The full-scale invasion of Russia changed the attitude of Ukrainians to Russian fiction, representatives of the literary platform Booknet told Mezha.

According to the leaders of the platform, the growth of electronic self-publishing became possible due to the rejection of Russian-language fiction in electronic form by Ukrainians. The growth was also influenced by the civic stance of Ukrainian authors who, before the war, wrote and published fiction in electronic form exclusively in Russian. Today, these authors translate their books or immediately publish novelties in Ukrainian.

If according to the results of 2021, the literary platform Booknet sold 133,000 books, then according to the results of the first half of 2022, already 100,000 books. And this is despite a drop in sales in March, when many authors made their books free to help Ukrainians distract themselves from the war.

According to the results of June, the platform managed to sell 23,000 books and charge authors UAH 600,000 in royalties, which is 20% more sales compared to May and almost 50% higher than the January results.

“By the end of the year, we expect to sell 250,000-300,000 books in the Ukrainian language. It is clear that Booknet cannot be profitable at such volumes. These are large volumes for domestic publishers, but an IT product of such complexity will become profitable at levels of at least 1,000,000 books per year. This requires a lot of investment, which is what we do,” said Serhii Hrushko, co-founder of Booknet.

Booknet, a self-published by the platform, is primarily aimed at the mass reader of entertaining literary genres: fantasy, mysticism, love novels, light erotica, etc.