The present paper uses Twitter to analyze the current state of the worldwide,
Spanish-language, independent publishing market. The main purposes are to
determine whether certain Latin American Spanish-language independent
publishers function as gatekeepers of World Literature and to analyze the
geopolitical structure of this global market, addressing both the
Europe-America dialectic and neocolonial practices. After selecting the sample
of publishers, we conducted a search for their Twitter profiles and located
131; we then downloaded data from the corresponding Twitter APIs. Finally, we
applied social network analysis to study the presence of and interaction
between our sample of independent publishers on this social media. Our results
provide data-based evidence supporting the hypothesis of some literary critics
who suggest that in Latin America, certain publishers act as gatekeepers to the
mainstream book market. Therefore, Twitter could be considered a valid source
of information to address the independent book market in Spanish. By extension,
this approach could be applied to other cultural industries in which small and
medium-sized agents develop a digital presence in social media. This paper
combines social network analysis and literary criticism to provide new evidence
about the Spanish-language book market. It helps validate the aforementioned
hypothesis, proposed by literary critics, and opens up new paths along which to
pursue an interpretative, comparative analysis