Every year in Poland we ritualistically lament the country’s low-level readership, but we are yet to see the state take any meaningful action. What are the consequences of this lack of regulation, when readership is clearly not important enough for the state to create circumstances that would help both publishing houses and female writers – often undervalued – to develop?
Debates about the book market, female authors’ pay, and the challenges facing publishing houses have been going on for years. The idea of setting a standard price for books was discussed as early as 2007, then later revived in 2021 when writer Andrzej Sapkowski sued the computer games company CD Projekt for PLN 60 million (€14 million) after its adaptation of his Witcher novels proved more successful than he had anticipated. This followed an earlier discussion about novelist Kaja Malanowska’s earnings. Each of these debates was followed by silence. They brought no change.
This time the silence was broken by Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak, author of Chłopki (Peasant Women) and Służące do wszystkiego (Servants for Everything), who announced on Instagram that the courts are to settle the dispute she has been fighting with her publisher, Marginesy, since August 2024. Despite being published in 2023, Chłopki remains one of Kuciel-Frydryszak’s bestselling books in Poland.
It is not clear how much money she has made from the book, but preliminary estimates put the figure at PLN 900,000 (€212,000). Kuciel-Frydryszak herself emphasizes the disproportionate nature of her earnings in relation to the publishing house’s profits. In the year Chłopki was published, Marginesy recorded PLN 14.5 million (€3.4 million) more revenue than in the previous year. Kuciel-Frydryczak is claiming a share of the profits and is entitled to do so under the so-called ‘bestseller clause’ (i.e. Article 44 of Poland’s Copyright Act).
The author has come in for heavy criticism for having signed such an agreement. However, she quickly found support from writers such as Jakub Żulczyk, Katarzyna Tubylewicz, Grażyna Plebanek, Małgorzata Rejmer and Jacek Dehnel, who, like Kuciel-Frydryczak, had managed to escape the ranks of the precariat. To go to court, you need money. And to avoid being branded a problematic writer and ending up unpublished, you need to be successful.
It appeared to be a dispute between authors and publishers, with the latter supposedly ripping off the former. After all, an author who receives an advance that enables them to live modestly for three months out of the year it takes to write a book won’t be going up against anyone.
Precarious work
Of course, contracts vary, and we don’t know much about them due to the imposed confidentiality clauses. However, a survey carried out by the Literary Union shows that between 2017 and 2021 the average advance was between PLN 4,000 (€940) and PLN 27,000 (€6,360), depending on the genre and the author’s gender – proof that the pay gap also affects the book market. The median gross monthly salary for an author is PLN 2,500 (€590). Yet, in the words of Maciej Jakubczyk, ‘Hey presto: they take it’, as ‘the work is socially momentous, bestowing pride and honour. In fact, it’s not even a job, it’s a mission. And when you’re fulfilling a mission, you don’t talk about money’.
This mechanism was described long ago by David Graeber in his book Bullshit Jobs. Work that is socially important, carried out in accordance with one’s beliefs and based on responsibility, is undervalued. The moral, social or artistic values of work are not considered in the capitalist market. Instead, these values are cynically leveraged to exert psychological pressure and reduce resistance to exploitation. This applies not only to artists, but also to teachers, nurses, scientists, journalists and other precarious workers. And even more so when they are women.
Capitalism requires resources, including cheap labour, cheap creativity and cheap care, which it then transforms into a commodity. The way to control these resources is to tie people to a monthly salary that discourages risk and forces them to look for work on the side. This leaves no time for leisure or, above all, for understanding one’s situation. This is compounded by the embarrassment of supposedly being intelligent yet earning only PLN 2,500 a month.
It is somehow symbolic that Kuciel-Frydryszak has broken her silence over her book Chłopki, whose popularity stems from a collective reworking of the legacy of serfdom and patriarchy – an unjust, violent and unequal system that guaranteed cheap labour and which we couldn’t rid ourselves of on our own. This system contributed to the short-lived success of the wealthiest when the grain of the First Polish Republic flooded Hanseatic ports, followed by a long, painful decline.
Borderland opacity
However, it would be wrong to assume that the relationship between an author and a publisher is equivalent to a feudal one. Publishing houses are also exploited. This is especially true of smaller, more ambitious ones, which are in search of authors and thematic niches. Ultimately, it’s a case of the more you care, the less you get, because if you care so much, you’re going to do it anyway. Your commitment is a resource.
Publishers often say that running a publishing house in Poland is a gamble. The book market is small and deregulated. Poles don’t read much, so selling 2,000 copies is considered reasonable and selling 3,000 copies is considered very good. The Czech book market is twice the size of ours, despite serving a population of 10 million compared to Poland’s 38 million. Reading is not in fashion in Poland. There is no cultivation of a reading culture. Most poles only read when they are at school, where it is mandatory. Those who propose school reading lists seem to know this, so they include as much as they can while they can. However, books still lose out to TV series and social media, which require no concentration.
Above all, it loses out to the culture of hard work described by the cultural semiotician Zofia Smełka-Leszczyńska. We are one of the most overworked nations. At the same time, the value of our work remains much lower than the value of work in other Central European countries: the median gross salary is less than PLN 7,000 (€1,650). Since 1989, we have been the eastern frontier of capitalism, supplying Western Europe with cheap labour. With an education system that most of us leave behind with a sigh of relief after 12 years, books are associated with compulsion.
The authors of ArtRage, a podcast devoted to the publishing industry, claim that publishers conceal sales figures, which makes it challenging to analyze and understand the market. Polish bookseller Bonito has decided to reveal its sales figures and embrace the fact that selling 50 copies in a month makes a book a bestseller. Szczepan Twardoch has sold 170,000 copies, Wojciech Chmielarz has sold one million, and Joanna Kuciel-Frydryszak has sold 500,000. While this may seem a lot, for a population of 38 million, it’s a paltry sum.
According to the book market research agency Nielsen BookScan, 130–150 million books are sold annually in Poland (based on the 20-35% of the market it has been able to access). Two-thirds of these are school textbooks, a large proportion of which are children’s colouring books. This leaves an estimated 1.6 books per inhabitant per year in Poland. In France and Germany, by comparison, the figure is 10.
Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, the authors of the book Historia świata w siedmiu tanich rzeczach (A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things), recently published by Krytyka Polityczna, use the category of the borderland to analyse capitalist processes. Its characteristics are opacity, ambiguity and ignorance – because it is in the borderlands that devaluation takes place, the transformation of what capitalism wants to sell into resources.
Devaluation is a fitting term for the actual borderland, the buffer zone between Poland and Belarus / Ukraine, where human life and health is deprived of value unwitnessed, and for contracts on the book market, where the work of authors and publishers is devalued, hampered by confidentiality clauses and the lack of access to distribution reports. The opacity of the market is no accident, and the state should be keen to eliminate this, as it is not in our interest.
In financial terms, as calculated by Marcin Bełza in the online literary criticism journal Mały Format, the value of all books published in a given year in Poland is around PLN 4.5 million (€1.06 million), of which literary fiction accounts for less than 20%, or PLN 600,000–800,000 (€140,000-189,000). Bełza compares this figure with the beer market, which generates PLN 26 million (€6.1 million) per year.
The deregulated
This tiny publishing cake has been divided very unevenly. Why? Because it has been deregulated. It’s a completely free market. But wait a minute! There is also a free publishing market in France and Germany, yet these countries have regulations in place and a higher literacy rate. They also work fewer hours and spend more on health and education. They value their work, their time and their culture.
Meanwhile, no Polish government since 1989 has recognized the strategic importance of readership for state development, despite research clearly showing its correlation with health, civic engagement, the ability to identify disinformation and an understanding of global challenges, relationships and education. There is no regulation, despite the fact that cultural goods and books are described in the constitution as ‘a source of identity for the Polish nation’. Furthermore, Article 167 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union dictates that books should not be treated purely as marketable goods but should be supported and promoted.
However, rather than investing in culture, Poland relies on tradition. This tradition is understood as parochial, conservative, xenophobic, patriarchal, Catholic and feudal. It is averse to and distrustful of living, progressive, equal, accessible and therefore emancipatory culture. One need only recall the holding of rosary prayers outside theatres or the ’rainbow Virgin Mary’ case. Instead, most holidays are celebrated with a military picnic and a mass.
And yet, in the face of the challenges posed by a changing world, it would be more appropriate to foster an open and inviting artistic culture that could embrace followers of a variety of traditions, not just parochial Catholicism.
The Polish state is able to create favourable conditions for various enterprises. The state is subsidising the mining industry with PLN 9 billion (€2.1 billion) this year, even though it is unprofitable. It has allowed coal mines to drain brine into the Oder, instead of forcing the purchase of a system to desalinate mine water. The Oder catastrophe of 2022 did not bring about any changes. In 2024, the Ministry of Climate and Environment did not issue an immediate deceasement order to mining companies but merely recommended that they develop a plan, timetable and pricing, which is not expected for another five years. This is a perfect example of shifting costs onto nature – and onto us, because the money for the clean-up of the Oder is coming out of our pockets.
Clearly, if the state wants to support industries, it can. In the case of the book market, however, it does not want to. Pressured by stakeholders, the Ministry of Culture has proposed that market players get together and come up with a joint proposal themselves. However, it is difficult for small publishers to negotiate with an oligopoly of distributors.
Five earn as much as 300
A report by the Polish Economy Network (PSE) in December 2024 highlights the fundamental issue identified by publishers. The book market is dominated by four major distributors (some also count Azymut that is making losses), which control 80% of the market. The largest is Empik, followed by Ateneum, Dressler Dublin (formerly Olesiejuk) and Platon. They do not compete with one another. If one lowers its prices, the others follow suit. They can afford to engage in a price war and sell at a minimum price because they make their money from the masses anyway. If they own chains of bookshops, they are effectively transferring money from one pocket to another. Publishers cannot afford such low margins, but distributors can. Marcin Bełza calculated that in 2023 these five distributors earned PLN 4 billion (€9.4 million), which is as much as 300 publishers combined.
The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) is responsible for ensuring competitive conditions. It allows the concentration of capital and market monopolization, for example, by approving Empik’s takeover of Platon and the Foksal Publishing Group. The report prepared by the PSE also highlights that UOKiK is late in initiating investigative proceedings against several major entities.
In this arrangement, a distributor who owns a publishing house and a chain of bookshops can do whatever they want. As Krzysztof Cieślik and Michał Michalski explain on the ArtRage podcast, smaller publishers are essentially given the choice of ‘agree or get lost’ when dealing with distributors.
According to the PSE report, the average discount for distribution is as high as 50% (sometimes reaching 70%), whereas for bookshops it amounts to 38% of the cover price. Bookshops are going bankrupt, with one in three closing between 2010 and 2020. Book prices are rising because publishers must raise the cover price to avoid selling below production costs.
Intervention needed
There are ways to extricate cultural creators, who play an important role in the formation of ‘national identity’, from the realm of resources. But they require a state that believes that culture is a strategic sphere that must be protected by regulations.
The authors of the PSE report have some suggestions for regulating the industry, one being standardized pricing. This idea is not new. The publicist and Krytyka Polityczna contributor Piotr Wójcik wrote about it in 2021, and even then it wasn’t the first attempt. The proposal prepared by the Polish Chamber of Books (PIK) at the time envisaged setting a standard price that would remain in place for one year. The authors responded at length to the objections, most of which stemmed from the capitalist dogma of the free market, explaining that competition is not just about playing with prices, and that publishers should be able to compete with interesting titles.
Smaller publishers are concerned that the introduction of a standard price for books will only result in an increase in book prices. Distributors will continue to take books on consignment at discounts of over 50% and may even take advantage of the standard price to demand higher discounts because their sales will fall.
Other regulations supporting publishers should therefore follow the introduction of a standard book price. The state could purchase books from publishers at the cover price for libraries, regulate top-down discounts for distributors and order them to disclose sales data. It could also create a stabilization fund for publishers and treat bookshops as cultural institutions, which would entitle them to benefits such as reduced rent. In addition, the state could provide support for writers in the form of scholarships and insurance packages. If the state supports farmers and priests, why not writers too? The state’s initiative to reduce VAT on books to 5% has only benefited developers – sorry, distributors – but this error is hardly unexpected, is it?
Solidarity among those who are being exploited would also be useful. PSE proposes the establishment of a cooperative to bring together publishers and booksellers, who would together have greater bargaining power with distributors. Literary organizations such as the Polish Writers’ Association and the younger Literary Union could work towards introducing greater transparency in contracts. They could also support smaller publishers by encouraging respected and widely read writers, such as Jacek Dehnel, to publish with them rather than with larger publishers, which usually poach bestselling authors. Since the biggest players in the market are able to avoid competition, perhaps the smaller ones could also act against the established rules that drive the oligopoly.
A frontline country in polycrisis
Poland is a borderland country, and for several years now it has also been a frontline country in polycrisis affected not only by war but also by the development of AI, global warming and migration. We have reached a turning point. We have a choice: either to continue down the path set out at the beginning of the transition, competing in the market with cheap resources – cheap labour, cheap education and cheap culture, allowing individual players to grow – or to start valuing ourselves and working together so that as many people as possible can participate in culture. We should be opening up culture instead of forcing migrant children in integration centres to assimilate ‘Polish sensibilities’, as Interior Minister Maciej Duszczyk puts it.
And superficial measures are not enough. It is not enough to say that we need to start with education, because education is in the same position as literacy, and the crisis is already here. The collapse of healthcare and state brutality towards migrants are eroding the value of life. Culture and science are becoming less valuable – AI is being trained on stolen books and the work of scientists. Creators and scientists don’t get a penny for this. Yet, it is culture that can support us in this polycrisis and serve as a field of freedom and dignity.
Ukraine has experienced a boom in reading during the war. People are publishing, buying and reading books, and discussing them in cafés while on leave. In the face of constant danger, culture is proving to be a unifying and mobilizing force, providing solace and dignity. Ukraine is fighting against barbarism, standing firm on the side of civilization and basing its identity on this.
Now would be a good time for the Polish state to address the legacy of serfdom, of the agricultural estate and of the culture of hard work that is driving us into a trap. The state should side with society by imposing fixed discounts on distributors and negotiating taxes from big tech companies that have been capitalizing on our time, attention and creativity for years. This would provide enough funding for a basic income. Even a minimal basic income would allow us to work less and free up time for reading, thinking, rest, concentration, freedom, engagement and creativity. It will enable us to reclaim the most human aspects of ourselves that we are losing and rescue us from the borderlands, even if we remain geographically close to the frontline.
This article was first published by Krytyka Polityczna on 19 April 2025. Its English translation was commissioned as part of Come Together, a project leveraging existing wisdom from community media organization in six different countries to foster innovative approaches.
