latino role models
Marcela Landres
Helping writers get published

Marcela gained extensive experiences having worked for national publishing companies. In her position she realized that Latinos were not getting their manuscripts published. She also saw a way that she could directly impact and help to reverse this trend.

Marcela is now actively searching for writers that represent the lives of Latinos who have grown up in the United States. She travels throughout the county consulting, advising and teaching Latino authors on how to prepare themselves to deal with the complex and inner workings of publishing companies. She shares little known facts that affect the decision-making process of having a manuscript published.

In addition to helping to get the Latina/Latino voices heard she also shares time encouraging Latino graduates to consider an exciting professional career in the publishing industry.

LatinoGraduate.net: I understand that you are an editorial consultant. What does that mean?

Marcela: That means is that I help writers get published. Some of my clients write fiction, some write non-fiction. About 40% of my clients are Latinos. Some have agents and some do not. They are very diverse group but the one thing they have in common is that they have gotten nice rejection letters from publishing companies telling them that their work is good but it needs polishing before it can be considered for publication. That’s where I step in. I read and edit their manuscripts, but I also educate them on the business of publishing, which is as important as the craft of writing. Before I was an editorial consultant I was an editor at Simon & Schuster for seven years. I published a variety of writers there but my passion was helping Latino writers get published. It’s part of the reason I became an editor in the first place.

I was supposed to be the first medical doctor in my family. Ever since I was a little girl my family somehow got the idea that I should be a doctor because I liked to read and I got good grades in school. Being the obedient Latina that I was, I basically went along with the idea of becoming a physician. When I went to college I pursued the pre-med track. I got as far as organic chemistry, which is the class that separates those that truly want to enter the medical field from those that aren’t sure. As for me, I realized that this was not my area of interest. I realized that this dream of being a doctor was not really mine. I sat myself down and asked myself what my passion was. I asked myself, “What do I really want to do for the rest of my life?”

I had not questioned before hand what my goals were, and I think this is very common among Latinos or children of immigrants. When immigrants leave their nation of origin and come to the United States it is to pursue the American Dream and the Dream invariable involves financial security. Well, writers and book editors are not financially secure professions. I meet a lot of frustrated Latino writers who were pressured by their immigrant parents to become accountants, social workers, teachers, bankers or other traditionally secure professions. At that moment I realize that I needed to switch from what was not my dream and go after what I really wanted and that was to be an editor. So I changed my major to English Literature and I have never regretted that transition.

LatinoGraduate.net: How did you get the idea of becoming an editor? How did you learn about the role of an editor since you had been studying in the scientific world?

Marcela: It came from ignorance, which can actually be an advantage. If you know how hard something is you might not try it. I once heard the founder of Latina Magazine, Christy Haubegger, say that if she had know how hard it was going to be to launch the magazine that she might not have done it. She shared that she went into it completely ignorant of what it takes to work in journalism and that ignorance helped her to be successful.

LatinoGraduate.net: I guess there is an advantage of not knowing what you cannot do.

Marcela: Exactly! You don’t know the field nor your limitations so you go forth. So I didn’t really know much about the book industry. All I knew was that editors decide which manuscripts and writers get published. That was my vague understanding of what editors did, that they take something that someone else created and make it better. I like the idea of helping writers and I thought I would be good at it.

LatinoGraduate.net: Do you remember that first moment when you seriously considered the idea of becoming an editor? Did you get the idea from a discussion, read about it in an article or it just popped up in your head?

Marcela: If you love books and enjoy going to the library I guess you pick up the idea that there are librarians, teachers, writers, editors and publishing companies. You get a basic idea of what each of them does. No, I don’t think there was a particular moment where I read or someone mentioned this profession.

LatinoGraduate.net: It sounds to me that since you were always fascinated and immersed in the world of books that you were naturally drawn by it.

Marcela: It is quite surprising but until you enter publishing you do not realize there are so many different careers associated with it. There are literally thousands of jobs that are not editorial. One normally does not think of all the personnel a Human Resource office has to find in order to make it all work. There are many college graduates out there applying for their first job and have no idea of what they want to do. Unless a student is savvy and has a lot of connections or obtained experience through internships, he or she won’t really know what opportunities are available. It is one thing to be on the outside and another to be in the inside. Once you get your foot in the door then you get a better view of what the options are.

LatinoGraduate.net: So in your sophomore year you realized that the medical world was not for you and you changed majors to go into English Literature. Did you think that perhaps you may have wasted your time studying in the scientific realm and that now you had to start from scratch since you were in a different major?

Marcela: No, I was still in my sophomore year. Perhaps it would have been different if it was my junior year. Additionally, a liberal arts college like Barnard requires its students to take a wide variety of courses in your first year. They encourage you to stay open to new ideas. So the switch was fairly painless. If there is someone out there in college in a similar situation I would say to them that even if they are in their junior year and decide they want to switch majors--do it!

LatinoGraduate.net: What advice can you provide our readers of how they can lean more about this field?

Marcela: I strongly recommend students do internships. I don’t think there is a better way to understanding what a job is until you have actually done it. You can read about it, talk to others about it, and research it but until you have done the job you are not going to know if you will be happy doing it. Even if the internship does not offer a salary, you should do it. Think about it--you may save yourself months or years of anguish. What if you don’t do an internship and instead take a publishing job upon graduation? You’re an assistant editor and you find out that you hate it. You just wasted several months of your life and now you have a black mark on your resume that will be hard to hide. An internship is about learning who you are and what your needs are. You want to make your mistakes when you are a student. The mistakes are far more easily forgiven and easily explained as a student than as a real employee. So take chances and take risks.

LatinoGraduate.net: Did you get an internship that opened the door for you in your current career?

Marcela: Yes, I focused exclusively on book publishing. The best time to have an internship is in the summer between junior and senior year. We had a really wonderful career services department at Barnard. They offered a lot of jobs partly because the campus was in New York City, where most media companies are located. I had an internship at Rutledge and one at Dutton. I worked very hard and at the end I asked my supervisors if they thought I had what it takes to be an editor, and they encouraged me to pursue a career as an editor. That was the real objective of the internships. Internships are not about money, because you get paid so little. The objective is to determine if you like the work as well as the people you’ll work with. If you are a fast-paced outgoing individual working in a slow-paced environment full of shy people, you need to question if it will be a good fit for you.

LatinoGraduate.net: Given your outstanding background, you have the ability to select and work with any group you want throughout the nation. Why did you specifically pick to focus and work with the Latino literary community?

Marcela: During the first three years of the seven that I worked for Simon & Schuster I constantly asked agents to submit manuscripts from Latino writers. If there’s one thing I learned from being a Latina editor in a major publishing company it is that we still live in a segregated society. Most agents, like most people in the publishing, are not Latinos. And if you are not Latino chances are you don't know any Latino writers who happen to be talented. So agents for the most part were not capable of finding Latino writers.

After a few years of not getting very far with agents I made the choice of taking on the role of an agent even though it was not my job. I sat down and wrote a letter to the head of every writing conference and every MFA program in the U.S. As a result of that mailing I got a call from a director of a well respected writing conference in California and she asked me to fly over and give a workshop to Latino writers on how to get published. This is how my writing career began. Since then I have flown all over the county talking to countless groups of Latino writers.

LatinoGraduate.net: What advice do you give to Latino writers?

Marcela: Be conscious of the creative choices you make. Let’s say you love to read science fiction. Chances are you also love to write science fiction. If you are a Latino writer you have likely read numerous Latino writers. At this point in time, publishing companies have not made a significant contribution to their bottom line with Latino writers. There are numerous complex reasons for this, but the bottom line is Latino writers need to create stories and characters that are relevant to the current generation of Latinos in the U.S. Instead they, usually unconsciously, create works that perpetuate what the mainstream think is the Latino experience.

Also, look to the African-American literary community as role models. Publishers have made a great deal of money with books by and for African-Americans. Arguably, most of what publishing companies know about how to publish African-American books they have learned from African-American authors. Publishers still haven’t quite figures out how to sell books to Latinos because Latino writers have not taught them how to do it.

LatinoGraduate.net: So what I am understanding is that Black writers did not assume that the publishers would know how to deal with the Black writers and marketing there so they took it amongst themselves to make sure they clearly understood.

Marcela: Well, there are clearly differences between the African-American and the Latino communities. I think what it boils down to is that we respond differently to authority. When the white face of authority tells the African-American community “No, we won’t treat African-American patients” African-Americans responded by building their own medical schools and graduating African-American doctors. When the white face of authority told African-American writers “No, we won’t publish your book” they responded by self-publishing. And some of them were very successful at it. When the white face of authority says “No” to Latino writers, what happens? They give up and say, “bueno, si dios quiere” and it ends there.

LatinoGraduate.net: The old “pobre de mi” (poor me) mentality.

Marcela: Latinos are raised to be obedient. We are raised to have a very particular relationship with authority and that is not necessarily something that is helpful to achieving the American dream.

LatinoGraduate.net: Is this an issue of simply being disobedient or are we talking more about having an entrepreneur mentality and seeking to be self motivated.

Marcela: Entrepreneurship is a form of activism. Art is a form of activism. It is really a matter of looking at yourself and looking at how you deal with authority. When someone says “no” to you, how do you respond? Do you give up or do you try to get in the back door if the front door is locked? Latino culture places a high value on authority, while U.S. culture places a high value on questioning authority. Look at history, we questioned the authority of the British and ended up with a Revolution and ultimately our independence. Disobedience isn’t a good or bad thing per se, but disobedience can help bring about positive change and help the greater good.

LatinoGraduate.net: Do we as a cultural group overuse the concept "I quit"?

Marcela: Yes. When Latinos get rejected, we tend to accept the rejection so we won’t reject the authority figure. When non-Latinos are rejected, they tend to put their own desires before that of the authority figure. For some this may seem selfish and selfishness is a trait that is not valued in the Latino community. Latinos are very bad at being selfish.

LatinoGraduate.net: A great deal of what you have shared could just as well apply to students when they were told that they could not go and graduate from college.

Marcela: That is true. Take me for example. I dropped out of college twice. I was very unhappy but I did not give up.

LatinoGraduate.net: Succeeding despite the obstacles says a lot about the character of the person. What final advice would you like to extend to students who like putting down ideas on paper?

Marcela: Don't give up. People who make it to the finish line are not necessarily the fastest or the best but rather those who stayed in the race. Latinos have every right to go to college. We have every right to be successful. No matter what level of education you get, whether undergraduate or graduate, the time and money you invest in yourself will come back to you exponentially. You will not only earn a higher income, but you will improve your quality of life. You will meet different kinds of people, some who can help you launch your career or achieve whatever goals you may have. College is not just about what you learn, it’s also about who you meet—and who you become.

www.marcelalandres.com

marcelalandres@yahoo.com

Copyright © 2005 Armando F. Sanchez