Sonia Draga at the 2023 Scuola per Librai Umberto e Elisabetta Mauri. Image: Courtesy Stefano Mauri and Nana Lohrengel, Fondazione UEM, Yuma Martellanz
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Also in today’s Rights Edition:
FEP’s Deputy Director Enrico Turrin Looks at English Exports
Rights Roundup: On the Road to Franfurt 2024
Sonia Draga: ‘Our Market Has Changed’
As Publishing Perspectives rights-news readers know, the Frankfurt Rights Meeting program in its hybrid format is underway now, with three of its digital events still to go and its in-person keynote reception featuring Madeline McIntosh, publisher and CEO with Authors Equity planned for the eve of Frankfurter Buchmesse‘s (October 16 to 20) opening.
Remember that you can register for each or all of the sessions, even now with the series under sail. This story has an updated rundown of the four online events and the reception for you.
Tuesday’s session (September 10) at 4 p.m. CEST (14:00 GMT, 13:00 BST, 08:00 ET) is titled Market Focus: Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania. It features:
- Sonia Draga, president and CEO, Publishing House Sonia Draga (Poland)
- Iulia-Cristina Stan, editorial director, Corint Publishing House (Romania)
- Richard Klíčník, editor, Argo Publishing House (Czech Republic, Frankfurt Guest of Honor 2026)
- Moderator and panelist: Milena Kaplarević, literary agency rights manager with Prava i prevodi (Serbia)
Sonia Draga, as many of our readers know, is vice-president of the Federation of European Publishers and a frequent speaker in international book publishing trade show, conference, and book fair venues, of course, and has spoken more than once in past years at Buchmesse.
Knowing how Poland’s market has been at the coalface of Vladimir Putin’s Russian assault on Ukraine, of course, particularly in terms of refugee reception and support.
Popular in Poland: Young Adult and New Adult
Ahead of Tuesday’s event, we asked Draga if she could give us a brief preview of some of her comments to come about a market in which she’s one of the best-known and most successful publishers.
“Our market has changed a lot in the last few years,” Draga tells Publishing Perspectives. “It’s been influenced by social media—TikTok and other influencers—so the books that sell the most are dedicated to the generations active in that sphere.
“We see high popularity of Young Adult and New Adult books. Among those—to a degree like never before—are the titles written by Polish authors themselves, many of them quite young.”
Draga also speaks of a shift in terms of sales channels: “Another thing that’s actually connected with the most popular genres is the fact that most of the now are realized online. Our brick-and-mortar bookstores suffer in an uneven competition, as online stores offer books with big discounts of up to 45 percent.”
Audiobooks, primarily in downloadable distribution, she says, “are still an interesting part of our market,” as they have been for some years. The format “is steadily growing, becoming more and more popular. Fortunately we don’t observe yet the situation where the audio market could be cannibalizing the paper market.”
When asked how she sees some of her own publications faring on international markets in terms of rights sales, Draga says that having not yet published into the YA and New Adult genres, she hasn’t yet had a chance to watch how that genre sector may be performing in Poland’s lists.
“It’s generally much more difficult to offer books from a country like mine,” however, she says, “being a bit off the mainstream of literary interest, and with a challenging language like Polish. But we keep on trying. I’ll have some interesting thrillers and one ‘romantasy’ book to offer soon,” and those titles will give her some new angles on rights performance.
And when asked where the main pressure points for publishers in Poland are this season, Draga says, “The main problems we, the publishers, are facing here is the distribution and the decline of brick-and-mortar bookstores.
“It results in a narrower line of books that sell well and challenges in successfully promoting more sophisticated titles.”
These and other points will be part of Tuesday’s Frankfurt Rights Meeting discussion with Sonia Draga from Poland, Prague’s Richard Klíčník, and Bucharest’s Iulia-Cristina Stan.
Again, registration is here, and a look at the other sessions planned is in our story here.
More from Publishing Perspectives on the Frankfurt Rights Meeting is here, more on digital publishing is here, more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here, more on international translation and publishing rights is here, more on the Polish market is here, and more on international book fairs and trade shows is here.