A feeling of necessity, rightly or wrongly

Inseparably author and publisher, Benoît Peeters has been at the helm of Les Impressions Nouvelles for over twenty-five years, drawing on the collective energy of his collaborators and always paying the utmost attention to the specific features of each book published by the house. It’s an eclectic house, where the humanities, literature, comics and cinema mingle in a whirlwind of erudition and emulation. Although it is still very much alive, this long-term work is facing the many challenges encountered by publishing in the current socio-economic context.

Reading, writing, publishing

After his first foray into publishing with the magazine Conséquences in the early 1980s, Benoît Peeters embarked on the Impressions Nouvelles adventure with the conviction that publishing books is just as important as publishing a magazine. “The structure was associative, based in Paris. At that time, Marc Avelot, Jan Baetens and I were people who published books, rather than a publisher. After the structure had been dormant for a few years, we had to make a decision: either we stopped or we gave it a more professional form. I had a small audiovisual production company through which I offered to take over Les Impressions Nouvelles in Belgium, with Patricia Kilesse as my partner. The team grew over the years and we started publishing more professionally around 2000. After a few years, thanks to our first major bookshop success, we joined the Harmonia Mundi distribution structure.” In 2011, at the initiative of Tanguy Habrand, Les Impressions Nouvelles applied to undertake the Espace Nord heritage series. The result of this takeover is the publication of a total of around thirty volumes a year – “which, in a structure that has become increasingly fragile in recent years, is quite substantial”, says the publisher. The publishing climate is not making it easy for independent publishers, as many titles that have not proved their worth in the first three months are finding it hard to stay on the market. “We’ve never stopped making professional progress in a context that has continued to deteriorate. Our efforts have only enabled us to stay at the waterline.” Seasoned by experience, the IN nonetheless face a number of challenges: the sales levels of Espace Nord, which was once a great success, are, for the most part, very low. “I deplore the lack of support, whether in education or in the libraries of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation,” continues Benoît Peeters. “It’s as if reading the classics of yesteryear is now only of remote interest to the literary world, or that more demanding reading outside the world of bestsellers is only of interest to minorities.” With the exception of well-known names such as René Magritte, authors with a strong Belgian identity are finding it hard to establish themselves in France, he explains. But this problem is not confined to the French readership: “These days, we’re living in a rebound culture. We’re constantly moving from one article to another, from one medium to another. This focuses us on the subjects that are of direct interest to us. This is how search engines and algorithms work. Cultural information is increasingly focused on what people are already talking about, which can attract clicks. But when it comes to more demanding publications, the question of visibility is essential – we need to know whether those who might be interested in our books will find out about them. Booksellers themselves have to make choices and, as we know, the visibility of a book in a bookshop is essential. It’s a constant battle.”

Strategies and tailor-made solutions

Through Harmonia Mundi, Les Impressions Nouvelles is represented throughout the French-speaking world. As a result, the potential difficulties that books may encounter in finding their way into bookshops are the same for the IN as for larger publishing houses. If the IN suffer in particular in the field of literature, it is due to a “rather strange” accusation of provincialism: “as if being based in Brussels made our books less credible than others.” It’s a complex from which the Belgians themselves seem to suffer, and one that is particularly felt in the field of literary prizes, where an award that emanates from within the country does not have the same value as a French prize – just as it is much more difficult for authors published by a Belgian publishing house, rather than a French one, to appear on these lists. “That’s why I advised Hélène Gaudy and Emmanuelle Lambert, two remarkable authors who started out with us, to go to Parisian publishing houses once their work had been spotted. Their recent books were both shortlisted for the Goncourt, and it’s obvious that the same text would not have had the same success here.” Of course, certain fields are not affected by this double standard: comics, books related to images and, to a lesser extent, the humanities. However, because their light structure means lower overheads, the IN are able to publish titles that the big houses find attractive, but whose sales potential is too low. “This difference means that we receive some very interesting manuscripts and that many authors send us their projects first. You’d think they’d come to us after being turned down by prestigious houses, but no, the possibility of a rapid response and personalised support, and even a publication date that’s not too far away, means that we maintain a relationship of trust with these authors.” However, the risks taken by these publishers, whose economy is more fragile, have to be offset by other contributions, such as the support provided by the Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles or the search for additional funding from the Centre national du livre in France, universities or foundations. “It’s a fairly onerous and laborious quest, but one that has become structurally indispensable.” Today, the IN catalogue contains almost four hundred titles. Of these titles, “only a third are actually still alive, but for a publishing house of our stature, that’s in fact very good,” continues the publisher. And that’s where the difficulty lies in managing a catalogue over the long term: making small, costly reprints, ensuring that you have sufficient stocks of all the titles, especially when it comes to books with sophisticated production processes. “One of the advantages of our company is that we can tailor our products to their needs. We don’t have an absolutely strict mould that applies to every book. I’m thinking, for example, of a magnificent work like Caroline Lamarche’s l’Asturienne. Spending a month on the layout of a book is not profitable, but that’s what makes the work exciting. And that’s what might make people want to come to us, rather than somewhere else.”

Prospects and opportunities

However, there are many fears for the future, and the delicate question of succession arises: “In their Histoire de l’édition en Belgique [History of publishing in Belgium], Pascal Durand and Tanguy Habrand drew attention to the phenomenon of publishing houses that are linked to one person and die out with that person. I’d like Les Impressions Nouvelles not to suffer that fate and to continue beyond me.” It would probably be a different kind of continuation, but one that would retain the assets: the distribution structure and a rich catalogue, which means that books can survive over the long term despite the socio-economic context. “Although publishing is a big part of my life and my time, it has always been a kind of sideline. I’ve never made a living from publishing; it’s my work as an author that has sustained me. This particular situation somewhat distorts the economic game: if I’d had to pay myself a salary, even a modest one, the company wouldn’t have been able to support it. The continuation of the IN thus implies something strange, a mixture of passion and struggle, a feeling of necessity – rightly or wrongly.” It is this feeling that drives the publisher to give new authors a chance, such as Bénédicte Lotoko, Nathalie Marquès and Esther Demoulin in 2024. While most of the manuscripts that arrive in the post are often unsuitable because their authors haven’t bothered to look at the publisher’s catalog, some stand out from the crowd and it’s up to the publishing house to help them take the plunge. “That’s part of our mission. Taking risks, but also giving people a chance. And that chance is not strictly a matter of the success of the first book, but of the authorisation or encouragement it gives to continue, to go further.” Benoît Peeters, himself the author of a first novel published by Minuit, recalls the words of Jérôme Lindon: by definition, no one misses a new author. Neither Samuel Beckett nor Annie Ernaux would have been missed if they hadn’t been given a chance. “These books didn’t respond to any demand, a strangeness that doesn’t exist in other industries, where things are made according to a previously studied demand. But in the cultural sector, in the noblest sense of the term, demand is created little by little. Today, we can’t imagine a landscape without Beckett and Ernaux. They are part of a kind of configuration of the world. They have created their own field, their echoes, their imitations, their polemics. This possibility seems essential to me, and justifies the trouble we take.”