April 20, 2004 - By the time Victor Villaseñor attempted to sell his fourth book about two years ago, he was a best-selling author in the Southwest and a cherished figure among Mexican-Americans who had seen their lives reflected in the pages of his family memoir, "Rain of Gold" (Arte Público Press, 1991).

Yet his manuscript, "Thirteen Senses," another family memoir, with all the magic, adventure and miracles that are familiar to Hispanic families, was rejected seven times.

"What arrogance!" Mr. Villaseñor, 62, said he thought after each of the rejections. "To most publishers it was as if I was writing adult Harry Potter. They just didn't get it."

Eventually an editor in San Francisco suggested he send the manuscript to HarperCollins in New York. He did and sold it in a week. Mr. Villaseñor's "Thirteen Senses" became the first title offered by Rayo, a bilingual imprint of HarperCollins started last September and dedicated solely to the work of Hispanic authors.

Rayo, which means flash of lightning in Spanish, is the first attempt by a major publisher to focus on the Hispanic market in the United States as both creators and buyers of works mostly produced in English.

The group of Hispanics who prefer English has been so untapped that some of the writers on Rayo's list are more popular among non-Hispanic readers.

Carolina García-Aguilera, a Miami writer known for her mystery books featuring a sassy Cuban-American woman as a private eye, for example, said no one had marketed her books to Hispanics before because there was a perception that they were not mystery fans. For that reason, she said, she had been translated into eight languages but not Spanish until Rayo came along and published her romance novel "One Hot Summer" this summer. The book, already in its fourth printing, is now being translated into Spanish. "I was in Japanese, but not in Spanish," she said. To these authors Rayo is indeed like a flash of lightning. Mr. Villaseñor said his first encounter with René Alegría, Rayo's editorial director, "was like coming home to family."

Mr. Alegría, a Mexican-American himself, knew that Mr. Villaseñor was a huge success in the Southwest, the kind of author whose dog-eared books are read by several generations of a family at the same time.

That kind of intimate knowledge of a market is what HarperCollins is banking on. Jane Friedman, president and chief executive of HarperCollins Publishers, said she trusted Mr. Alegría's judgment because he was precisely the type of reader her company wanted to reach: young, Hispanic and having a great deal of purchasing power.

"The numbers are there," Ms. Friedman said, citing the latest statistics on Hispanics: 35 million and counting, according to the last census, while their purchasing power is more than half a trillion dollars and rising at more than double the rate of the rest of the United States population.

HarperCollins is not the only publisher going after this market. Earlier this year St. Martin's Press paid $475,000 for a novel by Alisa Valdés-Rodríguez, a first-time author. Ms. Valdés-Rodríguez is being promoted as the Latina Terry McMillan, a writer who could showcase the appetite for books among Hispanics the way Ms. McMillan's "Waiting to Exhale," which sold more than two million copies, introduced the publishing industry to the purchasing power and tastes of African-American readers.

Still, a year after Rayo published the first books on its lists, the Hispanic book market has not had a breakout success like "Waiting to Exhale," publishing executives said. Rayo executives would not reveal sales figures, but they did say that Mr. Villaseñor's "Thirteen Senses" made the best-seller list of The Los Angeles Times and some other newspapers.

"The Other Face of America," a book by Jorge Ramos, a popular journalist and Spanish television anchor, made the list of The Washington Post , they said. This fall Rayo will publish in English and Spanish "No Borders," Mr. Ramos's autobiography.

Mr. Ramos, 44, chuckled when he remembered how last year he was eating at an outdoor cafe in Manhattan with several of his Univision colleagues when they noticed that the actress Sarah Jessica Parker was sitting at the next table. Yet the fans who walked by were stopping to ask not for her autograph but for Mr. Ramos's. Finally curiosity won, and Ms. Parker asked the waiter, "Who are those people?" The waiter, a Hispanic, knew and told her.

"Americans don't get what a Hispanic is," Mr. Alegría said. "So we are providing a way to corral all of what we are, all of that diversity, all of that creativity under a label."

Mr. Alegría said there was a sensibility that was strictly Hispanic, though, and that some authors could capture it in their writings and some readers could appreciate it.

But for writers like Ms. Valdés-Rodríguez, whose own ethnic history is a story in diversity, the label "Hispanic writer" is perplexing. Her father is Cuban; her mother is Irish with traces of American Indian blood.

She wrote her book about six Latinas, she said, with no particular audience in mind, though she went out of her way for her characters to reflect the diversity among people who have Spanish surnames and may hail from Latin America or have ancestors who did. One of the characters in her book is a Cuban Jew, another is a black Colombian who is a lesbian, and a third is a Chicana from California. There is also a Puerto Rican born in San Juan but raised in Providence, R.I., and a Mexican-American from New Mexico who thinks of herself as white despite the copper tone of her skin.

"My point was to show that we are not a monolithic, homogeneous group, something that the U.S. media have been slow to figure out," she said.

Twenty years from now, Mr. Alegría said, there may not be a need for an imprint like Rayo, because, by then perhaps everyone in publishing will understand who Hispanics are and how to publish and market them. "But until then," he said, "someone has to kick that door open and leave it open for them."