In the huge International Bookshop at Bologna Children’s Book Fair, where internationalists often go first at the trade show. Image: BCBF
By Jarosław Adamowksi | @JaroslawAdamows
‘2024 Was a No-Surprises Year’
With Estonia jut days from opening its 2025 Guest of Honor stint at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, the Estonian publishing house Hea Lugu offers an eclectic mix of fiction and nonfiction, benefiting from Estonians’ preference for local writers, but also publishing a selection of well-established foreign authors, according to CEO Vallo Kalvik.
Estonia’s nearly 1.4 million inhabitants’ book market is dominated by titles released in Estonian, a Finno-Ugric language that is part of a family that also includes Finnish and Hungarian. Russian-speaking inhabitants represent around 27.4 percent of Estonia’s population.
Vallo Kalvik
Kalvik tells Publishing Perspectives that, last year, the Estonian publishing industry reported a stable year despite the slight drop in print runs.
“Overall, 2024 was a no-surprises-year. We started off hesitantly, fearing the consumers are careful due to the stagnant economic background. As always, beginning of the year is difficult, spring shows some hope, summer is slow, autumn wakes up again and then the Christmas saves the day, or the whole year, actually,” Kalvik said.
Estonia’s average book print runs are steadily decreasing, and have been doing that for many years, Kalvik says.
“But the retail prices stood their ground for years,,” he says, “until something happened after COVID-19 and the Russian aggression against Ukraine: electricity and some other costs spiked, which made the cover prices rise and now they can be compared to prices in Finland. So even if the amount of paper copies sold keeps falling, the revenues are staying about the same.”
Hea Lugu publishes both Estonian and foreign writers, including the New Zealand novelist Heather Morris, author of ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz.]
Estonian readers demonstrate a strong preference for local writers, but foreign bestselling authors translated into Estonian can also count on solid sales. Some of these authors include Colleen Hoover, Jessie Inchauspé, David JP Phillips, Jay Shetty, Valerie Perrin, and Alex Michaelides, according to Kalvik. Moreover, one of the major literary events in 2024 was the first publication of an Estonian translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Last year, Kalvik says, “We could have been a bit braver, I guess, as the market wasn’t too bad, yet. So in 2025, we’re pushing on in our key areas and definitely making more things in audio, as it does seem to have a lot more potential than in Estonia,” he says. “Hea Lugu is about an average-sized publishing house in Estonia, up to 90 titles per year. We like to work with Estonian authors, both in fiction and nonfiction.”
The publishing house has also successfully released titles on gardening, health, and cookery, as well as local fiction, classics, children’s, and young adult books.
“You can’t be too picky or niche when you have about a million reading book-buyers here,” he says.
Hea Lugu can benefit from being a subsidiary of Ekspress Grupp, the country’s leading media group which publishes three major Estonian newspapers and the nation’s biggest nationwide online news portal Delfi.ee.
The Estonian book market’s genre mix is similar to that of other European nations, in Kalvik’s view.
“We do love our own children’s books writers and illustrators,” Kalvik says.
“They are well-known and celebrated figures through generations, writer- and illustrator-dynasties stretching from the Russian occupation years. So it’s hard to market foreign children’s books here. Also the locally written books for gardening, cooking, and handicraft work well,” Kalvik said. “Crime and romance is dominant in e- and audiobooks and mostly from foreign authors, with a handful of local Estonian bestselling authors, as well.”
More from Publishing Perspectives on rights trading in the international marketplace is here, our Rights Roundup series is here, more on Bologna Children’s Book Fair is here, more on children’s books is here, more on the Italian market is here, more on world publishing’s trade shows and book fairs is here, more on Estonia is here, and more on guest of honor programs is here.