One more down for the count. Baker Street is no more. The small Parisian publisher named after the Sherlock Holmes series was quietly placed into receivership on November 29, 2023. "To think that we had just released three books!" said Cynthia Liebow, the American who founded the small business in 2007 in order to make English-language authors better known to a French audience. Over the years, Baker Street published texts by Jerome Charyn, Robert Littell, Stephen McCauley, Francine Prose and more.

The company, which started off as a subsidiary of Seuil before going independent, had been treading water for years. "Publishing foreign literature is expensive, but we were able to survive, and I put back in a little money to fill in the gaps," said Liebow. Yet this fragile edifice failed to hold when the group Média Participations, which has owned Le Seuil since 2017, demanded payment of the rent for the offices it sublet to Baker Street. "In recent years, I had cut costs, released fewer books and ended far too expensive promotional tours by foreign authors that required buying plane tickets and hotels. It wasn't enough," lamented Liebow.

One down and others may follow, as foreign literature now finds itself in a tight corner. This trend was confirmed in 2023, during which the overall French book market grew by around 1% in value, according to the research company GfK. But this increase was entirely due to a sharp price hike (+5%). On the other hand, the number of copies sold fell by 4% in a year, a slump due in particular to a 10% drop in contemporary foreign literature, except for romance novels, which are enjoying great success.

This lousy year comes on the back of a string of mediocre vintages. "In the last decade, sales of modern foreign fiction have fallen by 25% in volume," pointed out Sandrine Vigroux, GfK's director of market intelligence. By contrast, French literature sales rose by 20% over the same period. As a result, "foreign literature is becoming a niche market," said Manuel Tricoteaux, the head of publishing house Actes Sud's foreign literature division.

This was evidenced by the top 100 best sellers in bookshops for 2023. Dominated by Asterix and Gaston Lagaffe comics and winners of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, the chart still included 28 foreign books, but more than half were non-literary. Among these successes were five mangas by Eiichiro Oda and Prince Harry's memoir, Spare. The number of foreign novels on the list, which had long hovered between 35 and 45 a year, dropped to just 12, including several sentimental novels by Colleen Hoover and the feel-good comedy Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi.

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