ISSUE NO. 31
CM: This issue is about independence. You are a bestselling author who launched your own publishing house. Today, not many writers start their own company. It’s a move. We are used to listening to so many conversations about the fact that the entire publishing industry is facing a crisis; that the publisher’s role is not so helpful anymore. What if bestselling authors self-publish, counting on their own mediatic power? In your personal case, it’s not self-publishing, it’s more than that: you started your own house.
Joël Dicker: When you take a game-changing decision, you often don’t understand what you’re doing. You don’t realize what’s needed. You just see the bigger picture. It’s a good thing because, if you set yourself an objective or if you had a better idea of what you are doing, you would be less likely to get stuck. You don’t see the amount of work and all the complications that are going to be on your journey.
Independence is about building your own path – whatever it’s in business, in the industry, or in your personal life. Independence is relying on yourself to create your path. I met one person in my life who taught me all of this. His name was Bernard de Fallois. He was a publisher, in the best sense of this word in France. He was born in 1926. I was born in 1985. We had an age gap of almost 60 years. He taught me to think out of the box. He taught me that if you think out of the box, you must gather a lot of advice, a lot of opinions, all the time. He was an independent man.
He had worked for big groups. In his entire career, he had served a list of publishing groups in France. When he retired from those big groups – maybe the year I was born – he decided to create his own publishing house. He was a very fiercely independent person indeed. He was the one who built the success of my books.
The first novel I published was called The Last Day of Our Fathers. Bernard wasn’t enthusiastic about it. He published it because we had a friend in common, a publisher in Switzerland who had died in a car accident. Bernard felt like he owed his friend to publish the last book of his as a publisher, and so he published my novel. When the book came out in France in January 2012, I had just finished writing The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair. Bernard read it and he said, “Joël, this book needs to be released immediately.” I was like, “What do you mean immediately?” He said, “Yes, absolutely immediately. This book is going to have great success.” I was confused: we had just published my first book, and we had no success at all.
We sold 200 copies – since my parents bought half of them. He was a man with no technology at all. His phone at the publishing house was an old rotary dial. He would say, “I’m going to send you a tweet,” meaning he was going to send you a text.
Yes, he was a renowned name in the industry, but he owned a small, not-famous publishing house. The very small business was named Éditions de Fallois. He said, “I’m going to phone all the booksellers in France and I’m going to tell them to read your book.” And he did something clever that I keep doing today.
When he wanted someone to read a book or to do something, he didn’t say, “Read this book, it’s great,” because all the booksellers used to receive a lot of books, and all the publishers were like, “Read this book, it’s great.” Bernard would call everybody, saying: “I need your help, I’m curious about your opinion. It matters to me, because I loved it, and I need to know:”
“Am I crazy, or am I right to be in love with this novel?” All the booksellers in France, in every little town, received a phone call from Bernard. He created a buzz. Bernard passed away at 92 years old in January 2018. My first thought was: I will never betray Bernard by going to another publishing house. I didn’t know that Bernard had left in his will the decision that the publishing house had to close after his death. He didn’t want the publishing house to be sold to a big group.
CM Éditions de Fallois – was it completely financed by Bernard de Fallois?
JD He had a few shareholders, but he was the main one. He had at least, I think, 60% of the capital. The publishing house had to close within one or two years. I was like, there’s one thing I need to do. It’s to create my own publishing house.
CM The economics should be better for a writer that becomes a publisher.
JD Economics should be good, as long as you keep good sanity and a good vision of the cost. You sell a lot of books, but there are costs. Not only the cost of the paper – there’s also the cost of the employees and the cost of promotion, marketing operations. It’s a ratio to find that is not that easy. We are four people based in Geneva.
CM You still must balance between your commitment as a writer and your job as a publisher.
JD My biggest luck is that I found a team of people that took over the publishing house for me. I’m not an operative. I’m the CEO, but I’m trying to stay away as much as I can from daily operations. This way I can write.
CM In this industry, you must count on the intellectual ability of the people you are working with. It’s a matter of being curious about everything they do. Intellectual commitment is not something you can require. It’s up to the human bond you build with your team. Young people today want to live easily and do what they are told.
JD People on my team are between 35 and 45. They’re young, but they’re not juniors anymore. They were not coming from the publishing industry when they started working with me. On the path to independence, we need to rethink the model and start our own model. There is no point in going to talk about books to people who are already readers.
CM All the deals today are made by your publishing house.
JD I am the one in touch with publishers around the world. And it’s Alfaguara in Spain, it’s Harper & Collins in the States, it’s Piper Verlag in Germany. La Nave di Teseo in Italy, with Elisabetta Sgarbi. I was confident that I would be able to deal with my own publishing house quite early in the process. At Éditions de Fallois, they were not equipped to deal with all the publishers in the world. There were only a lot of issues about taxes between Switzerland and France and in the other countries. I stepped in quite early with them. Lucky for me, I went to law school.
CM It’s a huge amount of work in terms of workload.
JD They say that if you want something to be done, give it to a busy man.
CM How many books do you manage to release per year with your own publishing house?
JD We do approximately two or three books a year. I don’t want to just release a book. I need to be credible, as a publisher, because I’m a writer.
CM To be independent means to release not a lot of books but to release the good ones. Who decides which books you publish? I guess you are the one who has the last word.
JD It’s me. I decide. It’s about my readers. For instance, the first book we published was a book by an American author. Her name is Maryanne Wolf. She’s a professor at UCLA. Her book exists in English – the title is Reader, Come Home.
CM What is the name of your publishing house?
JD Rosie & Wolfe.
CM How did this come from?
JD It came from Reading and Writing – R & W. My grandfather’s name was Wolf, and he wrote a book. I was a kid; I saw his book – it was a biography – and I was like, “Wow, he wrote this,” and I thought maybe one day I’d be able to write so many pages.
CM Your upcoming novel La Très Catastrophique Visite du Zoo is about a girl that got lost in the zoo.
JD The girl is not lost. She decides to be lost in the zoo.
CM Why the zoo?
JD I tried to write a story that could be a story for everybody – for my readers, of course, my adult readers, but also something they could share with their kids. This is a book that you can share. It’s frustrating when you read a good book and you want to share it, but you know for sure that the person is not going to read it, maybe because the book is too long.
CM But why the zoo?
JD The girl goes to special school. One Monday she goes to school and there’s a firefighter. There has been an incident, and the school is flooded. There’s water everywhere and they cannot access the school anymore. The firefighter says that it was just an accident, but the girl is convinced that it’s a criminal act. Why would someone do that? And the girl is going to investigate. Their teacher had told them that on the last day of school before the holidays, all the kids would go to the zoo.
CM One last topic for discussion. We like to introduce Lampoon as a rough mag. We try to use a way of writing that is without adjectives, that is without adverbs, without any kind of rhetoric. All the images that we release are untouched – they’re not post-produced. We would like to shoot everything on film with analog images. We say that we are searching for everything that is rough in the world, in the arts, in fashion – everything. Rough means what is raw, what is not polished, what is not refined. We hate everything that is plastic. We fight plastic. We are a magazine devoted to sustainable matters. We define Lampoon as the cultural magazine about sustainability. We like everything that is imperfect. We like the wrong details of every human being. Which feeling does the word “roughness” give you?
JD We’re using filters on our images. Cameras are made to change reality, to make it better, to polish it. A rock is rough. When you have a rock, an animal can go behind it and hide and feed. We live in a world of plastic where we hope that everything could not be rough. We hope everything will be smooth and easy. It’s not the case. It’s a lie that things will go smoothly. Things are rough for a good reason.
ISSUE NO. 31
Lampoon is a cultural magazine.
Culture today means sustainability – in its honest meaning.
Culture has always been about human respect, tolerance. It’s not only about accepting human diversity but it’s about searching for the beauty of every human peculiarity.
Inclusion is the first value that defines art. Culture today means one thing only: to be part of a community, to think as a community.
Reading Lampoon, you see that these themes are smoothly aligned. A good part of the articles’ content discusses practices to restore our environment and stories about understanding the others.
Reading Lampoon, you find a dialogue between science and creativity. From sharp and edgy photo sessions to fashion, architecture, technology – the commitment is dedicated to a future that is all about us – together.
LAMPOONMAGAZINE.COM is an independent online magazine, properly listed at the Milan Court Register of Press, number 407 / 19 December 2014
The magazine is released by LAMPOON PUBLISHING HOUSE S.r.L.
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