Participants: Alenka Kepic Mohar, Renate Punka, Ivan Sršen, Tauno Vahter
Moderator: Carlo Carrenho
Summary:
The panel will discuss all the magic tricks the publishers in markets with smaller returns learned to survive.
Description:
Book markets with smaller returns are usually more translation dependent, have less money to invest in tech development and less money to nurture their best authors. Yet publisher in small markets know something that publishers from bigger markets don’t: they know how to conduct a business in market, sometimes with less potential book buyers than the population of Frankfurt urban area. How can this be achieved? And what kind of tricks do such publishers do to outwit the limitations forced on them by the size of their market?
Alenka Kepic Mohar, PhD, is Editor-In-Chief at Mladinska knjiga Publishing House. Her research interest includes the question of reading and learning in the digital era. She combines practical experiences from educational publishing with scholarly research to encourage dialogue between academic researchers, publishing companies, and educational policy involved in the production of digital reading materials.
Renate Punka is managing director of well-known Latvian publishing house “Jānis Roze”, president of Latvian Publishers Association (since 2012), has been moderator and speaker in various events on book publishing in Latvia and abroad. She is also a professional translator from English and Russian with more than 60 titles published.
Ivan Sršen is an writer, editor, and translator. In 2007, he started the Zagreb-based independent publisher Sandorf. In 2021, together with a freelenace literary editor Buzz Poole, he started a US publishing house Sandorf Passage base din South Portland, Maine. He is the author of the novel „Harmattan“, a short story collection “Skela – bajke iz automata za kavu“, as well as the two non-fiction books “History of Zagreb Libraries” and “Halo Bing – interview with Max Bunker“. He also edited the anthology Zagreb Noir for a US publisher Akashic Books. His translated works appeared in the renowned literary publications such as Lit Hub and New York Review of Books. He lives in Zagreb, Croatia.
Tauno Vahter (b. 1978) is an Estonian publisher and author. Editor-in-chief of Tänapäev Publishers, member of board for Estonian Publisher´s Union and past participant in the Frankfurt fellowship programme.
Carlo Carrenho is a publishing consultant based in Sweden. He was the founder of book trade media PublishNews in Brazil and Spain. He recently joined a partner in his home country Brazil to launch Pop Stories, an audiobook company. He is also a partner at the Italian aggregator StreetLib and is actively consulting for audio publisher Dreamscape in the US, the Arabic Language Center in Abu Dhabi and the publisher Beletrina in Slovenia.