Flatiron Books, the publisher of “American Dirt,” said Wednesday that it was canceling the author’s book tour because of safety concerns.

In a statement, Bob Miller, Flatiron’s president and publisher, said, “Based on specific threats to booksellers and the author, we believe there exists real peril to their safety.”

“American Dirt,” a novel by Jeanine Cummins about a Mexican woman and her son fleeing to the United States to escape cartel violence, came out last week and seemed poised to become one of the year’s biggest books. It made its debut at No. 1 on The New York Times’s best-seller list for hardcover and for combined print and e-book fiction this week. But the book has also encountered a backlash, with Latinx writers and community members criticizing Cummins’s depiction of the migrant experience and accusing her of appropriating it for profit.

Miller acknowledged some of the criticism in his statement, saying that “we made serious mistakes in the way we rolled out this book.” He added: “The discussion around this book has exposed deep inadequacies in how we at Flatiron Books address issues of representation, both in the books we publish and in the teams that work on them.”