Polish Audiobook Production: A Guide for Indie Authors

Two global audiobook services named Poland this year. On October 7, 2026, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Spotify announced that audiobooks open to its users in Poland on October 15: eligible Premium plans get 12 hours of listening a month inside the subscription they already pay for, an Audiobooks+ add-on adds 15 more hours for 17.99 zł, single titles can be bought outright, and the catalogue starts with more than 20,000 Polish-language titles. Seven months earlier, at the London Book Fair, Audible's president Bob Carrigan announced eleven new markets, and Poland is one of them, with catalogues in local languages including Polish and subscriptions billed in the local currency, Tabletowo reported, citing Publishers Weekly; the announcement gave no Polish launch date.

If your book has a Polish edition, that is the shelf it will sit on: a home market with four established competitors, and two global newcomers building Polish catalogues. Polish audiobook production asks the same three questions as English production, who reads it, what it costs and where it sells, and this guide answers them with the current numbers. Then it covers the two things that are specific to Polish: dialogue printed with dashes instead of quotation marks, and names that change their ending in every grammatical case.

If you want the wider picture first, our full-cast audiobook guide explains the format, and the multi-language announcement covers what shipped for every language at once. This post is the Polish-specific version, and it follows the same shape as the Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Hindi and Korean guides.

The most complete public picture of the market is the Polish Book Institute's annual report, The Polish Book Market 2025, prepared from data by Biblioteka Analiz, NielsenIQ BookData and the National Library and published in September 2025. It puts the Polish book market at PLN 3.13 billion in 2024 at publishers' selling prices, up 1.3%, and retail sales at almost PLN 4.5 billion a year. Audiobooks accounted for 8% of the entire market in 2024, and digital formats together, e-books and audiobooks, for about 16% of its value. The report credits the growth to competition between four companies in the online audiobook segment: Audioteka, Empik, Storytel and BookBeat.

The platforms have their own numbers. Audioteka was founded in Poland in 2008, sells audiobooks in Poland, the Czech Republic, Lithuania and Slovakia, offers more than 40,000 titles and is owned by Wirtualna Polska Holding. Empik reported a 40% rise in paying subscribers to its Empik Go app in 2024; its own recording studio produced 516 audiobooks and 19 original productions that year, and the app's catalogue of e-books and audiobooks passed 210,000 items, nearly 4,000 of them added in 2024 by independent creators through Empik Selfpublishing. Storytel had run a subscription in Poland for nine years by the time of the report. BookBeat, in Poland since 2020, passed 100,000 Polish subscribers in 2024, more than a tenth of its subscribers worldwide. Legimi, the e-book subscription, offers more than 690,000 e-books and audiobooks across Poland and Germany.

Then the gap. Most publishers now issue every new title as an e-book, but on average only one new title in nine is also issued as an audiobook, the report says, and Polish publishers submitted 30,662 new titles to the National Library in 2024. Readers are a minority: the National Library found that 41% of Poles read at least one book in 2024, down two points on the year before, and the genres they read most were crime fiction (28%), literary fiction (22%) and biographies, memoirs and twentieth-century history (17%).

Finally, the newcomers. Spotify's Polish catalogue is supplied through Legimi Content, a Legimi Group company acting as distribution partner for publishers, and the partnership is non-exclusive, so titles on Spotify can stay on Legimi and other services, NaCzytniku reported on October 12; the full list of launch titles and publishers had not been published. Globally, Spotify is taking audiobooks from 22 markets to more than 180 by the end of 2026, with more than 350,000 titles in over 120 languages, and its Audiobooks+ add-on passed one million subscribers and $100 million in annual recurring revenue about a year after launch, according to Spotify's announcement.

Two things follow for an author. The Polish shelf is being widened this year by two services building Polish catalogues. And eight new books in nine are still published without an audio edition at all.

Polish audio already has a name for a fully produced audiobook. The Polish Book Institute's report describes Audioteka's so-called super productions, superprodukcje, as audio recordings with well-known actors, sound effects and original music, made in its own studios. One example from its catalogue: Dary bogów, fourteen tales from a mythic age before humans, written by Witold Jabłoński, runs just over ten hours with 28 actors, Spidersweb reported in 2018. The other platforms are building the same way. Empik, the report says, is building Empik Go's competitiveness on its own audio series and radio plays, and Storytel Polska launched Storytel Original in 2017 to produce ten-part audio serials.

That changes the question for an author with a Polish edition. On the English-language shelves, the full-cast edition has become the premium edition of books that already had a plain read. In Poland the platforms themselves compete on the cast-and-score format, and they make those productions in-house for the titles they choose. A Polish novel produced with a cast, a score and a mix arrives in a format the listener already knows from the platforms' own productions. The same logic applies to what listeners finish: the completion data on dramatized audio is the argument for making the Polish edition the version people play to the end.

The genre figures point the same way. Crime fiction is the most-read category in Poland, and a detective story with a large cast of suspects is the kind of book a cast opens up; the mystery and detective production guide covers how to cast one. Myth and fantasy, the material of Dary bogów, have the same needs, and the fantasy production guide covers them.

Before language, decide the format. Every audiobook is one of three things:

• Single narrator. One voice reads everything, narration and dialogue alike.
• Full cast. A distinct voice for every character, with the narrator as one voice among them.
• Full production. The full cast plus an original score and sound design, mixed like a film.

The third is what Midsummerr makes, and the choice depends on the book more than the language. A memoir with two speaking parts and a crime novel with twenty suspects do not need the same edition. Full cast versus single narrator compares the listener experience of each, and does your book need a full cast? walks through how to read your own manuscript for the answer. A series needs the same cast from one book to the next, which is what cast continuity across a series is about.

Most of the production is language-independent. The rows that are not are the ones worth reading twice.

The cast sheet deserves a note. Even for a Polish book, each character's voice description is written in English, so a rights holder who does not read Polish can still review who is playing whom, how old they sound and what standing they have. Judging the reading itself is a different matter, and the honest advice is the same as for any language you do not speak: have a native listener hear the sample before you publish.

Dialogue printed with dashes. Most Polish fiction does not put speech in quotation marks. A line of dialogue opens with a dash, and the reporting clause is set off by another: — Nie wiem — powiedziała Ania. — Może jutro. Some editions use „Polish quotation marks” instead, and some mix the two. Either way, dialogue is assigned by who is speaking, not by the punctuation that marks it, so a dash-led line goes to its speaker and powiedziała Ania stays with the narrator. Check the first chapter with a long exchange on the free sample, because a dash also does other work in Polish prose, setting off an aside or a pause, and that is where you would hear a line land on the wrong voice.

Names in seven cases. Polish declines names, so one character appears in the text under several spellings: Cunningham, Cunninghama, Cunninghamem, Cunninghamowie. The pronunciation guide matches whole words exactly, which means each case form of a name you want to fix needs its own entry, with the same ending carried onto the respelling: Cunningham as Kaningem, Cunninghama as Kaningema, Cunninghamem as Kaningemem. Feminine and vowel-final names change more than an ending, Irene appearing as Ireną, so list those forms one by one. The exception is a foreign name whose ending Polish attaches with an apostrophe: an entry for George respelled Dżordż also covers George'a, which is read as Dżordż'a.

Foreign names that keep their spelling. Polish spelling follows its sound closely, and in our test readings Polish prose and Polish names were read as written. The names that came out wrong were foreign ones that keep their original spelling: Michael read as Michał, Siobhan, Reigate, Maupertuis, Surrey, and Goethe in its genitive form Goethego. Names a Polish listener knows by sight, Holmes, Sherlock, Wellington, Seattle, Brooklyn, were read the way a Polish speaker says them. A Polish respelling fixed every miss: Majkel, Szywon, Rajgejt, Mopertui, Sari, Getego. Because Polish letters spell sound, a respelling does what a phonetic transcription does in English, and there is no need to reach for one. The automatic pronunciation suggestions that flag hard names at upload run on English, Hebrew and French only for now, so the free sample is where you check names in Polish; how pronunciation suggestions work describes the English version.

Pricing is per word of the manuscript you upload, and the language changes nothing. The three formats map to three prices.

You own the finished files, and edits in the timeline are free. The first 5,000 words are free with no card, so you hear your own book produced before spending anything. One practical note: Polish has no articles, so a Polish edition can come in at fewer words than its English source. The price is per word you actually upload, not a flat per-title fee. For the wider cost comparison against studio production, see what an audiobook costs to produce.

Set that against the gap above. If publishers issue one new title in nine as an audiobook, the decision about the other eight is a budget decision, and a studio production with a cast of actors is the most expensive version of it. At $450 for a fully produced 90,000-word novel, a Polish edition with a cast, a score and a mix is a decision about one title, not a line in next year's budget.

On time: generating the fully produced audiobook takes a few hours, even for a full novel. What remains is your own tweaking in the editor, which takes as long as you want it to. A fully dramatized Polish audiobook in days is the realistic timeline, and how long an audiobook takes sets that against the studio calendar.

Spotify set October 15 for its Polish shelf, and its Polish catalogue reaches it through Legimi Content, which handles publisher relations, files, metadata and settlements, so a publisher does not need its own integration; neither announcement says how an independent author's Polish title gets there. Audible has named Poland and a Polish-language catalogue but gave no date. Audioteka, Empik Go, Storytel, BookBeat and Legimi each run their own catalogue and their own terms for who can submit; Empik Go's catalogue gained nearly 4,000 titles from independent creators through Empik Selfpublishing in 2024. Each store sets its own route for independent authors and its own policy on digitally narrated titles, and those policies change; our distribution guide is kept current on which doors are open and on what terms. The one rule that does not change: read the platform's current policy before you produce for it, not after.

1. Upload the Polish manuscript and choose Polski as the language. Chapters are detected automatically, and you can split or reorder them before generating.
2. Review the cast sheet. Every character arrives with a voice, an accent and a description in English. Edit any description, and regenerate that voice until the cast is right.
3. Generate. A full novel takes a few hours. Each chapter arrives cast, directed, scored and mixed.
4. Edit in the timeline. Change a line's delivery, a pause, a music cue or an effect, and add a respelling for every case form of a name the reading got wrong. Edits are free.
5. Download the masters and submit to the stores you have chosen. How to make a full-cast audiobook walks through each step in more detail.

Can I produce a Polish audiobook if I do not speak Polish?

Yes. The cast sheet is written in English even for a Polish book, so you can review the characters, ages, relationships and accents yourself. For the reading itself, have a native Polish listener hear the free sample before you generate the whole book. That is the same advice we give for any language you cannot judge by ear.

Does a Polish audiobook cost more than an English one?

No. The price is per word and identical across every language Midsummerr produces in. A 90,000-word novel runs $135 as a single narrator, $337.50 as a full cast and $450 fully produced with music and sound design. A Polish edition often has a different word count from its English source, and you pay for the words you upload.

Will dialogue printed with dashes go to the right character?

Dialogue is assigned by who is speaking, so a line opened with a dash goes to its speaker, the reporting clause between dashes stays with the narrator, and lines in „Polish quotation marks” are handled the same way. Listen to the first long exchange on the free sample, because a dash can also mark an aside in narration.

How do I fix a name that changes form in every case?

Add one pronunciation entry per form, carrying the ending onto the respelling: Cunningham as Kaningem, Cunninghama as Kaningema. The guide matches whole words exactly. A foreign name whose ending is attached with an apostrophe is covered by its base entry, so George respelled Dżordż also fixes George'a.

What is not available for Polish yet?

The automatic pronunciation suggestions that flag hard names at upload run on English, Hebrew and French only for now. Everything else in the production is the same: casting, directed performance, score, sound design and the editor.

Can I hear a Polish sample?

The public sample productions are in English today. Pride and Prejudice is a full production of 12 hours and 15 minutes with 30 speaking parts, an original score and sound design, and the casting, score and mix you hear there are what a Polish production gets. Your own Polish sample is the free 5,000 words on your own manuscript.

Upload the Polish edition, choose Polski, and hear your own cast on the first 5,000 words for free. The production that follows is the same one every English book gets: a full cast, an original score and sound design, and an editor to finish it in. Start with 5,000 free words or listen to a full production first.