Feature Market Focus
company’s legal list suited her. She was energised even more when Gorbachev’s perestroika, around a decade later, meant the publisher could expand its list, and she began running a new social sciences division. Kilbloka was deeply involved in the independence movement which swept Latvia in the late 1980s and early ’90s. But this was not necessarily a good period for its book industry. She says: “That time is hard to describe. We were fighting for independence, for free- dom, for what our parents and grandparents told us they had before the Second World War. It was so excit- ing, so inspiring. But it was chaos for publishing—all these houses went bankrupt almost overnight because they were used to being supported by the state. The free market was wild, almost criminal at the beginning.” Zvaigzne almost went under, too. In 1993, its then-director called a meeting, told the staff that the company had no money and that he was taking his pension, and leſt the next day. Kilbloka was having none of it. She says: “I wanted to save jobs: all of these people were colleagues I had known for years. And it was the only job I ever had. I just decided I had to take over.”
The bare necessities The early days were difficult as the very infrastructure of the Latvian industry was collapsing and being rebuilt. Kilbloka says: “We had no resources. For example, it was difficult to get even paper stock.” She ended up having to buy paper from a now-defunct “doubtful and a litle bit criminal” Russian printer at a high rate. Part of the deal with the Russians was that the printer shared in the profits: “It was scandalous, but it made us ensure that each book we sold made money.” But there was a market in Latvia, Kilbloka says. She explains: “There was a vacuum of books and people wanted them desperately. Particularly in education—the Soviet-era textbooks had been thrown out and a lot of schools didn’t have any, with the kids only being able to write down what their teachers said in class.” There seems to have been a Nietzschean “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” element to the Latvian market in the 1990s, and even through the 2000s, not least with a volatile currency. Kilbloka says: “It was time of high inflation. Your money on one day could be worth a tenth of its value the next. You had to sell right aſter publication, get your cash, and be decisive.”
The inflation crises, and cuting out of the many middlemen in Latvia’s convoluted book distribution system, were among the reasons Kilbloka decided to open a bookselling division. Zvaigzne now has a 40-shop estate, making it by far the country’s biggest chain and responsible for around a quarter of Latvia’s specialist bookshops. She says: “It was a time when a lot of retailers went bankrupt and didn’t pay us for our books that they sold. We decided to develop our book- selling to be in more in control and not be so exposed to unpredictable governmental policies and the whims of others. It was about securing the cashflow.” Zvaigzne enters this year’s fair in fine fetle. It still has its original schools business as a base (accounting for some 20% of revenue), but has long since expanded into
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general trade publishing, which is now its core. Around 35% of its revenue comes from non-fiction, 27% from children’s and 17% from adult fiction. The Market Focus will boost all the Baltic states, “or at least, it will give us some recognition. I have been at trade fairs in the past where someone will say: ‘Latvia? But you’re so tiny. And don’t you just publish books in Russian?’”
Zvaigzne does acquire a fair number of foreign books, especially in fiction, where almost two-thirds of its sales are of its translated titles. But Kilbloka is bullish on sell- ing rights the other way. Zvaigzne’s biggest international success to date has been with Juris Rubenis, a Lutheran pastor whose books on relationships and spiritualit
Pictured above and left Vija Kilbloka, c.eo. and founder of Zvaigzne ABC, shows off some of her firm’s publications in one of its bookshops—an auxiliary operation it runs in Latvia, where its 50 shops make it the country’s biggest chain
have been hits in Germany and the US, in particular. But she is particularly keen to plug the novelist Tom Crosshill at this year’s fair. Born Toms Kreicbergs in Riga (the nom de plume is the English translation of his surname), Crosshill lived in the US for many years, authoring science fiction and Young Adult titles. His newest is a general fiction title called The Cattle Express, billed as “a tale of Wall Street and Siberia”. Kilbloka does speak frankly about the challenges she, and her fellow Latvians in the book trade, face going forward. She says: “The population is shrinking—we have about one million Latvian speakers and have reached some limits in the number of books that we can sell. Plus, younger people are quite eager to read in English, and do so—because sometimes it takes a bit of time for us to translate—you might publish the first book in a series in Latvian, and customers will read the next one in English because it’s already available [and not yet translated into Latvian].
“But I am optimistic about the future, particularly about developing our home-grown authors. And we are looking for titles to translate into Latvian, particularly from non-English languages, so we are looking at the bestseller lists in Europe to see what we can find. I guess part of our responsibilit as a big publisher in a small market is to help save the language, to help keep it alive. We are swimming against the current a bit—it’s difficult, but I think we’ll get to the shore.”
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