Bicho Raro already has a website, a name, and a phrase that works as a doorway:
books outside the usual species.
That is not a bad place to begin. But a phrase is not enough. A publishing imprint should not be born by saying it has come to publish “content,” nor by promising to save culture from a spreadsheet with a logo. There is already too much solemnity available and too little concrete infrastructure.
Bicho Raro begins somewhere else: smaller, more visible, harder to administer.
It begins inside a real bookshop, Tremendos Libros, in San Carlos. It begins after many conversations about book prices, independent bookshops, invisible authors, used books, preorders, AI, distribution, catalogues, margins, readers and that strange zone where love for books often lives beside underpaid work, blurred agreements and exploited enthusiasm.
So if this manifesto has to fit inside one idea, it is this:
the economics must be visible.
An imprint does not begin only with a logo. It begins with a way of arranging the table.
The economics must be visible
Economic transparency does not kill desire. It prevents desire from always paying the bill.
The world of books speaks a great deal about culture and very little about money with clarity. Everybody loves books, everybody works for love, everybody knows the market is difficult, but almost nobody sees the whole chain.
Bicho Raro wants to do something else.
We want four commitments to be remembered:
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Publish less, answer for more. We are not interested in filling a release calendar just to prove activity. If a book is strange, it needs more care, not less: reading, editing, form, time, conversation and responsibility.
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The author is not a content provider. An author does not bring raw material to be packaged. An author brings a work, a voice, an expectation and a piece of their life. There must be a clear contract, delimited rights, realistic deadlines, sales information and settlements that do not look like a mystery.
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The bookshop is not a channel. A bookshop does not only move copies: it moves trust. It recommends, listens, holds a book, places it in conversation and sustains it after launch. That work deserves clear margin, clear consignment, restocking and respect.
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AI assists, it does not govern. We will use tools to organize manuscripts, review processes, calculate scenarios, prepare metadata and reduce bureaucracy. But AI does not decide the catalogue, sign contracts, replace human reading or speak for an author. The tool may assist. The publisher answers.
Transparent preorders belong to the same logic. They are not begging and they are not the epic of precarity. If a community helps cover the initial risk of a book, that fact must be visible and must change the conversation about costs, deadlines and distribution.
Each project will have to be able to explain, in plain language, what is being financed, how much production costs, what the print run is, where the break-even point stands, what margin remains in direct sales, what margin remains in bookshops, what stock exists, what sold and what must be settled.
Not because literature has to become accounting.
Because when accounting is not visible, someone pays for literature with invisible work.
Bicho Raro will not resolve every contradiction of independent publishing. It will live inside them: market and culture, desire and spreadsheet, authorship and editing, bookshop and direct sale, AI and human judgment, community and cash flow.
The intention is not to cover those tensions with a pretty mark.
Less promise, more table.
Less epic, clearer accounts.
Less content, more book.
Publishing with the chain visible.
Martín Álvarez
@unfalsoguru