What was your experience of the London Book Fair?

I have been going to London from the outset and Frankfurt for the last 20 years, but I also go to other international book fairs such as those in Moscow and Beijing, and I plan to go to Guadalajara. London and Frankfurt undoubtedly complement one another, and London provides the opportunity to further any contacts made in Frankfurt. The key aim of my meetings during the fairs is to sell book rights, which constitute an essential part of Diable's budget (270,000 euros out of a 1 million euro budget in 2006). It was in 2003 that the sale of foreign rights really took off. Our catalogue is currently made up of 75% French and 25% foreign books. Authors such as Thomas Gunzig and Regis de Sa Moreira attracted the interest of foreign publishers. Italy and Russia are currently the main buyers for Diable books, but we are also increasingly selling rights to Asia and Spain. Undoubtedly, foreign publishers are drawn to the “new French wave”, a new generation of young French authors who are producing works of their time that go beyond social satire and appeal to the general public.

You created Diable Vauvert in 2000. What are the greatest successes and key stages that defined it?

Our first great success was Nicolas Rey. The contemporary writing style of Running at 30 (Courir à trente ans) sold 30,000 copies, and the four titles we have published by him have sold 80,000 copies in total. Today, Thomas Gunzig also sells well throughout the world, except in Great Britain. Pierre Bordage and Ayerdhal sell 10,000 copies and are doing very well in paperback. Philippe Le Roy won the Crime Fiction Prize in 2005, with 15,000 copies of The Last Testament (Le Dernier Testament) sold. Grégoire Hervier's first novel, Scream test, a slasher-style vitriolic attack on reality TV, has already sold over 7,000 copies, and the paperback and film rights have also been sold. Equally, our foreign rights catalogue contains numerous success stories: Douglas Coupland, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, Poppy Brite and soon Irvine Welsh. I published several of these authors as part of the “J'ai lu” series during the 15 years I was at Flammarion, but I wanted to go further. I wanted to celebrate these authors as literary figures, and not just publish them in paperback.
Today, Diable publishes around 25 titles per year, with average sales of 3,500 copies per title. The biography U2 by U2 sold over 10,000 copies, and The wife stripped bare (La mariée mise à nu), by the Australian author Nikki Gemmell, has seen sales of 13,000 in just four months.

How do you select the authors you publish? What do they have in common?

Diable receives approximately 4,000 manuscripts per year. Our editorial policy is ambitious. Above all, I am looking for authors who write about today's world in today's language whilst mocking its labels, pushing boundaries and mixing genres. Habitus, by James Flint, for example, is a novel with echoes of Deleuze and Balzac and influences of Science Fiction which sold better in France than it did in Britain. All the authors that we publish have various qualities in common: a strong narrative, an original voice, and a plot that goes beyond the constraints of the novel. Works such as those by Régis de Sá Moreira are both narrative and avant-garde, with well-drawn characters and a perceptive view of society.

What do you think of the publishing industry in France today? Do you in some ways feel closer to the British publishing industry?

Yes, I do feel close to a certain Anglo-Saxon publishing culture: contemporary, borne of rock and roll and pop culture, audacious, mixing a fusion of influences. Even the design of our books is inspired by British books, with colourful covers, a different image for each title, the author's
photo inside the front cover and the paperback book format. The ever-changing Diable logo on all our covers also stems from this influence.

In Les enfants du plastique, Thomas Clément parodies the music industry's homogenization of the “cultural product”: “Smoothe, smoothe, then smoothe some more. Take away splinters so that nothing stings, lubricate words so that sentences slip by well. A good product need not be riginal, although its marketing needs to be.” Do you think this comment can be applied to the publishing industry?

I was not able to convince Flammarion to publish authors that had been successful in the “J'ai lu" series in hardback. I wanted these authors to be recognized as the great writers they are, I wanted to create a catalogue with the same literary weight as those of P.O.L and Christian Bourgois. During the first three years, people tried to warn me against my editorial policy, telling me that the authors I was defending belonged to a niche market. I said that in fact quite the opposite was true, that they represented new voices and growing trends. Six years down the track, I am focused on consolidating and developing the Diable catalogue, and the success it has encountered in France and abroad shows that this approach was the right one. I strongly believe that originality pays in an increasingly bland world, a world that has become enslaved to commercial constraints, and that is why I back certain original voices. Sá Moreira became an established author after his third book, and he now sells over 15,000 copies in France and Germany. This emphasis on originality, coupled with rigorous selectiveness, is one of the key reasons for Diable's success.

London, May 07.