SURVEY – This profession imported from the United States is developing in France due to the extension of the market for authors and audiovisual rights.
“A literary agent is a shrink capable of meeting the needs of his author at any time. He is also a marriage agent, responsible for facilitating the harmony of a meeting. Between two text messages exchanged with the Prix Goncourt Hervé Le Tellier, stuck in an airport somewhere in Asia, Pierre Astier, head of the Astier-Pécher Literary & Film agency, gives us his vision of the profession. It has been nearly a decade that he accompanies the author of The Anomaly (Gallimard, 2020).
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“Hervé joined us at the time of major discussions around digital rights between publishers and authors. He wanted to entrust these contract negotiations to an agent., he says. With Laure Pécher, Pierre Astier deals with 80 French and international authors. For his part, François Samuelson, the country’s leading literary agent, likes to define himself as a “traveling companion”. The founder of Intertalent, who imported the profession from the United States twenty years ago, has built his career around authors…
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