At the beginning she wasn’t interested: her assistant who had read the book for her had thought that the story about a wizard boy was old school. But J.K. Rowling’s agent had faith in the book and during a visit from Sigrid Kraus to London, she insisted: “Until you read it, I won’t accept a negative”. She opened the first page of the book on the return flight: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. She liked it and offered $4,000 for the rights in Spanish. They were asking for $10,000. Paid $7,000. (4,700€)

The numbers form part of the formation of Sagrid Kraus, a woman of words that was born 44 years ago in Munich and has lived in half the world. At six years old, her family settled in Angola. Two years later, until she was 19, in Sao Paulo. “If I have feelings for a country is Brazil” she says. There, in addition, she was bitten with the reading bug. “My dad was a geologist and we didn’t live in big cities. There was nothing else besides books”. Also in Brazil she fell in love with songs in which Caetano Veloso talked about Las Rambas. She left Brazil to study at the University of Hamburg, Literature and Business. She wanted to be an editor and in 1985 she looks for outside of Germany. Caetano Veloso gave it to her. In Barcelona, she met her future husband and partner, Pedro del Carril, an Argentinean in charge of the Spanish branch of Emecé, Borges editorial. In 2000, Planeta bought the Spanish branch and changed its name, Salamandra: “The good thing was, then, Harry Potter worked, but not uch. If not, if would’ve been impossible to buy the stocks of the editorial”.

The first title released a year earlier had only sold 100,000 copies, not a bad number, but very small compared to the UK or Germany were the numbers reached the millions, even after they had brought the author to Spain. “But it took a lot for the media to be interested in her”, she remembers. Between the second and third book the fever arrived. It was all thanks to the word of mouth and not a marketing explosion: “First reprinting every 2 months, then every month and later weekly. And we thought, something is happening here”.

The phenomenon was working alone, but it still had some zeros to make It to the 1.2 million copies reached by Salamandra the past February 21st with Harry Potter y las reliquias de la muerte (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) the seventh and last book in the series. Most of it was printed in Villatuerta, a town in Navarra of a little over a thousand inhabitants. There, they accomplish the secrecy of not one book or even the book cover reaching the public ahead of time. Paranoia? “No”, says the editor, “its so nobody knows the ending, that every reader gets into the story with ingenuity”. Because of this, even when she understands it, the doesn’t like that translations are circulating on the internet a soon as the book is published in English. Also the fact that the books has been brought to the big screen before the series was over. “Yes, even if they brought in more sales. Rowling you think the same thing now, but when she sold the right, she had just finished publishing the first book and needed the money”. In fact, Kraus didn’t want her young daughter to see the big screen adaptation without reading the every one of the books first. And she only reads her one book each year.

As of today, Salamdra has sold 12 million copies of the Harry Potter adventures. Half of them in Latin America. And in the United States, where it’s the bestselling book in Spanish. A lot of people would exploit the chicken with the golden eggs, but Salamandra’s strategy is different. Its launches never fall on Christmas not Sant Jordi: “Also, the book that has so much fame we separate it from the general counting [No idea if that’s correct] It’s not fair, because it take away a lot of time and resources, but it’s the only way for us to know that we can’t have everything with only one title”. To know that they have reached their goal, it only takes one look at their catalog. Sándor Márai, Irene Némirowsky, Andrea Camillery… “The danger of Harry Potter”, finishes Kraus, “was that it would swallow the editorial. We didn’t want to be the editors of only one book”. Now they have published another phenomenon in which 15 people are working: El niño con el pajama de rayas (The boy with the striped pyjamas).