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Article Dans Une Revue Publishing Research Quarterly Année : 2003

Small and Big Publishers in France: Is Literature a Rare Species?

Résumé

As suggested by the title, the general picture of literary publishing in France is not ideal, or idyllic. While the business in itself remains active, original and economically stable, the price of this stability is rather high. Literature pays the biggest part of the bill while commercial fiction, media-related documents, and best-selling authors are favored, along with developing sectors such as children trade books or practical books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. The tendency is not necessarily toward lower quality or hastily made books, since the children trade books sector, for example, has gradually imposed high standards of quality writing and of artistic and creative visuals. It is now admitted that children's writers are not secondary writers for nondemanding or weak readers. On the contrary, an observation of the production shows that the more it goes the more fiction writers skip freely from adult books to children's and vice versa, without lowering their standards. Also, more and more children book authors in France belong to a new type of creator: writing artists or writers with graphic gifts, that is to say, creators who express themselves equally by means of drawing or painting and writing. It would therefore be unfair and altogether wrong to describe French book production as decaying and the purpose of this communication is to bring nuances to this basic picture. But the general and exclusive rule of profit making which affects publishing in the United States has not left European publishing untouched.
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hal-02123105 , version 1 (11-05-2019)

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Brigitte Ouvry-Vial. Small and Big Publishers in France: Is Literature a Rare Species?. Publishing Research Quarterly, 2003, 19 (1), pp.31-44. ⟨10.1007/s12109-003-0021-7⟩. ⟨hal-02123105⟩
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