Welcome: A Blog for the Professional Author

Welcome to the SOAF blogspot.

SOAF, the Society of Authors, France, is the French regional forum of the Society of Authors, London (see www.societyofauthors.org )

The term "blog" is a contraction of "Web log." "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. So if you want to follow our postings in the order in which they were entered -- and generally in their order of importance -- you should scroll down to the bottom of this page and read upwards, posting by posting.

A ‘posting’ is a specific topic for dialogue, initially described by the editor and open to commentary. If you wish to make a comment, click on the letter box after ‘COMMENTS’ and follow the simple directions.

In the last couple of years blogging has become an increasingly significant means of communication in business, government and politics. We believe it has enormous potential as an instrument by which you, as an author, can communicate your thoughts and promote your books among the people who matter to you. We urge all members of SOAF to participate in this blog, for we think it could be of great significance in your professional future.

Check in whenever you like to see new postings, and most importantly to email posting ideas to our Chairman, Gregor Dallas.

From here on in it's over to you, Gregor and me, the members of the SOA, France, to make this blogspot work for us. If you don't play you don't win, so please, try and participate as much as you can.


Signing in

In order to make your first comment you will need to sign in as a ‘blogger’. The system does not accept anonymous comments.

You want to make your first comment. You click on ‘Comments’. A simple worksheet will appear on your screen. Type in your comment, followed by your Society of Authors membership number. You could even paste in a new posting that you would like to recommend. Below this comment you will be asked to type in Username and Password. Since you have not yet chosen one, go down to the question ‘No blogger account?’ and click on ‘Sign up here’. You get a second worksheet on your screen. Type in your User Name (no spaces), your Password, your Display Name (this will normally be the same as your User Name), and your E-mail (this will not appear on the Blog, and nobody on the Blog, including the Chairman, has access to it). Then click on ‘Continue’. Check the text of your Comment, and your membership number. Then click on ‘Login and Publish’. Your first comment has just been published on the SOAF Blog!

For subsequent comments: Click on ‘Comments’. Type in your comment (or paste). Below the comment, in the spaces provided, type in your User Name and Password. Click on ‘Login and Publish’. Your comment is now published.

I am leaving for England for a week. What a pleasure it shall be if, on my return, I find a series of comments from the members of SOAF. You are the people who create our new French community of British authors!

If you are not a member of our parent organisation, the Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens, London SW10 9SB, see www.societyofauthors.org


Responsible participation and respect for other members

We expect this blog to initiate original and robust debate. Please remember, however, that its success depends on your respect for the persons and reputations of all those involved. Some blogs have floundered because of slanderous remarks made by participants.

Gregor will do his best to vet incoming comments to assure high standards of dialogue. But each participant is legally responsible for his remarks, which is why we are obliged to ask you to identify yourself by email and SOA membership number. Non-members are welcome to participate, but we highly recommend membership (see www.societyofauthors.org)


Question: How do you think we can best assure high standards of dialogue? Is there a conflict here between the maintenance of high standards and the privacy of participants -- and their right to free expression? If so, how do we resolve this?

SOAF Organisation

Not many of us have the time nor the willingness for a complex organisation, and after all we are all already paid up members of the SOA with its own conditions of membership which we adhere to.

Gregor is proposing the following simple structure:

An annual National Chairperson who will be responsible for maintaining www.soafrance.blogspot.com and chairing the annual meeting.
Regional chairpersons responsible for a) gathering data on Anglophone clubs, associations and bookshops within their region b) organising regional meetings, Paris being one of those regions. Volunteers are welcome.
A secretary for any SOAF meeting, be it regional, annual or Parisian who would volunteer at the beginning of any SOAF meeting to take notes for that one meeting and write a posting that the Chairperson can publish on our blog. (Ian notes: ‘On the occasion of the first meeting we didn't appoint a note take until two thirds of the way through our meeting so please forgive me if these early reports are a little sketchy - I rely on participants to fill in the gaps by making comments on this blog’.) WE DO NEED SOMEBODY TO VOLUNTEER AS SECRETARY OF SOAF. If you are interested do contact us through the comment section below this posting or email Gregor directly.

For ease of planning, our 'year' would start 01/01/07 and the regional and national chairs would be one year roles, voted on by the people attending the annual meeting. (For all intents and purposes our first meeting in October 06 was our 2006 annual meeting and although we didn't have an official vote, I think it was clear everyone was happy for Gregor to carry it forward in 2007. So for the sake of simplicity and in honor of Gregor's efforts to get this venture off the ground, it is proposed that Gregor is the national chair for 2007.

At the annual meeting people could nominate themselves to be the chairpersons (regional or national) for the next year, and there would be a vote. There would be no constitution precluding the chairpersons being re-elected for another term, and no limit on the number of terms the chairs could be held by the same person.


Question: Do you have any comments on this as a way of organising SOAF?

Profiles

I have included my own profile in the blog (though I am not entirely satisfied with the way this is currently set up). Why not send us yours? After all, the whole purpose of this blog is to promote your books and to help you find an efficient means of promoting them in the future. Depending on your response, we could devote, perhaps, one month to each person who would be willing to provide us a profile in depth. Tell us what you think.

Question: Do you think presenting profiles on this blog is a good idea? If so, how would you like this to be done? If not, give us your reasons.

Links

I have created a number of links on the SOAF blog.

Question: If you know of any useful writing related sites that you can recommend and which we can include on our section of links, please make a comment below with the url of the link and a few words about why you think we should link to them.

Next Annual Meeting -- A Literary Festival?

Where and when should we have our next annual meeting (assuming hopefully more frequent regional and Parisian meetings)?

Should it be in Paris given how many of the members don't live in Paris?

Could it be turned into a weekend event; a mixture of speakers, readings, discussion about writing and issues facing writers in France, and of course socialising? Could we pull in speakers from the SOA in London?

Is there someone who would like to take charge of organising an annual event?

During our October meeting it was suggested that our annual meeting could take place alongside a literary festival somewhere in France where many members lived. Lennox Morrison, the Scottish novelist, has looked into the matter of festivals and this is what she writes (24 October):

The biggest festival is the Salon du Livre in Paris. Next year it runs from 23rd to 27th March with the theme of India. There's a further general book festival in Nice in June or July with more than 200 authors and various events including cafes litteraires. Smaller general book festivals take place round the country, for instance, the Foire du Livre at Brive-la-Gaillarde which in 2006 is from 3rd to 5th November. Specialised festivals include: children's and youth fiction at Seine-Saint-Denis and at Boulogne; cartoon books (BDs) at Angouleme, Paris and Saint-Malo; thrillers at Montigny-les-Cormeilles; crime at Le Mans; Breton lit in Brittany; roman noir at Frontignan la Peyrade -- by their very nature these festivals a bit to specialised for us. My attention was caught, however, by the Salon du Livre Insulaire which is held on the l'île d'Ouessant , Finistere at the end of August. They seem mainly interested in islanders within the French speaking world although they also include all the islands of the Med, many of which are of course not within la francophonie. They don't mention the UK. Perhaps an off-shore meeting is a little too adventurous? However, if there's a clutch of Society of Authors members in this area then the festival organisers might welcome participation from British islanders? Another festival with a difference is the Etonnants Voyageurs Festival International du Livre et du Film in Saint-Malo. Created in 1990, the festival is based around the idea of writers going out into the world with a sense of discovery; a sense of elsewhere. In this spirit it sometimes exports itself abroad, for instance, to Dublin, where the emphasis is on rencontres with writers in the host country. This year's festival will take place between 26th and 28th May in Saint-Malo and the theme is World Cities, including, of course, London. For a flavour of this festival take a peek at www.etonnants-voyageurs.net/ Since our aim was to consider a meeting outside Paris I would suggest that either the general festival in Nice or the Etonnants Voyageurs festival in Saint-Malo might be worth a closer look. I do, however, remember Lucy Wadham's comment about the dreariness of a book festival she attended. An alternative to arranging a meeting parallel to a book festival would be to identify a cluster of Society of Authors members outside Paris. The Languedoc? Normandy? We could then find out whether there was an English language bookseller who might be interested in hearing from us. Shakespeare & Co. felt like the ideal meeting place in Paris and the restaurant next door was superb. However, if we ever had difficulty finding a suitable date for Shakespeare & Co. then the Maison des Ecrivains on the rue de Verneuil in the Seventh has very grand premises with a relaxed cafe-restaurant in the courtyard and one of their missions is to be friendly to foreign writers.

Question: What are your suggestions for next year’s meeting? Do share with us your ideas of venues and dates.

Paris Meetings

How often do Parisian members of SOAF?

Question: Is there anyone who wants to take responsibility for organising meetings and agreeing their frequency for Paris-based members? Given that Gregor is not far from Paris should it be him or should he retain an overall national role?

Post your comments here please.

Regional Meetings

It is clear that a number of people were unable to attend due to distance from Paris.

Question: are there any people out there interested in organising regional meetings? If so please post a comment here and Gregor will write a posting on you and how to get in touch with you. No doubt regional groups will arrange their own frequency of meetings.

http://soafrance.blogspot.com

It was agreed that this blog should be set up as a first step to provide an online meeting place for SOAF members. Members can suggest to the chairman of SOAF ideas for postings or even send him already written postings that he can then post at www.soafrance.blogspot.com

It's all about participation - your ideas for events, activities, issues to be raised and published as postings and most importantly your comments on the postings.

Next steps for SOAF

Gregor was keen to impress upon us that we had built some momentum simply by having such a well attended first meeting, but ongoing participation was the key.

A number of issues were discussed, but if you have an idea as to what SOAF could do please post a comment here.

Further separate postings have been made on what we did agree and there is a posting on how SOAF should be organised.

Health and the Business of Living in France

This was an area of wide-interest to a large number of members, primarily involving various ‘caisses’ and other agents of the French helath system as well as other social and pension organisations; what were the terms, conditions, advantages and disadvantages of joining AGESSA, which manages social security for authors in France.

We here publish Gregor’s preliminary notes on the subject:

Sécurité sociale
The French equivalent of the National Health Service is a system of obligatory health insurance. Anybody living in France, by law, has to belong to it -- though, in fact, there are fairly large swathes of the population that don’t. I personally would recommend it.
To join up you have to do it through your profession -- which strikes most foreigners as most peculiar (I think it harkens back to the Ancien Régime where a man’s position was determined by his état or his ‘status’ in the social order of things).
At any rate, if you are a teacher, you register via the National Education system. If you are a worker you’ll probably do it through your Syndicat. If you’re a plumber you’ll go through representatives of what are known as the Petits et Moyens Enterprises (PME). And if you are an independent writer…
Well there is an organisation known as AGESSA, l’Association pour la Gestion de la Sécurité Sociale des Auteurs which sits at 21, bis, rue de Bruxelles, in the 9e arrond. (01 48 78 25 00)
AGESSA is not what they call a caisse de sécurité sociale -- that is it not an organisation that will pay for your health problems. But they do give you good advice and I have found them quite user-friendly. They could put you in touch with the myriad caisses that actually pay out the sums when you have a problem.
-- What you will probably go through is a Social Security organisation in your own department -- it may be Paris, or in my case it is the department of the Eure -- that is known as the CPAM -- Caisse Primaire d’Assurance Maladie.
-- The CPAM won’t cover you 100 per cent., in fact, sometimes far from that. To top up the payments you need a mutuelle, which is again organised by profession.
--I belong to a mutuelle called the MNLPC, the Mutuelle Nationale de la Presse, du Livre et de la Communication -- which strikes me as a very political organisation and some of my friends have said it is too expensive, though its payments strike me as generous.

Of all the issues of the evening it was the AGESSA issue that was certainly one of the ones that grabbed many members’ attention. I fear we failed to even establish if ANY ONE of us was a member and if so why, and we left none the wiser as to what we needed to be doing as authors if our writing income was either our primary or secondary source of income.

There was no one present who could, and nor was it the environment to present a clear and comprehensive presentation on AGESSA, although a journalist/historical novelist present did report that the NUJ (who have a Paris branch) was endeavouring to understand and explain to their members the obligations and benefits of joining (or otherwise).

Alison Culliford has kindly offered to look into this matter, feed information to Gregor and hopefully we can soon expect a clear and user-friendly explanation of AGESSA and our obligations or otherwise to join it.

Key issues touched upon was the relevance annual earnings in a world where authors can receive a large advance and then very little for the coming years, and as a result what would be the costs of joining, the monthly payments, for authors in perhaps a 'quiet year'?

The AGESSA issue is definitely one that concerns a lot of members and we hope that this blog and future meetings will provide some clarity.


Question: What comments do you have to make concerning the Social Security system in France? Do you have information to share with us?

The meeting did not have time to cover other aspects of the business of living in France, such as dealing with France’s complicated legal system.

Question: Do you have any comments about the practical side of living in France that you would like to share with us?

Translation and the French Book Industry

Opinion seemed to be divided between a number of participants on the ease or otherwise of getting one's work published in France in French.

Authors present who had had their work published in French had all had their foreign rights sold by their UK agent or by their agent's foreign rights colleague or collaborator.

As for translators, it was reported that French publishers prefer to work with their own translators, something of a risk if you are not happy with the outcome, but seemingly unavoidable.

But there was also a positive sentiment that the French book market was in fact extremely open to foreign works, indeed the average French bookstore will have a far wider collection of non-French writers available in French than your average Waterstones in England. And this was not just something that applied to mass market paper backs, but a far wider range of writers.

But finding translators one's self with the aim of getting the work into French before selling into the French publishing houses (almost exclusively a world that operates entirely without agents) was going to be expensive (someone quoted around 120 euros per 1,000 words) and equally was not going to satisfy their requirements to work with their own translators.

This all said, some words of hope.

One member spoke of a new agent, Ana Jarota, who was actively looking to set herself up as an agent in France, and even had her email address.

QUESTION: IF YOU ARE THAT SOFA MEMBER PLEASE POST A COMMENT WITH ANA'S EMAIL CONTACT AND SOME MORE INFORMATION ABOUT HER.

Other members spoke of AX, La Nouvelle Agence and Andrew Nurnberg all as having a useful potential role to play in this area.

QUESTION: IF YOU WERE ONE OF THE MEMBERS WHO HAS MORE INFORMATION ON EITHER OF THESE PEOPLE OR AGENCIES PLEASE POST A COMMENT BELOW AND LET US KNOW MORE.

There was an interesting conversation about writing in French, how that affected form and style, and what opportunities that offered. Indeed one biographer present had been unable to sell her book to a UK publisher but managed to find a French publisher provided she wrote it in French, which, with some corrective help, she is doing.

Selling Books in France

Gregor's opening comments indicated that could be as many as 800,000 Brits living in France, and if we are to include the wider English-reading community there is no doubt that a country the size of France presents significant opportunities for selling our books: we're here, we're local and there is huge demand from English speaking associations and bookshops for speakers and authors that wouldn't normally go outside the UK.

It was agreed that the members would, by department and ideally by region, collect and share via this blog a list of English-language 'circuits' that authors could go on to promote their books to the English community in France, a very large percentage of which do not live in Paris.

QUESTION: WILL YOU VOLUNTEER TO COLLATE DETAILS OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE BOOKSHOPS, CLUBS AND ASSOCIATIONS IN YOUR DEPARTMENT AND GIVE THEM TO OUR CHAIRMAN, GREGOR DALLAS WHO CAN THEN PUBLISH THEM AS POSTS ON THIS WEB SITE? VOLUNTEERS ARE REQUESTED FROM EVERY CORNER OF FRANCE, ESPECIALLY IN THOSE AREAS WITH LARGE CONCENTRATIONS OF ANGLOPHONE READERS.

If you have any suggestions or ideas as to exactly what sort of information we should be gathering please post a comment here.

QUESTION: WE ARE ALSO LOOKING FOR A VOLUNTEER TO COLLATE ALL THIS INFORMATION, POSSIBLY IN AN EXCEL FILE FORMAT AND KEEP IT UPDATED. WOULD YOU BE INTERESTED IN DOING THIS, AND IF SO PLEASE MAKE A POST HERE?

We did not have time to discuss promoting our books (if published in French) here in France but if you have experience of this please make a comment here.

There were some ideas from Gregor he had at local Midathèques and other local French associations as forums for public speaking and even a possible revenue source.

Gregor notes: I am building up information on my own local Médiathèque, which I am sure is similar to those elsewhere in France. I will post what I think will be of interest to other members.


Question: Is there anyone out there who has information on a French public speaking agency?

From the pulpit

After the initial introductions, Gregor then explained to the meeting why he, as a British author living in France, had called the meeting and provided his personal view of the current situation in publishing.

Essentially, Gregor has the impression that readership is in decline and that this has created both cultural and material problems which authors have to face. He also suggested that living outside the UK, while an advantage in many ways, also presented certain dangers for authors.

These are Gregor’s own notes for his introductory remarks, though he warns that what he actually said did not perfectly correspond to what he had in his notes:

FROM THE PULPIT
by Gregor Dallas

Let me start, from the Pulpit, by tossing you a few statistics. ‘There are statistics, and there are statistics,’ Mark Twain said a long time ago.
-- The official number of Brits now living in France is 400,000 [in fact, 550,000 (24/10/06)]. The true figure could well be over double that -- so there could be close on a million of us Brits residing permanently in the hexagon, as the Cartesian French like to call their country.
-- Now I thought I had better confirm this this with the British Embassy. The British Embassy put me through to the British Council... So I haven’t been able to confirm these figures at the Embassy.
-- But what I do know for sure is that there are
-- 131 members of the Society of Authors living in France
-- and -- what I discovered only a fortnight ago -- only 74 of them can receive e-mail… So I haven’t been able to get in touch with almost half the total… Which is a Very Sad Thing.
I am sure that there are well over 200 British authors living in France. Perhaps something like a thousand or more.
Whether 200 or a thousand, what a history we have! With DH Lawrence, George Orwell, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess and others as our forebears we have a pretty fine pedigree, don’t we. And as British authors living abroad we can even lay claim to be the driving force in British literature -- the contemporary equivalents of Heinrich Heine in German literature.
So it is a pity we are not yet all in touch because I have a hunch we have a number of stimulating things in common that we can most usefully discuss together.
And problems we also have. I do believe we are facing today a kind of material as well as cultural crisis in writing and publishing that hasn’t been known since the printing of the Gutenberg Bible.
And the problem is this: a precipitous decline in readership since about the 1980s. I think we’ve got to remember that all the particular problems that we are about to cover come back to that single fact -- the decline in readership. Ultimately, the problems we have with agents, with publishers, book distributors, even the tie-in TV people and the movie makers are due to that one problem -- the decline in readership.
The material problems created by this decline are basically the issues that we’re going to cover in this agenda. But I think it is worth keeping in the back of our minds -- as we talk -- cultural problems that I imagine worry quite a lot of us as authors -- and I’ll just give you two recent examples which illustrate what I am thinking about:
1) The first example of the cultural problem is this speech, which I am sure you have all heard about, that the Pope made last month in Regensburg, Germany. It was a speech that addressed an issue that has been discussed in many church circles (and not just Roman Catholic) -- the issue of faith and reason. And it is interesting that the Pope, in this speech, was advocating reason founded on a wide, philosophical base and not on the narrower empirical, purely scientific kind. You know, the speech reminded me, most irreverently, of Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind -- which dominated cocktail party talk in the 1980s -- and which focused on the development in the States of a singular, one-dimensional way of thinking and a sort of spiritual rootlessness that had grown out of a narrow reading of books, or no reading at all.
So what happens? The media, when presented with the Pope’s speech, hooks on to a two-line quotation from a learned 14th-century Byzantine emperor, Manuel II (Paleologus), who was tackling the problem of faith based not on reason but on violence -- and specifically the problem of the violence of Muslim forces surrounding Constantinople in the 1390s. [Ref.: Professor Theodore Khoury of Münster]
The current Muslim populations, we’ve seen, rise up with incredible violence on the basis of hearsay revolving around this two-line quote.
But what troubled me here was not so much the Muslim reaction (I haven’t read the Muslim press), but rather the reactions of our own media in the West… the majority of which obviously had not read the speech. It’s as if the text of the speech were an total irrelevance.
There was one commentator on the French radio I heard who said that the Pope’s error was that he was out of touch with his times, that his learned talk was based on a civilisation of the text, whereas we live today in a new civilisation of the image and the symbol. I should imagine that most of you British authors here this evening are men and women of the civilisation of the text, and not of the symbol -- whatever that civilisation may be.
What is really worrying is that the French commentator may be right: perhaps a new kind of functionally illiterate civilisation is underfoot.
2) My second example of the kind of cultural problems we are facing today is a report that has just been released in London concerning map-reading skills. Over a third of British adults under the age of 35 cannot read a map. The study gives the example of the M-4 motorway being mistaken for the River Avon by a large proportion of those being tested.
I’m a historian, as I said. History is based on maps. You can’t talk about wars, or systems of peace, or international, or even national relations without studying the maps. History makes no sense without maps. So we may conclude that for a third of British adults under 35 history makes no sense: I am ready to believe that -- it’s reflected in the book sales, isn’t it.
And here we are not even dealing with the reading of texts, but the reading of symbols -- source of this new apparent civilisation.
Those two examples -- the selection of a two-line quote from a speech that has not been read, and the widespread inability to read maps -- epitomise for me the kind of cultural problems that have arisen out of this precipitous decline in reading over the last twenty or thirty years.
That’s all I’ll say for now on these important cultural problems. What about the material problems?
Let me just suggest by way of an introduction -- before we open up to the floor and the discussion -- that it seems to me that each professional sector of what we call the book trade is closing into itself as this crisis deepens -- the agents, the editors, the marketeers, the book distributors and somewhere out at the end of the line, the authors. Each one of these sectors seem to me to be retreating into its shell, despite loud professions to the contrary. The proof of this comes in particular from the distribution sector, which is now openly stating that they stand for profit and don’t owe the author anything.
There is a lot of finger-pointing going on at the moment -- with the author generally having the finger pointed at him (or her).
-- ‘Go and get a day job,’ say the professionals from the other sectors of the trade -- though their own day jobs rely entirely on authors.
There is much blame spreading around -- with the author being blamed most of all.
The irony of the situation is that as readership declines the number of books published increases… 130 or 140,000 new books were published in Britain last year -- one new book every forty-five minutes; we now have the technology for ‘print on demand’: you know, a dozen sales for each ‘title’ (they’re not known as ‘books’ anymore in the trade).
A struggling Ottakars bookstore chain has been absorbed by a struggling Waterstones book chain: we now be-knighted a struggling monopoly in the distribution of books. And that could well bring about a decline in the number of books published… Perhaps that is a Good Thing. But who is going to do the selection? If you think things are vicious today, just wait for tomorrow.
*****
Those few comments, I hope, give you an idea of why I called this meeting. For I fear that in living outside Britain we could be making ourselves vulnerable to certain unfair practices within a suffering British book trade.
I don’t mean to sound unnecessarily alarmist, for I think there are a number of things that authors can do. And we’re, after all, the ones with the real talent: I’ve already seen from your e-mails that there is a lot of talent in this room.
But it’s terribly important that we know where we can get aid, how we choose our agents, how we can best communicate with our publishers (on the other side of the Channel), and how to make sure that our works are distributed to the people who are interested in them.

There was some disagreement over Gregor’s analysis of readership and a general feeling that the electronic age provided many more content platforms to write for; one member noted that the electronic arena was essentially a text based medium.

As for living in France, most opinion was of the view that living in France was perhaps an advantage rather than a disadvantage, provided one had a good UK agent.

Members noted that the days of long lunches with editors and publishers were pretty much over; that communications between these disinter mediation were brief and often electronic anyway; that a call from sunny France or gay Paris was a more door-opening and engaging conversation than calls from the vast majority of their UK clients.

Geographically one Scottish member pointed out the challenges (or rather non-challenges) for members in France were no different to those in Scotland or the West Country. Indeed, another member reminded us that should meetings be required in an industry now no longer known for its love of meetings with writers, that now more than ever the difficulty, speed and cost of coming to the UK are lower than ever.

There seemed to be a strong general consensus that living in France offered more opportunities than challenges, and that the same could be said of the multi-platform electronic age we have arrived in.

Gregor broadly agrees with the idea that living in France brings many advantages to an author. But on the issue of readership the statistics say many things. He maintains that the cultural problems he raised are real enough, notwithstanding the opportunities created by new technologies. He is planning to write an article on the subject which will be posted on this blog.


Question: How do you react to Gregor’s introductory comments and the discussion that followed? What information do you have on readership? Do you think it is an advantage or a disadvantage to live in France? Are the reactions expressed here only valid for those who live close to an airport or to Eurostar?

SOAF's First Annual Meeting, Paris, 6 October 2006

On Friday, 6 October 2006, the first annual meeting of the Society of Authors, France (SOAF) was held at the famous English-speaking bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, in Paris. The meeting was organised and convened by the British historian, Gregor Dallas.

The name, SOAF: During the course of the meeting it was suggested that ‘SOFA’, the ‘Society of French Authors’ would make a good acronym to describe members of the Society of Authors in France. Gregor later expressed concern that SOFA did not accurately describe what we were and, furthermore, ‘that such a change in name could cost us affiliation with the Society of Authors in London.’ There is also the matter of registering the organisation as a personne morale in France -- a clear affiliation indicated in the name eases this problem. So Gregor has recommended that we call ourselves ‘SOAF, the Society of Authors, France’

Similarly, our blogspot is to be called http://soafrance.blogspot.com


The meeting was attended by 21 writers from all over France and even one from Germany. According to Gregor Dallas the SOA has 141 members resident in France, though only 74 of them can be contacted by email.

It was suggested that Gregor write a written report of our meeting and send it to the SOA in London and ask them to send out the report to those not online (or willing to provide the SOA with their email address) and alert them to the existence of http://soafrance.blogspot.com


The meeting formally began with each member presenting himself with his name, his residence, and what they wrote. These introductions revealed a wide range of writers, including ghost writing, memoirs, biography, travel writing, children’s writers, novelists, and academic non-fiction as well as narrative non-fiction.

A Networking List, which gave name, residence, email and field of work was passed around for those who wanted to register in it. An amended version of this was forwarded to the SOA, London, on 17 October, to be circulated to all members resident in France. A further version, including additions, will be forwarded to members in November.


Question: Do you approve of the name ‘SOAF’? Do you have any other suggestions? Do you have any comments about the Networking List?