The Publishing Landscape in Croatia, with Vesna Kurilic

How does publishing work outside the Anglosphere?

In today's ep, I'm chatting with Vesna Kurilic, owner of Shtriga Books – a small press in Croatia publishing queer speculative fiction.

We discuss how things work differently in Croatia, the yawning gulf between literary and genre fiction there (compared with in the Anglosphere), and what Anglo-American publishing could learn from Croatia and vice versa.

You can check out Shtriga Books here: https://shtriga.com/

Transcript

Hello and welcome folks to The Freelancer. This podcast discusses all things publishing through a social justice lens. My name is Andy Hodges. I'm a cultural anthropologist, turned fiction writer and editor, and I own a book editing business called The Narrative Craft.

Make sure you subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode and sign up for my newsletter in the show notes if you want more regular updates. So today's episode is a guest episode and this week I am chatting with Vesna Kurilic, owner and senior editor of Shtriga Books, which is a small press in Rijeka, Croatia. Hey there!

VesnaK (00:48)
higher.

Andrew Hodges (00:49)
Do you want to tell us a little bit about Shtriga books? First of all, just a short introduction.

VesnaK (00:55)
Sure, I think we're the ⁓ only small press in Croatia which focuses on speculative fiction and queer stories at the same time. It's very easy to say that because there aren't that many small presses in Croatia which focus on either. And my partner, Antonia and I have been at it for five years and for two years now I've been exclusively working in Striga.

as an editor, freelance editor, and also a writer and a book mentor, writing mentor.

Andrew Hodges (01:22)
Awesome.

That's so exact and I'm grinning because that is everything that I edit. It's speculative fiction and queer fiction. It's amazing, I love it. So it's great that there's a small person in Croatia that's combining these two. So...

VesnaK (01:33)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yes, we have a few stories

out which are not queer, just to let folks know, but it's minority.

Andrew Hodges (01:45)
Yep.

Cool. So today we're going to chat a little bit about how the publishing industry works in Croatia. My first question for you is, so let's say I'm from Croatia and I want to publish a book there. What are my options? Where do I start?

VesnaK (02:02)
Well,

okay. Are you writing in Croatian or in English?

Andrew Hodges (02:06)
Let's say I'm writing in Croatian and I'm writing fiction.

VesnaK (02:10)
Okay, so the

first thing you need to do is meet other authors local to you to see what their experiences are and to see whether you'd be better suited for self-publishing with the book you're working on or for trying to find a publishing house. In Croatia, lot of fiction, even speculative fiction, even queer fiction gets published by grants.

Andrew Hodges (02:17)
Mm-hmm.

VesnaK (02:35)
by sponsorship by the Ministry of Culture and also by local municipalities, et cetera. If you want to self-publish, there's a lot of people who are going to pose as publishers.

Andrew Hodges (02:41)
Okay.

VesnaK (02:47)
and take your money and help you publish your book. But also since we are in the EU, you can do whatever you want with publishing your novel. We have a print and demand option in Croatia in Split. They do books in Croatian too, non-fiction and fiction. And also a lot of people publish, I mean publish themselves, but...

Andrew Hodges (02:48)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

VesnaK (03:13)
print their books through I think it's Books Factory, the Polish company. So there are a lot of options.

Andrew Hodges (03:17)
Mm-hmm.

Okay, that's really interesting. And what you said about how you need to find kind of an institution that's going to believe that they can get funding for your project. That's quite different to what I've seen in the Anglo-American world, where there's very little state support and very little state funding of like literature.

VesnaK (03:25)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hodges (03:39)
and also lots of non-fiction too and people it's more about profit it ends up being more about profit I think

VesnaK (03:44)
Yes. Yeah, and from what

I understand in Serbia, they went the other route. They went completely into the hands of the readers and market. So there's next to no state funding for fiction. So the genre market is also bigger. I mean, it's a bigger country either way, but also the self-publishing scene is stronger in Serbia.

Andrew Hodges (03:52)
you

wow.

Yep.

Okay, now that's interesting.

VesnaK (04:13)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hodges (04:14)
So tell me a little bit more about the like vanity presses first of all because that sounds like a significant problem.

VesnaK (04:19)
Mm-hmm.

Yes, it's a big pain point for us. Just to illustrate the issue, a couple of months ago I got a DM on TikTok because I do a lot of TikTok videos and lot of Instagram reels for Shtriga edits, our freelance editing services, where a young person was wondering, they just wanted to check whether they got it right. If you want to publish something, they said, you have to pay somebody to get it published.

And it was like a completely normal thing for them because they Googled it or somebody told them. so from then I started researching a couple of small presses in Croatia who poses publishers because they are a publisher, but they're a publisher for their in-house authors. Yes, and they don't necessarily disclose that and they don't disclose the difference.

Andrew Hodges (04:45)
Bye.

VesnaK (05:09)
from when you pay them to get your stuff published with them and when they fund everything themselves. They don't say they're a vanity press. They say they're a publisher. Mm-hmm. And the pro.

Andrew Hodges (05:18)
Right, yeah, this is coming ground

with the UK and the USA. Exactly the same setup I've heard, yeah.

VesnaK (05:27)
And another major issue is that they have good distribution. So their books, both theirs and those they've accepted money to publish, are available widely. So they are a viable option for people. It's just different. I think there is just a slight lack of transparency upfront.

Andrew Hodges (05:32)
Okay.

Okay and do these

are they they editing the manuscripts or are they because there's there's rogue not necessarily okay

VesnaK (05:51)
⁓ Not necessarily. ⁓

They're not even that small. Some of them have gotten quite big with a big production and a good readership also. Win some, lose some. I think they do a proofreading ⁓ round, perhaps, but I'm not even sure about that. In Croatia, in the self-publishing scene, editing is a bit...

Andrew Hodges (06:02)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

VesnaK (06:16)
A matter of fiction still. It's a future thing, a future task.

Andrew Hodges (06:18)
Okay.

Yeah

Well, even in the UK and in the USA, absolutely loads of authors who self-publish don't hire an editor. And there's a whole educational process that they have to go down to get to the stage where they're willing to pay what is substantial amount of money for an edit. yeah, that educational work in the self-publishing space feels like it's never ending to me. ⁓ But it's important.

VesnaK (06:29)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Yeah.

Andrew Hodges (06:48)
really important work to do. Okay so next question is it true that literary agents don't exist in Croatia and is that good bad or a bit of both? What are your thoughts?

VesnaK (06:59)
⁓ It's not precisely true but from what I heard in the past decade or something, there's at least one, perhaps two agencies who work with people trying to get their works published abroad. So not in Croatia, for the Croatian market, but for the wider market. I think they help people get translations and

Andrew Hodges (07:01)
okay.

Yep.

VesnaK (07:20)
And push their books outside of Croatia But if you're publishing in Croatia there there is no such thing as literally agents I mean In Croatia at the moment. There's a little under four million people. I think according to the last census we had Yeah, so I'm not sure who the agents would be for also

Andrew Hodges (07:39)
similar to Scotland.

VesnaK (07:46)
Obviously it means that the in-house editors and people who select novels to publish. For the creation market they have their work cut out for them. It's harder for them because the middle person who would vet the manuscript doesn't exist.

Andrew Hodges (07:55)
Mm-hmm.

Bye.

Okay, and it used to be well, I don't know agents in the UK have had a apparently it goes back to Victorian times. Don't quote me on that. ⁓ But it's been a real issue that whole direct thing and then having to direct submissions receiving lots of manuscripts from near beginner writers and yeah, it's really must be really difficult. So kudos kudos to those people who are doing that important work.

VesnaK (08:08)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hodges (08:28)
This is just my feeling and I don't know if you'll agree with it or not but I have this sense that the genre and literary fiction worlds are a bit more separate in Croatia than in the UK and the USA. Like in the UK and USA sometimes the genre fiction author will then like cross over and write a litfic book

but it feels a bit more, dare I say it, like elitist, the literary fiction scene in Croatia. So wondered if you could talk about your take on all of that.

VesnaK (08:53)
Mm-hmm.

Yes,

my take is ⁓ snobbery. Is that a word in English? Snobbery and gatekeeping. In Croatia, it doesn't really matter how well educated you are. It matters more if you appear educated. So in Croatia, in the book market, there's fiction and there's pulp fiction. So there's literary fiction or mainstream and everything else.

Andrew Hodges (09:02)
Right? Yeah, it is, Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

VesnaK (09:22)
And it's a big issue I used to work for as a librarian in the Rijeka City Library as a public librarian for 10 years. my biggest issue was with dystopia as a genre or a subgenre because dystopia is harder to read sometimes than regular sci-fi. It tackles heavier subjects sometimes than regular sci-fi.

Andrew Hodges (09:37)
Okay.

VesnaK (09:50)
Etc and my colleagues used to like be very certain that dystopia is not sci-fi in fact dystopia is fiction it's literary fiction and when I when I try to tell them that dystopia is with us the rest of us firmly on the side of sci-fi nope they wouldn't listen and Literary fiction gets all the accolades gets

Andrew Hodges (09:56)
⁓

Literally facing.

VesnaK (10:14)
most of the publicity and newsfeed space. And everything else is just like pulp fiction and the only way to get wider acceptance if you're reading genre fiction, if you're writing genre fiction in Croatia is to be very, very successful at it. The biggest...

Andrew Hodges (10:31)
Okay.

VesnaK (10:33)
⁓ small press, they're not even that small anymore. In Croatia for genre fiction is ⁓ Ina Morata. It started with a lady, her name is Ina, who self-published her fiction, novels, her romance novels on Wattpad, and then started the publishing company. And now she publishes her colleagues and several other genres. They've also added like illustration, illustrated books for kids.

So they're really branching out. And people know of her, but still, they don't read her. Only the people who read romance read her. Nobody else reads her, but everybody knows who she is and what she does.

Andrew Hodges (11:08)
Mm-hmm.

Okay,

yeah I'll definitely put a link to that publishing house in the show notes and that is interesting that does fit my limited experience because I like a bit of both. I like stuff at the intersection between genre and literary fiction and it feels like that would be difficult in in Croatia. ⁓

VesnaK (11:14)
Mm-hmm.

And

a lot of people who do write a mishmash or a mix of both don't advertise it. They advertise it as literary fiction. Even if all of the short stories in a certain single author collection are genre fiction, they're never going to say it.

Andrew Hodges (11:36)
Okay. ⁓

Okay, that's really interesting. Yeah. Okay, that gives me some food for thought as well when I'm planning like translations and things like that. big question now.

VesnaK (11:48)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hodges (11:57)
What do you think Anglo publishing, because I know that you know quite a lot about the Anglo-American publishing world as well, what do think it could learn from how things are done in Croatia?

VesnaK (12:07)
We're still big on collaboration, on working together, on coming together in smaller or bigger groups to publish something and to do something. There is, I mean, we're working towards the US-centric view of the world when it's every person for themselves, but we're still not there. We might not even get there anytime soon, and if you need help, you can get help.

Andrew Hodges (12:16)
Mm-mm.

Mm-hmm.

VesnaK (12:30)
⁓ It's also not that I have a feeling since I'm in genre fiction exclusively in genre fiction I have feeling that writers don't really see everybody else as a Person who's gonna take their part of the cake there's ⁓ I think it's still more like let's work on this together. Let's try a multiple author collection and

Andrew Hodges (12:44)
Okay, yeah

VesnaK (12:52)
see if it gets funded, et cetera. And I think that's useful. It's not exclusively a creation thing, and it doesn't really go against what I know about the US and ⁓ UK publishing, but I still think it's a strength for us. And also,

⁓ We don't really wait for other people to do something for us. We do do stuff ⁓ Since everything yeah, this is everything is harder Yeah, you gotta do it yourselves and we are those people

Andrew Hodges (13:15)
Okay, yeah. Yeah, I'm aware from having looked at it. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I can think of several examples from when I was living in Croatia and in Serbia, but that taking the self initiative and that can be really powerful. And I think that works well with the self publishing ethos as well. ⁓ Like figuring stuff out and taking that initiative.

VesnaK (13:31)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hodges (13:45)
Yeah and on the collaboration that makes a lot of sense that also matches my experience living in Croatia and having read novels like Yellowface it's clear to me that there is like what I'd call a nasty grad school competitive side to the fiction world as well.

VesnaK (13:56)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hodges (14:04)
I imagine that's particularly strong in literary fiction, but I don't know. I'm not immersed in those worlds in the USA or the UK. And the editing community is incredibly collaborative. That's one thing that I've noticed. And the genre fiction community feels quite collaborative as well. So I guess there's less... There's not like all these prizes and awards. Well, there are still prizes and awards.

VesnaK (14:22)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Mm

Andrew Hodges (14:28)
but there's not quite as much riding on them. Like literary fiction authors are often very focused on the recognition of a particular award I think.

VesnaK (14:39)
it gets them

news space. It gets them headlines, interviews, daytime TV features, which are still a big thing in Croatia, et cetera.

Andrew Hodges (14:42)
Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Yeah, there's a yeah, it all makes sense as well. It's not recognition for recognition sake. It's a passport to certain opportunities. yeah. Okay. And is there anything you think that Croatian publishing could learn from the Anglo publishing world? there anything that you've noticed that seems particularly good there?

VesnaK (15:08)
Editing? Yeah, in-house editing especially. Having a higher standard for what gets published. mean, the differences are not exactly measurable because the markets are so different in size. It's like we're a mini school and the rest of the world, especially Anglo, publishing is huge.

Andrew Hodges (15:09)
Editing, okay.

you

VesnaK (15:32)
I would really, really like for us to have a set of professional or more professional standards regarding editing in Croatia. Because a lot of times when somebody puts their name in your book as your editor, they're not gonna be your editor. They're just gonna be a person who holds the title of editor for your line, your publishing line.

Andrew Hodges (15:40)
Yeah.

VesnaK (15:54)
where you're publishing with, et cetera. And ⁓ don't really like that.

Andrew Hodges (15:57)
Yeah, one thing I noticed that I do like in Croatia is having this, I think you call it an impresso, it would be called an imprint in, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you always name the copy editor in those imprints, in my experience, yeah.

VesnaK (16:05)
It's an impressive list.

If you have them, if you have them,

if you have that person, from my experience, it's more the case where you're gonna have a proofreader, a lector, and you're gonna name that person. I think that's the only person I've seen listed in most of the books I've ever read in Croatian. Because we are obsessed with grammar.

Andrew Hodges (16:24)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Oh yeah, I know, yeah. But just that naming of the proofreader slash copy editor, you don't get that very often in Anglo-American fiction. Sometimes the author will say, I want to name them in the acknowledgements. And that's really cool when that happens. And at the end of the day, I...

VesnaK (16:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. I always read.

Andrew Hodges (16:54)
I was just going to say, think that getting paid well is more important than necessarily being named for an edit, but it's nice. like other people can then find that editor and like if they did a good job, they might want to work with them, kind of thing. So. ⁓

VesnaK (17:07)
I always

read the acknowledgments and all of my favorite authors list everybody. I think it's a very good practice.

Andrew Hodges (17:12)
⁓ cool.

Yeah.

Yeah, my experience working for traditional publishers is maybe between 20 and 40 % would name like a lot of the the copy editors but if it's just a proofread that's quite rare maybe 10 % or less something like that but yeah, it is quite different so and I think that links to

VesnaK (17:34)
Whoa, whoa, that's different. Yes, that is a big difference.

Andrew Hodges (17:41)
think in the UK it's just seen as something that should be done for a text

Yeah, which means the more languages you know the more kind of

VesnaK (18:00)
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hodges (18:01)
I

VesnaK (18:02)
The proofreading thing, the lector thing in Croatia is also because we had to reinvent our language quite literally, black and white on paper in the 1990s after we split from Yugoslavia. an even bigger emphasis was put in schools, in primary education, most notably on knowing the rules for Croatian.

Andrew Hodges (18:15)
Yeah.

VesnaK (18:25)
And it didn't help people actually learn the rules. All it did was help people get even more scared of making mistakes in Croatian in their own mother tongue. Yeah. Anyway, it's a different subject. Yeah.

Andrew Hodges (18:28)
No.

Yeah, yeah, that's

a really important topic. Purism and prescriptivism in the language and yeah, that's big as well. But yeah, we'll save that for another episode. So just to finish this episode off, tell us a little bit more about Strieger books. What does Strieger mean? Just tell me everything.

VesnaK (18:59)
So do want the TV show supernatural version of what a shtriga is, or do you want a local Istrian version from Croatia? So a shtriga is probably a Vesterdise version of the Italian strega, which literally means a witch, which is one of the versions you had on supernatural on the TV show episode.

Andrew Hodges (19:04)
Yes!

Both, both, both.

VesnaK (19:24)
And locally in Croatia and further, ⁓ shtriga is like a very bad supernatural entity, most usually female, although we have the shtrigun, which is the male version, who does something bad to people around them. They make your milk curdle, if that's the term, earlier than necessary. They poison your cows, they curse you, and the only way to...

Andrew Hodges (19:44)
yeah, no thanks.

VesnaK (19:49)
banish them or to fight them is with the help of a krasnik, which is a local version, I think, of the witcher, a more famous Slavic version of the supernatural fighter. Also, Ostriga is a very poisonous centipede from the forest.

Andrew Hodges (19:54)
Mm-hmm.

⁓ cool.

Yeah.

VesnaK (20:06)
⁓ We put something we're really afraid of in our header as our logo, as our company name. ⁓ We publish speculative fiction in English mostly by local authors, local to us, which has been written in English. don't do translations.

Andrew Hodges (20:15)
cool.

VesnaK (20:31)
don't understand it. How could you write in English if you're a Croatian speaker first? And all of us have been immersed in English even before the 1990s, before the internet, before Facebook even. So it's really easier than people think. And then when they read them our books, they say like, ⁓ this sounds OK. They're like, well, thank you.

Andrew Hodges (20:43)
Yeah.

Yeah.

VesnaK (20:53)
And

Andrew Hodges (20:53)
I think that's really cool about working...

with English and also with local authors because it it's one way of like dismantling the kind of myth of the native speaker as a gatekeeper guardian of the language which is another toxic language myth I'm curious because I used to do sociology of language stuff so I asked literary agent in the UK

VesnaK (20:57)
.

Andrew Hodges (21:15)
whether they frequently work with multiliterate authors, so authors who are writing in English as a second language. And the overwhelming vibe I got from them was that, yes, they do, and they welcome like that. There are small differences because the English is informed by the other languages that they know, but that brings beauty to the language. ⁓ It brings creativity. So it's really cool. I really like that.

VesnaK (21:38)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Andrew Hodges (21:43)
⁓

My last question is what are the challenges linked to running a small press in Croatia and especially one that link that centers queer stories and authors?

VesnaK (21:57)
Marketing is different. ⁓ We have to be careful what we say in our PR releases and who we say it to. Some of our authors don't want to have a book signing in their local areas because of that, because the communities are different. They're not as open as we would like to portray them.

Andrew Hodges (21:59)
Okay.

VesnaK (22:18)
since we are a part of Europe. I mean like the further most border part of us still. Also, I don't know, not, I think the biggest challenge was for us, for Antonia and me and Shtriga specifically, was learning business, learning the business side of things. Because we came from arts and culture, but not from business and not from publishing. We were writers first.

Andrew Hodges (22:19)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Hmm.

VesnaK (22:42)
and taxes and Excel tables, Excel spreadsheets were all hard for us. Too many numbers. And being patient and learning marketing too. So business and marketing. Same as everybody else, I think.

Andrew Hodges (22:49)
It's really boring.

Yeah,

yeah that's the same as everybody else. I was saying to a friend I think when I started I was excited to learn all the business admin stuff but now I just found it really boring. I'll just be brutally honest. Marketing's like it's...

more fun, it's interesting because there's always something changing with it. That's the thing that makes it interesting. But business admin is pretty much the same. You just have to fill in the forms and learn about VAT and boring stuff like that.

VesnaK (23:26)
Yeah, yeah. The part I

found the most fun was learning copywriting. Yeah, because I was a writer for like 25 years or something, fiction writer, before I had to learn to write copy. And I'm still having a lot of fun with it. Like really, really a lot of

Andrew Hodges (23:32)
⁓ okay. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah

copy yeah I love copywriting as well and especially because I used to work as an academic academic academic writing is like the opposite to copywriting like so yeah

VesnaK (23:52)
Mm-hmm.

Make it a story.

Make it valuable. Sorry.

Andrew Hodges (24:02)
Valuable, not boring, valuable, yeah. So,

yeah.

Okay, we're going to wrap up this episode now, so thank you very much for being a guest on this show. I will have you back not in the next episode but in the one after that where we will be discussing gendered language and how that works in English and Croatian and non-binary characters and authors in fiction as well. So looking forward to having you back in the studio for that.

In the meantime for everyone else if you've been listening this far in please please please sign up and subscribe so that you don't miss any of the future episodes and I'll see you all next time.