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I'm crazy for doing this job!
“I’m crazy for doing this job”
Michel Paquot
Established in 2011, Murmure des soirs, a publishing house based near Liège, is about to publish its hundredth book. After a long career as a lawyer, Françoise Salmon set out to give substance to her passion for literature, ensuring that she always prioritised human contact with the authors. The challenge paid off, given the quality of her catalogue, despite the financial troubles and the difficulty of promoting her works. But she is confident in the pooled distribution set up by some twenty publishers of the Wallonia- Brussels Federation (FWB).
‘‘I was so naive!” Françoise Salmon keeps on saying. It takes a lot of naivety indeed to set up a literary publishing house and think you can make a living out of it. “I’ve loved literature ever since I was a little girl,” she recalls, “so I asked myself what I could do with books. I couldn’t be an author, I don’t have the talent. I wasn’t strong enough to be a bookseller. I decided to go into publishing, without knowing anything about the profession.” In 2011, she went to the Brussels Book Fair, as she did every year. And luck was on her side. There, she met two key figures of her future: the son of Thomas Owen, a leading figure in fantasy fiction who died in 2002, and the writer Alain Dartevelle. “I told them I wanted to set up a publishing house focusing on quality Belgian literature.” They both agreed to follow her. Owen’s son gave her access to his father’s archives, where she discovered an unpublished text of his thoughts and aphorisms and the beginning of a book left unfinished by his passing. Alain Dartevelle entrusted her with some short stories. La Porte oblique and Narconews et autres nouvelles du monde were the first two books she published in 2011. She printed 4,000 copies, sure that she would sell them in no time. She only sold a few hundred, which is actually not bad for francophone Belgium.
The teapot and the quill
Nothing had prepared Françoise Salmon to become a publisher, a profession she had never considered before. At the time, she was a family rights lawyer. “I enjoyed what I was doing, it was fascinating, but I was exhausted. It’s a job that requires investing a lot of energy. Taking on people’s misery and problems is a heavy job.” A personal tragedy finally led her to take a radical turn and embark on an unknown world. The name of her publishing house, Murmure des soirs, comes from Mémoire des soirs, the name under which, in her former life, she wrote the stories that people shared with her. She would then print a few dozen copies for friends and family. It was a way for her to reconcile meeting people and writing, even if, as she points out, “there’s a difference between writing sentences and being a writer”. “Mémoire” [memory] became “murmure” [whisper], a term of which she likes the sound and the idea it conveys. But she kept “soirs” [evenings], because “you read in silence, and evenings are ideal for this activity”. The logo of the new label was designed by her daughter, who, knowing her mother’s passion for tea, drew a teapot from which a quill escapes. The next question were the book covers. “At first,” she laughs, “I wanted to do what Gallimard did, with a very sober cover that didn’t reveal anything about the content. Again, I was very naive. The covers were burgundy with a handwritten quote about the author’s relationship with writing. I thought it was very nice, but the booksellers didn’t agree, they told me they were unattractive, and they were right.” Thierry Horguelin, writer and publisher at L’Herbe qui tremble, suggested a white cover with three pictures reflecting the book’s content, that can be suggested by the author but are ultimately chosen by the publisher. In March 2018, Pur et nu by Bernard Antoine inaugurated this change. Murmure des soirs thus acquired a recognisable graphic unity, with flaps and a bookmark. As soon as she published her first two books, Françoise Salmon was swamped with texts of all kinds. “You can’t imagine the number of people who write and want to be published! Reading the texts, selecting the interesting ones and then accompanying the author, suggesting changes, cuts or additions – that’s what being a publisher is all about, and for me it’s the most exciting part of the job.” At the beginning, she published five to six books a year, but then the pace quickened to eight to ten. “But ten,” she admits, “is far too many to keep up with the small Belgian publishing scene. At the latest Brussels Book Fair, we published four simultaneously, which was too many.”
Respecting the reader
For a book to be published, it must have a style. And that’s very subjective. “Style is always about tone,” says Françoise Salmon. “It’s the way a story is dressed up, which can be very sober, with short sentences, or more elaborate, with sophisticated sentences. An adultery story, for example, can be extremely trivial, or it can be fascinating, it all depends on the style. You can tell when a book is good, you can feel it instinctively. I always think of the reader, because my tastes are not necessarily theirs, and likewise, I sometimes publish books in genres that I don’t spontaneously read, such as sci-fi.” Murmure des soirs receives three to four manuscripts a day, that are read by a team of four people. “I want every text to be read and I want the author, who has put all their heart into it, to be given an opinion. We owe them respect, it’s a fundamental human value. In the beginning, I used to explain every refusal kindly and thoroughly, but some people would just not accept it. Sometimes I’d even get insulted. Now my feedback is more concise.” When a text is selected, “the first contact [with the author] is key, because if we don’t get along, we can’t work together afterwards. The human aspect is essential, as it is the start of a long-term relationship. Once we meet, one of us accompanies the author until the text is finalised. I’m lucky enough to work with great people with remarkable human qualities.”
A better quality of life
Murmure des soirs and other Belgian publishing houses have recently taken a new step by pooling their distribution and circulation, giving them a greater presence in France and Switzerland. Françoise Salmon is delighted. “Initially, I put books on deposit in bookshops, which was impossible to manage on the long term. It was an exhausting and constant door-to-door. Then I got my first distributor, but I was unlucky. And a publisher can fail with poor distribution, given the percentage – justified but high – the distributor takes. Pooled distribution is a wonderful opportunity. We’re going to have a distributor who plays the role of representative, which will save us a lot of time! What’s more, they’ll be able to introduce different publishing houses to booksellers. I believe in it.” Fourteen years later, does the former lawyer ever question the life changing decision she made? “Although I sometimes regret certain aspects of my first profession, because I enjoyed pleading, the quality of my life improved. It’s a different kind of stress; it’s easier to put things into perspective when talking about books instead of people. Even though I still tell myself that I’m crazy for doing a job that isn’t paying my bills. Sometimes I get tired, and worn out, when I see that it’s so complicated, so heavy, with so few sales. It takes passion because, financially, I can’t get my head around it. I’ve invested a lot, I’ve borrowed money and today I receive subsidies from the FWB without which, like most Belgian publishers, I wouldn’t be able to make it. We work for hours and hours, and most of the time we don’t break even. But readers don’t realise that.” In October, Françoise Salmon will launch a new collection of unclassifiable books with two publications: Babioles, a collection of short texts by Christophe Kauffman, and Poste restante by Frédéric Kurz, a series of unsent letters to authors. And next spring, she will publish her hundredth book. Which she finds hard to believe.
