and more about selling books.

Book prices in Brazil are incredibly high and many of the publishers in attendance sold their books off with 20% or 50% discounts as well as bringing in backlist titles that are no longer available in smaller Brazilian bookshops. In order to promote literacy to the young (in a country where reading levels are very low, especially in the north and mid-west) SNEL gives 500 reais to every public school to facilitate a trip to the fair each year as well as five reais to every child so that they can buy books for themselves.

Over the fair’s 11 days there were 84 events created especially for children and the children’s Book Forest, an interactive area which covers 800 sq m, was designed specifically to attract younger children and leave then feeling excited and enthused about literature.

Although this year’s fair saw well-known international authors including Meg Cabot (who is incredibly popular in Brazil), David Grann, Bernard Cornwell and Joseph O’Neill fly over to discuss their books, commercially the fair lacks an international presence, with Brazilian companies making up about 95% of the 154 exhibitors. Those 154 exhibitors sold off 100,000 titles (including 1,000 new publications) in an area of 55,000 s qm. The Bienal is
primarily a promotional activity (a giant bookshop if you will) designed to foster good reading habits in the young rather than produce business deals and publishing partnerships.

The fair’s organisers, including Câmara Brasileira do Livro (CBL) who organise the fair in Sao Paulo (the fair swaps location each year between the two cities) are hoping to change this over the coming years however. Both CBL and SNEL are keen to expand the
professionalisation of the fair and SNEL is now hopeful that at the next Bienal do Livro in Rio in 2011 the first day will be closed to the public so that foreign publishers, agents and authors can come to discuss those all important rights deals and hopefully bring the Brazilian book market to the international spotlight.

First published at www.thebookseller.com

http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs//97924-hysteria-at-the-bienal.html

Things get official on the third day of our trip to Brazil. Our group of journalists and our escorts from the Book Fair are guests of the Camara Brasileira do Livro (CBL), the Brazilian Chamber of Books, the organisation with publishing companies, book trade businesses, literary agents and authors as its members.

Wednesday, 16 September, Day Three:
From our hotel, it’s only about 20 minutes through the attractively located district of Pinheiros to the Camara offices. It’s one of the rare occasions when we walk somewhere, usually travelling on this trip by plane or minibus.

The CBL also organises the book fair in São Paulo every two years, whilst the Bienal do Livro in Rio is the responsibility of the partner association SNEL (Sindicato Nacional dos Editores de Livros) which primarily represents the national interests of the Brasilian book industry.

The generous breakfast and chats with the publishers taking part are followed by a crash course in the Brazilian book business. The difficulties of a market which reaches only about a seventh of the total population (approx. 25 million potential book buyers) are obvious. Proper book business only exists in the cities and big towns – a distribution network for books as we know it in Germany is still something the Brazilians can only wish for.

As well as its market activities, the Brazilian industry works with the support of the government on behalf of book distribution and to promote reading. The Plano Nacional do Livro e Leitura is exemplary in its work here, with José Castilho Marques Neto telling us about its projects and aims.

After lunch in the restaurant (fillet of beef with mange-tout peas and cassava puree) we visit the Editora Cançao Nova (or “New Song”), a publishing company for religious literature. Editora Cançao Nova is one of the media companies run by Cançao Nova, a Catholic Charismatic society founded in 1978, with operating bases in Brazil, Europe, Israel and the USA. It could be seen as having been set up as a Catholic answer to the strongly expanding Evangelical movement which is very popular in Brazil.

Publishing director Cristina Maria Negrao can be happy with the success of her publishing programme. Unlike colleagues in other publishing companies, she manages to distribute tens of thousands of copies of a good many (edification) titles. The magic word is direct sale. Representatives are out and about for Cançao Nova everywhere in the country, offering and selling books on the doorstep (the catalogue is entitled “Porta a Porta” – “Door to Door”). Ms Negrao explains the sales concept as follows: “In Brazil, there are five social strata: A, B, C, D and E. Whilst the fiction and academic publishing companies sell to A and B, we offer our books to C and D.” That does not mean the very poor and illiterate, but people with four to eight years of school education. Accordingly the books are kept in simple, easily understood language that does not ask too much of their readers.

First published at http://www.boersenblatt.net/340452/