After more than two decades of book signings, festival appearances, and university talks, there’s one question that author Héctor Tobar finds himself constantly fielding. “People have asked me, literally hundreds of times, ‘Can I get this book of yours in Spanish?’ ” Tobar says. “And almost always, the answer is no.”

Tobar’s past five books—three novels and two works of nonfiction—have been translated into 15 languages. But until now, only one of them had been translated into Spanish. Even his 2005 book Translation Nation: American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States is not available in the nation’s second-most-spoken language.

Most Spanish translations go through publishing houses based in Spain. Tobar’s 2014 book Deep Down Dark, an account of the 2010 Chilean mining rescue (later adapted into a feature film), was released in Spanish by Barcelona-based Ediciones Paídos. But Tobar, a lifelong Angeleno, suspects that Spanish publishers’ understanding of Spanish-language readers “is much different than what mine is.” In his estimation, the Spanish-language reader in the U.S. “isn’t all that different from the English-language reader.”

So for Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of ‘Latino’, released in spring 2023, Tobar and his publisher, Sean McDonald at MCD Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, decided to take the translation question into their own hands. On September 24, coinciding with the book’s paperback release, MCD and Picador (FSG’s trade paperback arm) will publish a Spanish-language edition translated by Laura Muñoz Bonilla and Tiziana Laudato. With Nuestras Almas Migrantes, MCD’s first Spanish-language title, Tobar feels that “everyone at FSG and MCD is staking out new territory.”

Organic and cohesive

In the world of adult publishing, it’s relatively rare for traditionally English-language imprints to publish in-house Spanish-language editions of their own titles. Usually, Spanish-language editions are the purview of foreign publishers that have acquired the translation rights or of the dedicated Spanish-language imprints of U.S. publishers, such as Penguin Random House’s Vintage Español or HarperCollins’s HarperEnfoque.

“When we made the deal, I had hoped that we could do it in Spanish,” McDonald says of Our Migrant Souls, which he acquired in late 2021. “But I didn’t really know what that was going to entail.”

McDonald had put out one previous in-house Spanish edition before—a translation of Joshua Davis’s 2014 book Spare Parts, which was released by FSG as a tie-in to the 2015 film adaptation. “In that case,” he says, “FSG had all the rights and we struck a deal with a Mexican publisher [Editorial Oceáno] that handled the translation. We just licensed it back from them.”

But as Our Migrant Souls, which is McDonald and Tobar’s fifth book together, gained momentum throughout 2023—earning critical acclaim, including a PW star and the Kirkus Prize—McDonald says he felt a growing need to ensure the book became “the full work that we wanted it to be.” That meant getting it into Spanish.

“Obviously, we’re used to doing this in the other direction—hiring translators into English,” McDonald says, admitting that he was initially “a little intimidated about taking on the translation on our own.” Publishing a Spanish-language translation poses unique challenges, he acknowledges. But through it all, he was motivated to “just get it done.”

Because MCD’s corporate parent Macmillan doesn’t have an in-house Spanish-language division, the easiest, most readily available option would have been to license a Spanish edition. But that would have meant “taking our hands off the book completely,” McDonald says—something he and Tobar didn’t want to do. “I wanted it to feel organic, and cohesive.”

In the end, he says, it did. “I had been worried about copyediting and proofreading and all of that, but everyone here was very game and it wasn’t as tricky as I thought it might be to bring in Spanish-language copy editors and proofreaders. It all seemed to go smoothly.”

He notes that it “definitely helped” to have several Spanish speakers in-house, including assistant editor Ben Brooks and creative director Rodrigo Corral. In every sense, bringing the Spanish edition to life was a team effort, from finding the right translators to the production process.

Another valuable teammate in the process of bringing Our Immigrant Souls to Hispanophone readers has been Audible Latino, which licensed the Spanish-language audio from MCD. In Audible Latino, McDonald says he is grateful to have a partner that knows Spanish-language publishing and has been able to offer guidance along the way.

“To know that they were committing to [Spanish-language titles] as a market was encouraging, and inspired a sense of, ‘Oh, we should be in this space,’ ” McDonald says. “And that’s generally been my sense with this book, and other books, where it’s like, there’s an audience to be publishing to, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t do it.”

Catching up

McDonald was also assured about the plan to publish a Spanish-language edition by another key constituency: booksellers. Numerous booksellers McDonald spoke to, including Mitchell Kaplan of Books & Books in Miami, described successful bilingual in-store events attended by both English speakers and their Spanish-speaking parents.

“That just sounded like, that’s what we want, that’s what this book is trying to do, that’s the kind of conversation this book is trying to start,” McDonald says. “Hearing from booksellers made it feel like, ‘Oh, we can sell this. We can figure out how to do this.’ ”

Children’s publishing has already set off on this path: many children’s book publishers regularly do in-house Spanish translations. This fall, for example, Candlewick, Charlesbridge, and Holiday House will all release a number of their titles in Spanish.

Generally, titles by or about Latinx individuals tend to be the ones to get in-house Spanish translations. Candlewick, for instance, has translated many of Meg Medina’s books with Latina protagonists; Little, Brown Books for Young Readers has released Spanish-language editions of Mexican author-illustrator Marcelo Verdad’s two picture books; Holt Books for Young Readers offers a Spanish-language edition of Bravo! Poems About Amazing Hispanics by Margarita Engle and illustrated by Rafael López; and Penguin’s popular Who Was...? biography series has included Spanish editions for over a decade, with many of the more than two dozen titles on offer about such Latinx icons such as César Chavez, Frida Kahlo, and Sonia Sotomayor. But cultural specificity isn’t the sole criterion, as evidenced by LBYR’s Spanish editions of picture and board books by popular authors Todd Parr and Sandra Boynton.

Slowly, adult publishing is showing signs of catching up, recognizing the relatively untapped market of more than 40 million Americans who speak Spanish at home. Grand Central Publishing, for one, has been “publishing very selectively in Spanish,” per VP and executive director of publicity and marketing Matthew Ballast. Its handful of Spanish-language editions include translations of two 2012 James Patterson novels, both tie-ins into their movie releases, and a forthcoming reissue of its in-house translation of Rudolfo Anaya’s landmark Chicano novel Bless Me, Ultima.

Workman and DK have also published Spanish editions of select cookbooks, including Leanne Brown’s 2015 Good and Cheap, Stuart Farrmond’s 2017 The Science of Cooking, and Joshua Weissman’s 2021 An Unapologetic Cookbook. And this November, in a first for the indie publisher, Counterpoint Press will simultaneously publish English and Spanish editions of Aquilino Gonell’s memoir American Shield.

Oftentimes, in-house translations come together with the encouragement—or at the urging—of authors. Bold Type Books has put out several Spanish-language editions of its titles, including Nelson Antonio Denis’s War Against All Puerto Ricans (2015), Ed Morales’s Fantasy Island (2019), and Selenis Leyva and Marizol Leyva’s My Sister (2020). In the case of War Against All Puerto Ricans, Bold Type publisher Clive Priddle says it was Denis who was “key to us believing that two markets existed” and that he could effectively reach them.

“We allowed ourselves to trust his judgment,” Priddle says. “And I’m glad we did.”

Priddle attributes the success of the Spanish-language edition to Denis’s “willingness to support a publicity tour in Puerto Rico” and a concerted effort to work with the island’s local retailers, both of which “took a lot of personal effort and relationship-building and a very dynamic Latino rep”—Edison García, senior manager of international sales at Ingram Publisher Services. In the coming years, he predicts, in-house Spanish translations will become more common, particularly in “more commercial spaces.” But he concedes it’s slow going. “The key is choosing the authors and books that can really work.”

The next step

So, what works? One such example is Luis Miranda Jr.’s memoir Relentless, published in May by Hachette Books, which was recently folded into Grand Central Publishing. The paperback translation, Incansable, was the imprint’s first Spanish-language title.

“It became clear in the early stages that we couldn’t do the book justice without serving people who prefer to read in Spanish,” says Grand Central editorial director Brant Rumble, who describes it as “a political memoir by a proud Boricua.” He also acknowledges the practical benefits of handling and distributing the translation internally. “By doing the Spanish-language edition in-house, we were able to streamline all processes to ensure a smooth simultaneous launch. And, of course, from a business perspective, we’re happy to serve our Spanish-language readers with titles by authors who they are excited about.”

Rumble says Relentless’s dual-language publication is an “experience [that] has expanded our awareness of what we can do” as well as “a success that we’d like to replicate.”

Of course, marketing and promoting Spanish-language titles to Hispanophone readers poses challenges for traditionally English-language imprints. One of the most notable challenges it that less than 5% of publishing employees in the U.S. identify as Latinx.

Working on a title like Incansable “underscores the importance of having a workplace that represents the full U.S. market,” says Michael Barrs, who was executive director of marketing for Hachette Books before the reorganization. (His new title is VP and associate publisher at Little, Brown.) “Fortunately, we have members of the marketing and publicity and sales teams who are native Spanish speakers and who have close ties to Puerto Rico.” Hachette also worked with a Spanish-speaking member of its international sales team, associate director Jennifer Gray, to produce a book launch in Puerto Rico, funding the event with marketing dollars.

At MCD, McDonald concedes that “the hard part” of publishing an in-house Spanish edition like Nuestras Almas Migrantes—promoting and selling the book—“is still coming.” The campaign for the book, says Picador associate publisher Hank Cochrane, includes collaborating with Spanish-language media outlets, leveraging social media platforms popular in Spanish-speaking communities, and partnering with bookstores and literary organizations that focus on Spanish-language literature.

Cochrane adds that MCD is looking to produce special events and author events in regions with significant Spanish-speaking populations. MCD, for example, already has a strong presence in Los Angeles, where it is a founding publisher sponsor of North Figueroa Bookstore in the historically Latinx neighborhood of Highland Park.

McDonald says that being in constant conversation with Spanish-speaking colleagues, booksellers in bilingual markets, and Tobar have all been invaluable to crafting the marketing campaign. Tobar, for one, says he suspects that “Spanish-language media will be thrilled to hear from a major New York publishing house.” And the experience so far has left both McDonald and Cochrane eager to explore the possibility of future Spanish-language editions.

“I’d love to do as much of it as we can,” McDonald says. While he acknowledges that “no one wants us to try to be multilingual publishers—we certainly specialize in one thing,” some translation “feels like a natural expansion.”

A road for books that follow

For Tobar, Nuestras Almas Migrantes also makes “a statement about the kind of book Spanish-language readers are interested in.” In surveying the current landscape of in-house translations, most skew commercial, while Tobar’s books are by his own admission “a bit on the intellectual, artsy side, for lack of better word.” Publishing houses in Spain, too, appear to have a “very downmarket notion” of what Hispanophone readers in the U.S. want, he says. “So, in doing this, FSG and MCD might be pioneering a road for books that follow.”

Moreover, the publication has a symbolic weight to it, in that it acknowledges a vibrant—and growing—community in the U.S. that is often overlooked and excluded by the publishing industry. “It’s a wonderful recognition that a fair share of American readers are people who also read in Spanish, or who read in Spanish as their primary language,” Tobar says.

Personally, Tobar is excited to share the book not just with his Hispanophone fans but also with his family. His uncle Antonio, an immigrant himself, had previously attempted to read the book in English, painstakingly, with a dictionary by his side.

“Soon,” Tobar says, “I’ll get a chance to send one off to my relatives in Guatemala and have them read Our Migrant Souls en español.”