Participating in literary events : issues in professionalization for book authors[Participer aux manifestations et rencontres littéraires]

Book authors' participation in fairs, festivals and writing workshops has become an increasingly important source of revenue and has come to play a key role in the book industry's economic models. Through individual interviews with some sixty contemporary French authors, we examine how authors perceive these activities and we propose an interpretation in terms of professionalization. Authors' participation in literary events involves two trade-offs : in the short term, monetary relations and the allocation of working time are at stake ; regarding the long term, we highlight the prospects for professional development as offered by, or limited by, encounters with other actors, in particular peers, readers and publishers. An analysis of authors' discourse reveals the close interweaving of economic and creative concerns for each of these trade-offs, but also the variability of these concerns according to individual situations. Literary events play a contrastive role in the professionalism of authors : they represent opportunities for authors to distinguish between the qualities and positions they desire or in which they recognize themselves, from those they consider foreign to or even detrimental to the practice of their art.