Publishing in Poland
Herbert R. Lottman -- 5/1/98
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As Polish publishing heads toward privatization, it offers the best prospects in Eastern Europe
Poland is living through one of the best of times, with steadily rising national income, declining inflation, receding unemployment and an educational boom in full swing. In a word, this country is on a fast track to publishing paradise. Yet when communist walls came tumbling down less than a decade ago few industries called for as much re-building. The transformation is still in progress, with a number of state-owned companies still not quite ready to take the leap into privatization. But they are beginning to act as if they were already there.
43rd Annual Warsaw International Book Fair
For a close-up of the market, and an explanation of why U.S. and other Western investors, as well as groups such as Bertelsmann, Torstar/Harlequin and Scandinavia's Egmont, find it attractive, there's no better opportunity than the International Book Fair held in Warsaw each spring. The 43rd fair, scheduled for May 14-18, 1998, promises to be a one-stop opportunity to meet leading professionals. Last year's fair drew 795 exhibiting imprints from 31 countries, showing on 341 stands, in the somewhat cramped 54,000 square feet available betwixt the cumbersome marble pillars of Warsaw's grotesque Palace of Culture, a gingerbread sky-scraper donated to the city by Joseph Stalin.
Rights traders are increasingly visible at the stands, as the fair has traditionally been an avenue for sales of sci-tech and academic books into Poland and adjacent territories. More recently, trade publishers from the U.S. and other English-speaking countries have also been showing via their local distributors.
"Every country in the region wants to have the Eastern fair because Frankfurt is too big," says PWN's Grzegorz Boguta. "We think that Warsaw is the right half-way house."
For more information, contact the fair's secretary general Ireneusz Hermanski, c/o export-import agency Ars Polona, whose managing director is Monika Bialecka. |
With a population of 38.7 million, this nation is by far the largest in the former Soviet bloc. Its 6.4% rise in GDP last year put it well ahead of its near neighbors, to say nothing of Russia and other relics of the dismantled U.S.S.R. With growth of 5% predicted for 1998, Poland should again be at least a length ahead.
Salaries are the highest in the region; literacy is as close as you can come to 100%. Yet few book people encountered by PW during a recent tour of Poland' publishing centers failed to emphasize the bad news. While book distribution and sales are no longer in the hands of Big Brother, the country' book trade has yet to create the optimal mix of wholesalers and retailers called for by the free market.
The best estimate is that there are over 1700 active publishers (of which about 100 released between 30 and 100 titles in 1996, and 30 did over 100 titles). As for title output, estimates vary from 12,500 to 20,000, an indication of the inadequacy of trade statistics.
While there are some 3000 book stores spread around this country of 120,000 square miles, many of these outlets are tiny. A few publishers have tackled the problem by opening their own bookstores or in-house book clubs.
"Warsaw bookstores may seem well supplied," comments a professional pessimist (and a good publisher), Robert Ginalski of Warsaw's Da Capo, "but go out to the country and see what's going on. With 10,000 libraries in Poland and 3000 bookstores, we should see more volume."
Ginalski is ready to believe that the problem is overproduction. Expressed in dollars, the total book market in Poland is worth less than $250 million (down from the previous year because of the fall in the value of the national currency). If turnover seems low even in zlotys it's because list prices are so low, remarkably so, considering that Poland must meet world prices for paper and other supplies.
A survey prepared by PWN (Polish Scientific Publishers) estimates that more than 80% of the total book market belongs to 30 imprints. PWN itself, with the school publisher WSiP, together account for between 40% and 50% of aggregate turnover.
Foreign Rights
In its long, sad history Poland wasn't often independent. But surely none of the previous episodes of liberty were as sweet as the latest decade. Book traders remember the 1989-91 transition years as phenomenal; anything could be published and sold, especially if that anything came from America.
Yet it may be a healthier book economy now. Agent Ellen Bratina, who covered Eastern Europe from a Prague base until her recent return to the U.S., sees Poland as the second market after Russia in readership, rights sales, dollar advances (in quality publishing it's a head taller). Most rights transactions go through one of three international agencies:
1. Warsaw's world-class Graal, run by Maria Strarz-Kanska and Zbigniew Kanski
2. The recently established Warsaw branch of the U.K's peripatetic Andrew Nurnberg, managed by Aleksandra Matuszak
3. And from Belgrade, Jovan Milenkovic's Prava & Prevodi.
Strarz-Kanska had been editor-in-chief for foreign literature at Krakow's Tony Wydawnictwo Literackie before joining a late but unregretted agency specializing in Eastern Europe that has since vanished from the scene (pursued by its creditors). In an effort at decontaminating the local rights market she set up on her own in Krakow in 1993, transferring to Warsaw in 1996, later to be joined by husband Zbigniew. Their client list includes some of the best-known U.S. agents and publishers.
At Graal, Maria Strarz-Kanska handles fiction (he d s science, technology, computer books, and university textbooks. The Kanskis sit on a gold mine thanks to author William Wharton, whom they handle for Rosalie Siegel, for Wharton is Poland's translated darling and hardly a month g s by without a new book or a reprint from this prolific American-in-Paris author.
Strarz-Kanska remembers the first years of book hunger, when you could sell 300,000 copies of a Stephen King. Now you hope for 5000 copies, and publishers work hard for that. Yet thanks to the rise of cover prices, advances are higher than before. If Polish publishing underwent a shakeout after the initial boom, the market has entered what Zbigniew calls "a very satisfactory phase" slower but healthier growth.
Books translated from English are still what everybody wants, and it helps when a William Wharton or a Kurt Vonnegut or a William Styron comes over to meet his readers.
From London Andrew Nurnberg has made foreign rights his specialty, running branch offices in seven former Soviet-dominated countries. He recruited Aleksandra Matuszak, a translator by profession, to open the Warsaw office two years ago. If U.S. principals are slightly outnumbered by the British on her clients' list, they include trade leaders such as HarperCollins, Little, Brown, and S&S, agencies including ICM, Knox Burger, William Morris, and Writers House. That gives her such stars as Tom Clancy and Mary Higgins Clark, but also in this eminently backlist market George Orwell and Isaac Singer.
New Faces, Big Spenders
In turnover, in net profits and in title output, Poland's twin giants are, respectively, a school and a sci-tech publisher (WSiP and PWN). But if it seems modest in comparison, the activity of the major players in general books is bound to impress.
Proszynski, a four-way partnership put together in the year of independence (1989) to do popular magazines made books a part of the plan. The first list was ready in 1993, launched simultaneously with a book club, Poland's first. In fact the partners had already been selling books by mail through their magazines.
The double launching of trade imprint and club turned out to be a grand idea. This year Proszynski will produce 400 new titles, all published in series, the categories including fiction, SF, children's books, history, biography, and popular science, but also textbooks for universities, and increasingly for primary and secondary schools. All titles including textbooks go into the club catalogue.
Managing Director for books, with Dorota Malinskowska, science publisher Jaroslaw Wlodarczyk and a staff of 70 in the publishing division, says seven trade titles in 10 are translations, a ratio that Malinskowska expects will decline as Polish authors come into their own.
If the list includes Stephen King, Mary Higgins Clark, and Patricia Cornwell, one discovers John Irving, John Updike, and Thomas Pynchon as well, and a considerable amount of pertinent nonfiction.
And then there is Bertelsmann.The world book-club leader opened an office in Warsaw in 1994 with a first catalogue of 50 titles in spring 1995. Discovering that Proszynski's prior launching of a "klub Ksiazki" ("book club") preempted that logo, they made do with "Swiat Ksiazki" ("World of Books"). Today, program director Andrzej Kaflik says he serves one million members.
Kaflik describes a publishing program that, under the corporate name Bertelsmann Media, includes both trade and mail sales. Distribution remains the stumbling block, and the challenge was to find new ways to get books into the retail chain. Bertelsmann's solution was to set up its own agency, which handles the same titles that go into the club. When possible it acquires volume rights, adjusting pub dates as needed. Thus, a new Jackie Collins was launched first in the trade (under the house logo Diogenes), and only afterwards featured in the catalogue.
Bertelsmann targets readers without ready access to bookshops and those who are building home libraries. It's a market for literary classics, atlases and the PWN general encyclopedia (specially packaged for the club as a 10-volume set). The five annual catalogues show 250 new books and aggregate sales are some seven million copies.
Two of the most important translating publishers are not in Poland's capital but in Poznan, a couple of train hours east. "It's a problem for us because the media are concentrated in Warsaw," remarks Rebis publisher Tomasz Szponder. Rebis works with 40 wholesalers, dealing directly with five or six of the larger bookstores, selling also to the giant supermarket chains (Carrefour and Auchan, both French) and to the Proszynski club.
Today Rebis is a family company, owned by Szponder with his wife and brother. Originally it was a partnership with Tadeusz Zysk, who went on to set up his own imprint.
In 1996 Rebis had four of the top 10 translated books in the countrynumbers 1, 2, 5 and 7 and all were signed William Wharton; when it's ready the 1997 list will show at least four Wharton titles. Szponder has contracted for still-unwritten Wharton books, and when they are written they will appear in Polish before the original English is published. "He's not just a writer, he's a guru here," Szponder explains.
Wharton's Houseboat on the Seine sold 72,000 copies in a year. That other expatriate American, Jonathan Carroll, whose work hovers between mainstream and science fiction, and who, like Wharton, gets published in Polish before his American release, sells 15,000 to 20,000 copies in the year of publication, and g s on and on.
Rebis is into nonfiction, too, again with America as the main source, featuring serious books by Carlos Casteneda and Tina Rosenberg (The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism), among others. Popular psychology is also on the list: The Male Stress Syndrome, Dr. Ruth's Guide for Married Love and the Chicken Soup for the Soul series.
Tadeusz Zysk, former partner in Rebis, quickly built a mighty empire of his own in Poznan. Another family enterprise, Poznan will do no fewer than 180 new titles this year, 70% of them fiction, and about 85% translated from English. Their edition of The Horse Whisperer climbed to the top echelon and Fannie Flagg's sleeper Fried Green Tomat s at the Whistle Stop Cafe did 24,000 copies. Zysk even has some of William Wharton in print, although new books go to Rebis.
The status of nonfiction translated from English is also well illustrated in the Zysk catalogue. John Gray's Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus came close to 100,000 sales over a two-year span, the Richard Popkin-Avrum Stroll Philosophy Made Simple close to 50,000 in a yearmaking it the house's number one nonfiction seller in 1997. Like his trade colleagues, Tadeusz Zysk must rely on wholesalers to reach the booksellers, but then the difficulties begin.
"We have some 50,000 books in print in this country but no bookseller shows more than 10,000 and most keep no more than 1000."
In the most recent ranking of publishers based on sales, Warsaw's Muza came out fourth, and number one in the trade. Founded in 1989 at the dawn of independent Poland to do professional and illustrated magazines, it was soon adapting children's and young people's books from major producers like National Geographic, Dorling Kindersley and HarperCollins, moving into the general trade in 1992. Private from the beginning, it will soon be the first trade publisher to be listed on the Warsaw exchange.
Foreign Rights manager Ewa Schwarz-Borowiec and Marketing Director Krzysztof Gencdzelewski expect to do upwards of 230 new titles in 1998, 80% of them translated. Muza books are published in series, such as illustrated reference, children's books, sports and tourism. Even fiction comes in series such as "Bestseller Library," or "VIP series" with authors such as John Irving, Heinrich Bil and Anais Nin.
Amber was registered as Poland's first private publisher in 1989 only days after that became possible, the Amber partners focused on translated bestsellers on an industrial scale. It would be hard to mention a blockbuster author who hasn't appeared at Amber, writers who quickly mattered in Poland, such as Robert Ludlum, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, Clive Cussler, Michael Crichton and, more recently, John Grisham. Amber did all the categories, sci-fiction and fantasy, women's fiction (with Danielle Steel). They moved upscale with Kurt Vonnegut, J.G. Ballard, Anita Brookner, Isaac Singer.
Nonfiction came half a dozen years later, with series bearing such titles as Mysteries of the Universe and Your Health. The first years were fabulous; then came the morning after, as described deputy publisher Ewa Turcinska and foreign rights manager Ewa Malacina. Book starvation had been appeased; now came saturation.
With increased competition, rising list prices, some pioneer private houses didn't survive. Amber did, and even began to grow again. The newest wrinkle is a Time-Life connection (Treasures of the World, Lost Civilizations, World War II). With a staff of 200, 30 of them in editorial, there will be some 400 titles this year, perhaps 150 of them in nonfiction, and a whopping 95% will be translated.
Each of the newcomers to publishing in post-communist Poland seems to be the brainchild of somebody's genius. The office of Prima is a tiny three-room flat. Including the partners, who share a room, there is a staff of five to do the 50-odd new titles a year. Prima managing director and publisher Andrzej Kurylowicz explains how this less-than-nothing house can show one of Poland's most impressive lists of international bestsellers.
Prima seems too have published everybody at least once, with the likes of James Clavell, Jackie Collins, Michael Crichton, Michael Korda, Nelson DeMille, John Gray, Erica Jong, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Erich Segaleven William Wharton. The nonfiction is also bestseller-oriented: Donald Spoto's Marilyn Monr , Ted Szulc on John Paul II (Prima's number one seller in 1997) One tactic that allows this pocket publisher to reach for the stars is collaboration with the Bertelsmann club, sharing costs of editing and translation.
Robert Finalski started in publishing with pioneer Amber, leaving to form a company with his wife called Da Capo (From the Beginning) in 1991. He has had Robert Ludlum and Frederick Forsyth on his list, but the specialty here is women's fiction, in which he may be market leader. Then in mid-1996, realizing that he couldn't sell serious fiction under the Da Capo label, he opened a second imprint, Al Fine (To the End), which runs the gamut from single-volume encyclopedias (on Judaica, health, sex...) to books questioning Catholic dogma (In God's Name by David Yallop sold nearly 50,000 copies).
The prize for tiniest office may belong to Jacek Santorski, who hands out cards reading Books, Films & Psychotherapy. A trained psychologist and licensed psychotherapist, Santorski is a popular media personality, which helps get his books moving. Until 1989, in fact, he was an underground publisher for fellow psychologists, students and even patients. After independence, he set up an above-ground publishing house. He has done up to 50 titles annually; this year he's down to 35. They are no-nonsense science books, although packaged temptingly for the general reader. Most are translationsonce the only game in town. His 50% partner happens to be Swedish, and slips Scandinavian authors into the catalogue. One of these is Jostein Gaarder, six of whose books are on the list (including Sophie's World).
Wiedza i Zycie (Knowledge and Science) is the title of a pre-World War II popular science magazine that continued to appear in the communist era. Following the debacle the firm moved into books, connecting early on with Dorling Kindersley. Today W&Z sees itself as Dorling's chief Polish connection, notably with the Eyewitness travel guides. The house also originates a contemporary classics series (Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Christopher Isherwood).
Publisher Jan Ruranski, publishing manager Ewa Szwagrzyk and sales manager Tadeusz Maciejewski have a program of over 50 new books a year, produced by a staff of 34 and a pool of freelance talent. Some 25% of sales are now made in supermarkets and other non-book shop retailer outlets. One important customers is Empik, a Dutch-owned chain of media stores whose "megastore" in downtown Warsaw is probably every publisher's best customer nowadays
W.A.B. (initials of the owning partners) was founded to do practical health guides, then got tempted by contemporary Polish writing. Today it's a mainstream imprint for Polish fiction and nonfiction, the latter in history, philosophy and cultural history. Translations are more likely to be found in the health guides line.
By focusing on native writing, publisher Adam Widmanski explains, they feel that they have the best. "Publishing one's own authors is usually the hardest thing to succeed with. But no one else was doing this, and there was a need." The critics came through, the public caught on, and new authors found they were not only seeing their names in print, but earning a little money.
It wasn't easier to sell Polish writing abroad. Their star is Olga Tokarczuk, whose latest novel of village life has been called magic realism; Laffont acquired French rights and Fremad Danish rights. Last year's biggest success here was a survey of the condition of Polish women (Harps, Piranhas, Angels), a collaboration between a Polish novelist and a journalist. And they are also world agents for American Holocaust author Henryk Grynberg.
The Strength of Tradition
"Old Warsaw" means 50 years old, back when the builders sought to reconstruct the devastated town center in the image of the pre-war city. PIW, standing for "The Polish Publishing Institute," is as old as the street it stands in. Its prestige derives from the staff's attempts to defend literature in the communist years when good writing wasn't everybody's priority. Present managing director and publisher Tadeusz Nowakowski says the house's commitment to Western culture was helped by the fact that the managing director was a member of the Communist Party central committee.
Today PIW remains a state enterprise wanting out. Senior staff tried to privatize once before without success, but now plan to sell shares to employees on the installment plan. The uncertainty hasn't pulled PIW down. There are over 100 new titles a year, chiefly in fiction, where the backlist includes William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov and Isaac Bashevis Singer, with Umberto Eco and Milan Kundera, Donald Barthelme and Susan Sontag among contemporaries.
Venerable Czytelnik, Poland's other literary giant, was founded in 1944 in Lublin under the provisional government, validating its claim to be Poland°ree;s oldest surviving imprint. From the start it was a cooperative of employees and authorsdifficult to manage, surely harder to privatize. And from the start the publisher took the high road, with Polish classic and contemporary literature (still representing nearly half the list), together with translations, notably in the 40-year-old upscale Nike series. The Nike catalogue includes Bernard Malamud and J.D. Salinger, John Cheever and John Updike, Saul Bellow and John Barthand their counterparts from other major tongues.
There were 70 new titles last year, 90 scheduled for this yearbut in earlier years they could do 350. As a cultural publisher, Czytelnik benefits from state subsidies. They don't, Publisher Chlystowski and foreign rights manager Anna Mencwel insist, go out for bestsellers. Although the years after independence were the firm's hardest, they resisted the easy way (horror and SF, say). "Now," says Chlystowski, "People are beginning to read real books again."
Two of Poland's most respected literary houses are in Krakow, once Poland's royal capital, a couple of hours from Warsaw by rail. Here Wydawnictwo Literackie, the "Literary Publisher," founded in 1953 and thus another golden oldie, is attractively installed in an ancient mansion. Managing director Janusz Adamczyk explains that his house, voted best Polish publisher last year by the book trade, is in line for privatization (a matter of finding investors to share the purchase price with the staff of 29).
Meanwhile W.L. has doubled production to just under 100 titles, in an attempt to show its muscle, in prose and p try, with some impressive bilingual editions, notably of Nobel winners Czeslaw Miloscz and Wislawa Szymborska. But editor-in-chief Malgorzata Nycz also unveils the other half of the list, the foreign half, published with the same concern for quality, with a bow to the market all the same (John le Carre's The Honourable Schoolboy, Ephraim Kishon's humor, the J'Aringrgen Thorwald crime stories, popular biography...).
In the bad old years there were good Catholics and collaborationist Catholics. Publisher Znak represented the good guys, spin-off from a Catholic weekly, which called the house a "social institute" to remove it from the regime's tight control of book publishing.
Publisher Jerzy Illg remembers Znak during the martial law years beginning in 1981 as a bridge between public and underground writing. Another upscale house, eclectic in choice, they publish Umberto Eco and Joseph Brodsky as well as Czeslaw Miloscz, Leszek Kolakowski and Stanislaw Lem. Their biggest seller of the post-communist era is God's Playground, a two-volume, 2000-page history of Poland by Norman Davies; with 180,000 copies of the set were sold.
With a payroll of 50, last year Znak released some 100 new titles, in philosophy, theology, philosophy of religion, classics, contemporary Polish and foreign literature, autobiographies (of Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman and Karl Popper).
At Warsaw's Arkady, Janina Krysiak presides over an old-line publishing house privatized in 1992. Founded 41 years ago to publish in art, architecture and building construction, it has stuck to its guns, although it launched new lines of general interest and children's books following denationalization. Arkady is a major rights buyer, with translations and adaptations now accounting for 60% of the list of some 80 titles.
They publish the Dorling Kindersley Eyewitness Guides and the Eyewitness science series. Books or series have also been licensed from Abrams, Turner, Phaidon, Thames & Hudson and Mitchell Beazley. They'd like to sell their own books in turn, and try at each Warsaw Fair.
Poland's Mass Market
Torstar's Harlequin came to Poland in October 1991. The company clearly saw a gap to fill and it helped that Harlequin books came in series, ready for newsstand distribution. Today Arlekin, to use its local moniker, publishes in eight series, the 16 titles printed in an aggregate one million copies monthly (compare Harequin in America's 14 series and 76 titles).
Barbara Jozwiak, who had been managing director at Polish Egmont since 1991, came aboard as Harlequin's managing director in 1995. She explains that all house productions are done from English, the product of a team of 70 translators; printing is done in Poland or in Germany. After the initial high, print runs declined.
"In four or five years we published 20 years' worth of Western fiction," says Barbara Jozwiak. Discretionary income for women fell as prices for household necessities soared.
Egmont Polska, affiliate of the Danish media giant, opened in Warsaw in 1991 as a joint venture with a Disney merchandiser; today it is a wholly-owned Egmont company. Here MD Jacek Beldowski describes the transformation of the business from books alone to a mix of books and periodicals, mostly from Disney, for pre-school and comics, though they also exploit licenses from Warner, as well as from Europe's Asterix and Smurf.
Books here generally mean Disney books, but in this area too Beldowski expects the 80% Disney share to decline as other promising licenses are developed. In Poland Egmont claims market dominance in children's books, thanks in part to what Beldowski calls East Europe's biggest children's book club, serving 80,000 tiny members monthly.
That the market is solid, with strong growth potential when professionals are at the helm, is evident from the Polish giants.
WSiPWydawnictwa Szokolne i Pedagogiczne (School and Pedagogical Publishers) which once had a state monopoly on textbook publishing and still controls 55% of that market, remains the country's biggest book publisher ($51.5 million annual sales, 290 new titles released last year). WSiP management lives for the day it can become fully independent, and thus a better competitor.
WSiP's managing director Andrzej Chrzanowski is one of the Solidarity her s. Chrzanowski, who now chairs the European Educational Publishers Group, was recently elected to the presidency of the Polish Book Chamber, umbrella for the book trade. He oversees a publishing program covering all school curricula, and one that is also a publisher of college teacher manuals. WSiP buys rights from abroad for many of its books, notably from Houghton Mifflin, John Wiley and McGraw-Hill.
Chrzanowski also describes a growing trade list, which d s general books, books with an educational purpose, such as dictionaries and encyclopedias. Of last year's 290 books, 50 were conceived for the general trade. The house sells from 12 thematic catalogues, each with a mix of school and general books. WSiP d s an attractive English-language catalogue for export and rights sales of books and house-produced multimedia products.
PWN was originally the communists' monopoly science publisher and from the first PWN's charter allowed it to publish the best world science, along with the worst propaganda. In 1965, in the wake of an anti-Jewish purge, its director Adam Bromberg was dismissed.
The next purge, in 1990, saw regime hacks scatter for cover. To keep PWN alive, to provide it with a viable structure and then to move it out of the public sector, the new Solidarity government got the right man: Grzegorz Boguta. Privatization in 1992 attracted a strategic shareholder in a U.S.-Canadian investment group. The balance of stock is in the hands of senior management and personnel. PWN's operations were rationalized, computerized, bolstering PWN's position as the leading STM publisher in Central Europe.
With its strategic partner PWN recently set up a joint venture company to buy into publishing, media, and communications elsewhere in the region. Boguta reveals that if PWN is the biggest private publisher by far, specialized in professional and academic books, that profile is going to change.
Well-capitalized, racking up some $50 million in annual sales, Boguta speaks of recent and future acquisitions. While trade publishing now represents only 10% of the list, he promises that more general publishing is definitely in the cards and will be carried out by acquisition. PWN employs some 500 persons at headquarters and at seven bookstores and warehouses located in Poland's principal cities and towns.
The house has been turning out upwards of 350 new titles annually, to which a new school division is adding an additional 120-130. Then a new joint venture with Reed Elsevier in law publishing will add 70 additional titles, and permit the acquisition of other players in this field. A medical joint venture with Germany's Springer-Verlag will mean still another 30 books per annum.
The biggest single division at PWN is encyclopedias, with a whole new range of products produced from a post-communist era database. Then come Polish-language dictionaries, with a CD-ROM version due this year together with a multimedia encyclopedia.
Look for PWN and WSiP to sit astride their half of the Polish book market for a long time.
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