Life Among the Pirates

New books in Peru – new, legally produced books, that is – are often sold bearing a sticker that reads BUY ORIGINAL, just one of the small ways the publishing industry has responded to the threat from book pirates. The fact is, though, being pirated is the Peruvian equivalent of making the bestseller list. One writer I know ends all his readings by urging those in attendance to ‘buy my book before it gets pirated’. When I asked him about it, he confessed he hadn’t actually been pirated yet, but hoped he would be soon. The award­winning novelist Alonso Cueto told me he receives unsolicited sales reports from the man who sells pirate novels in his neighbourhood .At first it made him angry, but by now Cueto has learned to tolerate it. Less tolerable is that the same vendor feels authorized to give the writer advice on potential subject matter that might be more commercially successful.

Pirates reach sectors of the market that formal book publishers cannot or don’t care to access. Outside Lima, the pirate­book industry is the only one that matters. Oscar Colchado Lucio, one of a handful of Peruvian writers who actually make their living from book sales, told me of the time he’d gone to the town of Huancayo to do a reading at a very poor school. He signed some 300 books without coming across a single original. The authorized version simply wasn’t available – there were no bookstores in Huancayo. One novelist, who preferred not to be named for fear of being sued, was disappointed that his novel wasn’t available in his hometown. In response, he contacted a pirate in Lima, made a deal, and soon his book was for sale all over the country. When I asked him about it, he made no apology: ‘If someone can produce for three dollars what the editor is selling for twenty, then I think perhaps the editor is a terrible businessman.’ In a few cases, pirates have rescued work by writers the formal industry has forgotten. A friend told me the story of Luis Hernández, a little­known avant­garde poet with a cult following among university students. Photocopied versions of his out­of­print collections have been passed around for years, but no publisher had bothered to reissue his work – until a vendor from downtown Lima recognized the need, partnered with a press and came out with his own, unauthorized edition.

I remember riding to lunch in 2007, around the time my first novel was published, with Titinger, a friend of mine, who also had a new book in stores. We worked at the same magazine, and Huberth, the owner, our boss, had offered to take us out to celebrate. Along the way, we came to the traffic light at an intersection that doubled as a marketplace, where vendors sold fruit and whiteboards and newspapers and inflatable children’s toys. It’s a scene repeated on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of street corners in the Peruvian capital, an image familiar to anyone who has lived or travelled in Latin America or anywhere in the developing world. There were booksellers too, naturally, and Huberth called one over. The salesman was heavy­set and awkward, moving clumsily between the cars, and carried his books before him like a shield, the covers facing outwards: self­help titles, mostly (it was the season of the Peruvian edition of Who Moved My Cheese?, I recall), books about local scandals and worldwide bestsellers like El Código DaVinci.

‘Anything by Alarcón or Titinger?’ Huberth asked.

The man frowned. ‘Who?’

That was all. Huberth rolled up his window.

‘You’re both failures,’ he said, turning to us.

My first story collection has, to my knowledge, never been pirated, which is something of a disappointment. The day of our lunch with Huberth, my novel had just gone on sale and was retailing for around fifty soles, the equivalent of eighteen US dollars. This is nearly the same price it might fetch in an American bookstore, with one crucial difference: in Peru, that figure represents about twenty per cent of the average worker’s weekly income. I was frankly embarrassed by the price. How could I, in good conscience, expect my friends and family to pay that much for a book? Except for the small middle and upper classes, who has that kind of disposable income?