On the Daugava in Riga, also known as the Western Divina, the Väina, which flows from Russia’s Valdai Hills, near the source of the Volga, and moves through Belarus and Latvia into the Gulf of Riga. Image – Getty: Ross Helen
By Jarosław Adamowksi | @JaroslawAdamows
‘Fiction Is the Market’s Overwhelming Leader’
Latvia’s book industry representatives say that fiction continued to be the dominant genre of the country’s book market in 2024, with domestic authors fueling local publishers’ sales.
With a population of around 1.8 million inhabitants, Latvia is one of the three Baltic states, its neighbors being Bologna-bound Estonia and Lithuania.
Renate Punka, managing director of Latvia’s Jānis Roze Publishers and the president of the Latvian Publishers Association, tells Publishing Perspectives that 2024 was a steady year for the country’s book industry.
Renate Punka
It was “a rather stable year without huge positive or negative surprises,” she says.
“The official statistics gathered by the Latvian National Library will be published in the end of March.
But preliminary results show an increase in the number of new titles and a slight decrease in total print runs, which dropped from 2.2 million copies to 2.13 million” in 2024.
Fiction is the market’s overwhelming leader,” Punka says, accounting for “950 out of the 2,194 titles [published in 2024], if we count fiction for both adults and for children.
“Fiction for adults makes up almost 30 percent of the all titles and 23 percent of the [country’s] total print run. Popular science is the next most popular group. And titles for children tend to have bigger print runs than books for adults.”
Dace Dukāte, sales director at Jelgavas Typography, told Publishing Perspectives that last year was also successful for hre Latvian printing house.
The company’s performance in 2024 was “very close to 2023 and 2022,” Dukāte says.
Dace Dukāte
“In 2025, taking into account the fact that print runs are expected to decrease, Jelgava will install a B2 format digital printing machine, Fuji Jet Press 750S, on which we’ll print book covers up to 1,500 copies and also interior pages from 100 to 300,” she says.
“We offer this exceptionally high printing quality in small print runs to high-quality publishers not only in Latvia, but also to our clients in Scandinavia, Germany, France, Austria, and Switzerland.”
Up to 92 percent of the books published in Latvia in 2024 were released in the Latvian language, a slight decrease from the 96 percent of a year earlier.
Russians constitute around a quarter of the country’s population, which makes them Latvia’s biggest ethnic minority group. (Prior to declaring independence in 1991, Latvia was, together with Estonia and Lithuania, part of the Soviet Union.)
Strong Sellers in Latvia
“In all three major bookshop chains,” Renate Punka says, “the biggest bestsellers are titles written by Latvian authors.”
Last year’s undisputed leader, she says, was the autobiographical book by actress and stand-up comedian Zane Daudziņa, Bērnudienas Komunālijā (My Early Years in Komunalia) which is a book about the childhood the author spent living in a so-called communal flat, a dwelling typical in Soviet times, published by Zvaigzne ABC.
Other 2024 bestsellers by Latvian authors included Sandra Kalniete’s novel Māte sieva. Sieva māte. Meita sieva (Mother wife. Wife mother. Daughter wife), also released by Zvaigzne ABC.
At Jānis Roze, the No. 2 bestseller was last year’s No. 1, The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. “And the the third-bestselling title was the very timely and important book Digitālā bērnība (Digital Childhood) by Latvian scholar Zanda Rubene,” both books published by Janis Roze Publishers, Punka says.
The stability Punka talks about for Jānis Roze Publishers last year was in place despite the region’s rather unstable and unpredictable geopolitical and economical situation, she points out.
As chief of the publishers’ association, Punka says, “We have published many interesting books,” she says, including making a start on a 30-month project co-financed by the European Union’s Creative Europe program.
The biggest moments of 2024, she says, include the New Horizons award of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair—a special award assigned by juries of the annual Bologna Ragazzi Awards.
In 2024, that honor went to Aleksandra Runde’s What to Do if You are Naked in the City.
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Latvian book publishing industry and market is here, more on fiction is here, and more on book publishing in Europe is here.