St. Martin's Press was banking on a hit when it released The Dirty Girls Social Club on April 22. The publisher deemed the tale of six American-born Latina women who stay friends after college so compelling that it gave first-time novelist Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez a $475,000 advance for North American and audio rights. After the AP ran a wire story on the deal, Valdes-Rodriguez was dubbed a "Latina Terry McMillan," though at least one newspaper columnist wondered whether that high concept might outshine the story. Now, a little more than two months after the book's publication, another question looms: Has the book's commercial performance lived up to expectations?
When St. Martin's rushed out 125,000 hardcover copies of the English-language edition and 10,000 copies of the Spanish edition a month ahead of the original May pub date, the hope was that Dirty Girls would perform on par with the house's 2002 hit, The Nanny Diaries. But Lauren Weisberger's fashion industry roman à clef, The Devil Wears Prada (Doubleday, Apr. 15), moved faster up the New York Times bestseller list.
Though Dirty Girls hasn't cracked the Times top 15, the novel has lingered among the top 25 for 11 weeks, reaching a high of #20 on May 11. While its feisty author has been the subject of scores of print features and appeared on the Today show, mixed reviews in USA Today and regional newspapers may have slowed its sales trajectory.
But the book is still selling, as Valdes-Rodriguez finishes the final lap of her 20-city tour. In Houston, 500 people recently attended her reading at a Latino performance space. Another 250 crammed into independent Books & Books in Coral Gables, Fla. Meanwhile, St. Martin's has 130,000 copies in print after three trips to press.
How do those figures stack up against comparable breakouts by first-time writers? Doubleday paid substantially less for Weisberger's novel—a $200,000 advance—and has shipped 340,000 copies over the 11 weeks the book has spent on the New York Times bestseller list. And Knopf paid a mid—six-figure advance for Allison Pearson's I Don't Know How She Does It (2002), which sold roughly 300,000 copies after a 23-week run on the bestseller list.
Of course, it could be argued that the gamble St. Martin's took with the advance gave Dirty Girls its edge. "The combination of the large advance and the author's bad-girl reputation created a buzz that left people wanting to read that book," observed Books and Books owner Mitch Kaplan. News of a movie deal added heat. But analyzing Dirty Girls' performance by the standards of mainstream commercial fiction tells only half the story. In the context of Latino publishing, the book undeniably represents a major benchmark.
In the '70s and early '80s, classic works of U.S. Latino literature like Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me Ultima seemed relegated to obscurity, often overshadowed by hugely popular Latin American writers. That is, until a little-known poet and author named Sandra Cisneros published The House on Mango Street in 1984 with Arte Publico Press. The tiny, Latin-owned house sold around 30,000 copies before Vintage bought reprint rights in 1990, and began shipping an average of 250,000 copies a year, totaling 2.2 million copies overall.
Oscar Hijuelos's second novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (FSG, 1989), overcame other barriers. Not only was it the first novel by an American Latino author to win a Pulitzer Prize, but it was also made into a major motion picture. The novel has sold nearly 300,000 copies to date in all editions.
By the mid-'90s, stories about bilingual children struggling to reconcile the world of their immigrant parents with contemporary American life clearly defined Latino literature. Literary accounts by Julia Alvarez, Cristina Garcia and Esmeralda Santiago all found an avid following, though only Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents has outsold The Mambo Kings. It was left to Sandra Cisneros's long-awaited second novel, Caramelo—which netted about 100,000 copies in English—to push hardcover sales of Latino fiction to the bestseller level.
Why haven't more Latino books broken out? According to Barnes & Noble fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley, one reason is that "most Latino authors don't publish often enough to build a strong following. Many have teaching careers. And writing has not been profitable enough for many to make it a full-time job."
However Valdes-Rodriguez's novel ultimately performs, its major achievement may lie in the windfall advance and mainstream marketing it received, as much as its bold redefinition of Latino life from family-oriented to fashion-obsessed. "It's the beginning of the cycle for Latino commercial fiction, and that will help the market grow," said Hensley. "The market is there, and I've definitely begun to see more commercial Hispanic titles in the past year. Publishers just need to respond in the right way."
