Mass-Market Dream for Spanish Audio

In every Latino immigrant worker who dons a Walkman, H. Blair Bess sees a customer.

The same goes for each Latina telenovela fan who tunes in to the Spanish-language soaps to break the tedium of daily house chores. Ditto for every valet parker. Every janitor. And every Spanish-speaking commuter headed to work on the Southland’s congested web of freeways.

What Bess envisions is the first mass market for Spanish-language audio books, a medium that remains unknown to most immigrant Latinos even as the English-language industry pushes past $2.3 billion in revenues.

With AudioLibros del Mundo Inc., launched from Bess’ Valencia home two years ago, the former entertainment marketing executive aims to crack a market that has been both invisible and elusive to audio book publishers.

If all goes as planned, pulp tales of romance and mystery, advice on love and loss, and bestsellers on white magic and spiritualism will be widely available for less than $10 to immigrant Latinos in local markets, drugstores and music stores. Since September, AudioLibros has released eight titles, many of them read by big-name actors and telenovela stars. The company is expanding its distribution nationally, testing radio ads in Fresno and negotiating with several venture capital firms.

“We don’t want to be the Tiffany of this market, we want to be the McDonald’s,” said Bess, whose work in entertainment marketing and as a voice-over actor led him to the idea. “Nobody was trying to reach the Hispanic market on a mass level with audio books,” he said, and those publishers that produce Spanish titles have done little to market them.

The English-language audiobook industry grew 360% from 1990 to 1998, according to the Manhattan Beach-based Audio Publishers Assn. But only a limited number of titles have been available in Spanish, and many of those have gathered dust on the shelves of Spanish-language booksellers or disappeared amid stacks of English-language titles at big chain bookstores.

Now, Bess believes, with the right product and enough resources, all that could change. He is not alone. Another Los Angeles start-up is exploring the market for Spanish-language audio books and has entered into preliminary talks to partner with Books On Tape Inc., the Newport Beach audio book giant that pioneered the field in 1975 and now boasts more than 5,000 titles.

NewStar Media Inc. of West Hollywood will likely test new Spanish titles next fall as part of its push into mass-market retail venues such as Kmart and Costco. About 30 of NewStar’s 1,700 titles, published under the Dove Audio imprint, are in Spanish. But those titles have met with limited success and are at least 3 years old.

Demand, however, appears to be picking up. New York-based Nueva Onda Audiobooks, whose three dozen titles skew to more literary tastes, topped 25% growth in each of the past two years after 8 years of anemic 5% growth, co-founder Fortuna Calvo-Roth said. And some retailers say they now get regular requests from frustrated Spanish-speakers thirsty for an industry of their own.

“There’s not much out there that’s current and there is demand,” said Paul Rush, owner of Austin, Texas-based retailer Earful of Books and Audio Publishers Assn. president. “We get requests almost every day.”

Stefan Rudnicki, publisher and executive producer of NewStar Media, has also noted a sharp increase in such requests over the past 18 months. “My feeling is there is a fairly massive market just waiting for the product,” he said. “The problem is there isn’t a clear channel of distribution.”

The task ahead for Bess is undeniably daunting. Other publishers may be willing to explore the Spanish-language market while maintaining a booming core English-language business, but AudioLibros del Mundo has no such cushion. And educating consumers oblivious to the very concept of audio books will be a costly and lengthy process. “Libros para sus oidos!,” “Books for your ears!” screams the brightly colored AudioLibros store display in an effort to clue shoppers in to what the product is and does.

“We have to create a massive awareness,” Bess concedes. “They don’t know what an audio book is . . . in English or Spanish.”

Furthermore, there is much debate about whether a mass market approach will work. In English, high-income, college-educated professionals over 40 are the key audio book consumers, although the market has expanded in recent years to include truckers. More than 70% of audio book customers listen in their cars, another trend that Bess must defy if a mass market Spanish-language approach is to succeed.

“How far can they bring the price down?” asked APA executive director Jan Nathan. “Is it ever going to be $1.98? Even $9.95 is not an impulse item for someone earning $18,000 a year. That’s a commitment.

“What you have to do is grow into the mass market,” she said. “You have to first cause a demand, and it’s more likely you can cause a demand with people who can afford a product.”

Measuring demand is complicated enough when so little product is available--about 300 titles, compared with tens of thousands in English. Audio books generally generate about one-tenth of the title’s print sales, said Books on Tape CFO Ron Prowell, but whether that formula will hold true for Spanish-language titles is hard to say.

“Maybe the reason there’s not much there is there’s not much demand for it,” he said. “But who knows? It’s a chicken and egg question.”

Bess is hoping that as he builds it, they will come.

So far, his titles are distributed in 30 RitmoLatino music stores across the country, as well as in Borders Books & Music, on Borders.com, Amazon.com, and through his own site, https://www.audiolibros.com. They are sold through Chicago-based Giron Spanish Book Distributors as well as in the southeast. Bess hopes to be in Sam’s Club stores early this year and ultimately in discount drug stores, independent Latino supermarkets and small bodegas. He will enter the Puerto Rican market next month when Borders launches its first mega-store there--with 40% Spanish content.

The first titles landed on shelves last September, after two years of market research, talent scouting, and a $300,000 investment. So far, 20,000 books have been shipped to distributors, said Bess, who does not expect to be profitable for several years.

Among the titles are one on love, sex and intimacy by noted Latina columnist and psychotherapist Ana Nogales; Luis Rodriguez’s “La Vida Loca,” a tale of the author’s struggle with gang life in East Los Angeles; a detective series; and the Encanto romance line, released in print form by New York-based Kensington Publishing Corp. last fall.

Written by Latinas for Latinas, the novels have spawned a book club that is growing by a thousand members a month. With titles such as “Summer Dreams,” “Desert Heat” and “Miami Kiss,” the steaming titles treat not only love and lust, but class clashes and bicultural romances in the voices of women of Cuban, Puerto Rican and Mexican descent.

“We see romance as being a very strong area,” Bess said. “Look at the ratings on the prime time telenovelas. That is our audience, the average person on the street.”

Bess is hoping to spur impulse buys through his readers. Mexican telenovela star Kate Del Castillo reads “El Bandido,” a turn-of-the-century Texas drama; Mexican film star Pedro Armendariz Jr., known for his performances in “Amistad” and “The Mask of Zorro,” reads the mystery “Dias del Combate,” and Sonya Smith, a 23-year-old Venezuelan actress with five leading telenovela roles, is recording Encanto’s “Suenos Islenos,” or “Island Dreams.”

On a recent day, Alejandra Flores put the finishing touches on her reading of Encanto’s “Isabel Mi Amor” at Alba Digital Recording in Burbank. The Mexico-born Flores, who directs and acts, along with producing a television public affairs program, banters with the production director, but the work is not easy. She must modulate her voice so listeners can distinguish the narrator from the characters. Among them: Belle, a doctor who comes to a Texas town to connect with her Latino heritage, and Javier, the local political hotshot who tries to drive her out, then falls in love and marries her.

“The product is good,” Flores said. “Our community needs to read more, and one way to develop interest is to listen more. Our public are people who work two jobs, have children, are tired or commute two hours a day. This is a way to always stay close to literature. I think it just hasn’t occurred to anyone to do it before. There’s been a lack of vision.”

Clearly, the big publishing houses have done little to tap the Spanish-language market, finding plenty of room to grow in English. Among U.S. households, 21% listened to audio books in 1999, according to the APA. While that is up considerably from 12% in 1995, it still leaves plenty of room for expansion. Simon & Shuster sells a Spanish-language audio version of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” that moves briskly, but offers only one other Spanish-language title, said associate marketing director Patricia Keim. Random House, too, has published only the occasional selections.

Others have pushed ahead into uncharted terrain, but without the multimillion-dollar advertising budget it will likely take to educate a new class of consumers. New York’s Nueva Onda, for example, published by Coral Communications Group, has seen a spike in demand for its classic and contemporary fiction in the past two years, much of it from public libraries across the country. Nevertheless, Calvo-Roth says, her company has barely scratched the surface.

“AudioLibros can only do us good,” she said. “The market is there for everyone. It’ll happen, but we don’t know when.”