Saturday, November 4 in the evening, in a room at the Palais des Congrès in Strasbourg decorated as if for a ball. Three hundred and fifty guests (the vast majority of them women) sway to the sound of Love Me Like You Do, Ellie Goulding’s hit which appeared in the film Fifty Shades of grey, laptop in hand, red dresses brushing the ground, some perched on chairs. Since the first edition of the New Romance Festival (FNR), which was held in 2016, the song has been the anthem of a community which counts hundreds of thousands of readers but stubbornly goes under the radar of the general press.
In previous years, the authors participated in the dinner, but the fervor of their readers became so pressing that the team from the publishing house Hugo & Cie, organizer of the event, experimented with a new formula that evening: the dinner, punctuated by karaoke sessions and moments of communion, will end with the triumphant arrival of around thirty writers and the presentation of the New Romance Awards. Around 11:30 p.m., Morgane Moncomble is unsurprisingly crowned Best New Romance 2023. It’s deserved. Published on September 20, An autumn to forgive you (Hugo Roman), the latest novel by this Frenchwoman, has already sold 61,000 copies.
Since his first book, Come, we love each other (2017), the 27-year-old young woman from Argenteuil (Val-d’Oise) is the darling of new romance, this literary genre that appeared around ten years ago in the wake of the success of Fifty Shades of grey, by EL James (JC Lattès, 2012), and its chic sadomasochism. Today it constitutes one of the most promising sectors of publishing.
Fans and pop stars
From Friday to Sunday, thirty-five authors (and one author) came to meet their audience, sign copies for the channel and answer, during master classes, questions asked by their fans via Instagram. Going on sale on January 31, the 3,500 tickets available for the event were sold out within twenty-four hours. Among them, the 350 fan passes, which, for 135 euros, gave the right to a free book, an escape game evening with the authors on Friday and the gala dinner on Saturday evening, were all purchased in less than two hours.
Here, the readers are fans and the writers are pop stars, applauded wildly during their interventions, asked for selfies every two meters and protected from excesses by the staff (the entire Hugo team, supported by 210 volunteers). “Book signings really are the Hunger Games. This morning, we arrived at 6:30 a.m. and, when we entered, we ran to get a ticket for the signing of Morgane Moncomble,” tell Kahina and Kenza, two sisters aged 18 and 20 “romance fans”.
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