Member of the FEDE’s Panel of Experts, Antoine Béon is Director General of Editions Bragelonne publishing house (Paris, France). He tells us about his job and gives some advice to future editors.
What have been the highlights of your career?
The first highlight was my education: a Master’s in Product Design (2003) and Master’s in Education and the Teaching of Religion in 2015. After six years working in a design agency, I was fortunate enough to discover what has become a meeting place for my dual education: the publishing. Indeed, publishing combines my appetite for creativity in the broad sense and my love of books, which have always been my favourite medium since I was a child. I joined the technical management service of Hachette Livre in 2009. I was appointed art director in 2012 then editorial director of a department I myself founded in 2015: Hachette Heroes. In 2017 I began managing my first publishing house, Hachette Disney.
Can you tell us about your current role?
Editions Bragelonne is a publishing house with a range of catalogues dedicated to general literature (fantasy, science-fiction), manga (Mangetsu) and more classical literature (Hauteville). As Director General of Operations, I publish around 400 new books each year. For example, we publish Witcher, The Wheel of Time, Jojo Moyes, Junji-Ito, and more.
What would be your advice to a student wishing to pursue a career in publishing?
I’m not going to go so far as to say that an editor is a midwife, but he or she is at least the conductor of an orchestra, so to speak. That is, he or she oversees the publication of a book, from guiding the author to getting the book on the shelves. The editor is at the crossroads of various skillsets necessary to get a book on the market: production, legal aspects, artistic aspects and sales. If I had to give some advice to a student or recent graduate wishing to work in publishing, I would tell him or her to get curious about these various fields. Because, whilst you do not need to be an expert in all of them, you do need to have a sound idea of what each of them, in addition to the author, is expecting of you.