Storytel moves into the House of Stories – Newspaper Kommersant No. 23 (7468) dated 02/08/2023

The former team of the audiobook service Storytel, which left Russia, is launching the Dom Istorii publishing house, which will specialize in fiction. The main investor of the project was the former CEO of Storytel in Russia, Boris Makarenkov, who bought out the Russian business of samizdat Litnet. Experts estimate investments in the project at the level of 30-40 million rubles, naming high competition in the segment of fiction among the risks, which will intensify against the backdrop of the loss of rights to foreign works due to sanctions.

Since February, a new book publishing house, Dom Istorii, has been launched in Russia. There, Kommersant was told that the project was being implemented by the Russian team of the Swedish book service Storytel (left the country on October 1, 2022). The main legal entity is Everbook LLC, registered in 2012, its owner and CEO is Boris Makarenkov, who headed Storytel in Russia. Anastasia Zavozova, translator and former editor-in-chief of the Russian office of Storytel, will be the editor-in-chief of the House of Stories.

The project was launched at Mr. Makarenkov’s own funds, a representative of the publishing house specified. The volume of investments is not disclosed. The publishing house expects to reach payback within two years.

The House of History plans to publish works by foreign and Russian authors – paper, electronic and audio books. The main direction will be fiction, in particular detective stories, thrillers, science fiction and fantasy, family sagas and gothic novels: “Non-fiction is not planned yet, maybe in the future.” Now the publisher’s portfolio has about 200 publications, including “Like We’re Villains” by M. L. Rio, “Arctic Curry Club” by Dani Redd, “Down Through Branches and Bones” by Shannon McGuire and others. The average circulation will be 5,000 copies.

Boris Makarenkov also became the owner of the Litnet samizdat platform last year: he bought 100% from the co-founder of the service, Ukrainian entrepreneur Sergey Grushko (see Kommersant dated June 2, 2022). “There is no connection in terms of business processes and other interactions between Litnet and the new publishing house,” said Boris Makarenkov’s representative. He added that the House of Stories already has agreements on the placement of electronic and audio books on the Litres and Yandex platforms (it owns a license to use the Bookmate platform, Bookmate Limited, which manages the service, is recognized by the Ministry of Justice as a foreign agent).

“Publishing is a long game, the process from buying the rights to a shelf in a store can take up to six months. On this scale, investments in the project could amount to 30-40 million rubles, ”the source of Kommersant believes in the publishing market, adding that the main items of expenditure at launch will be the purchase of rights to books and employee salaries. He suggests that proximity to the samizdat service would, in theory, help the project pay off faster: “On Litnet, you can select the best-selling books and bring them offline.”

The project announced a fairly large average circulation, the publishing house will have to compete with Eksmo, AST, Azbuka-Atticus and Alpina, Kommersant’s interlocutors in the book market say. The main risks for the “House of stories” they call high competition in the field of mass fiction, which will only intensify as foreign rights become less accessible to Russian publishers. Also, according to one of Kommersant’s sources, the project’s payback may be affected by tighter content regulation and a drop in purchasing power: “A book for 400 rubles. sold three times better than the same book for 600 rubles.

In the current turbulent situation, talking about a return on investment in the horizon of two years “seems extremely optimistic,” says Denis Kotov, the main owner of Popcorn Books and Individuum publishing houses, the real period is from five years. Former head of the Association of Internet Publishers Vladimir Kharitonov considers the specialization in fiction to be a strength of the project, noting that the share of the segment in sales has been growing over the past year: “Many people want to escape away from this planet – at least into good novels.”

Valeria Lebedeva