This year's Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL), which closed on Sunday, was the largest in the event's 38-year history, with a preliminary attendance of 907,300 visitors before the final day of the nine-day event, up from 857,315 in 2023. The fair's children's pavilion, FIL Niños, drew 194,239 visitors, and Spain's delegation of 300 people was the largest ever from a guest nation of honor. (Spain will return for FIL 2025, slated for Nov. 29–Dec. 7, when Barcelona serves as guest city of honor.) Ricardo Villanueva Lomelí, dean of the University of Guadalajara, which co-organizes the fair, said that this year's FIL "broke all records."

This year's fair hosted 2,769 publishing houses from 64 countries and attracted 18,100 publishing professionals from 50 countries. The rights center sold 110 tables and organized 210 professional activities, while 880 authors participated in public-facing conferences, panel discussions, and workshops.

Speaking about the fair's continued internationalization, FIL director Marisol Schulz told PW that "the promotion of the fair at an international level is a constant. We travel to other book fairs, to Frankfurt, to Bologna and London, and where we meet with publishers' associations from other countries." Schulz added: "We are looking to expand for Asian and African markets, and the strategy is to seek more and more corners of the world where the FIL is not known and bring them here." She noted that representatives from Malaysia visited this year's fair for the first time.

Schulz said that FIL is also "constantly working with the United States" through collaborations with the American Library Association, U.S.-based book distributors, and the Association of American Publishers, "which is always present" at the fair. Schulz is also the director of LéaLA, the Los Angeles–based Spanish-language book fair, which is independent of FIL. Founded in 2011, LéaLA took a hiatus from its current format between 2015 and 2019, and returned annually starting in 2022.

"We are always going to be promoting the FIL in the U.S.," Schulz said.