S. 3, Ep. 20: A Chat with Crime Fiction Publisher Anne Trager

Debbi Mack interviews translator and crime fiction publisher Anne Trager. To buy Minced, Marinated, and Murdered, just click on the cover below. The interview transcript is below, if you’d like to read it. Or download the PDF copy and read it later. Debbi: Hi everyone. This is the Crime Cafe. Your podcasting source of great crime, suspense and thriller writing. I’m your host, Debbi Mack. Before I introduce my guest, I’ll remind you to check out the Crime Cafe boxed set and anthology on my website. Just go to debbimack.com and click on the “Crime Cafe” link and you can find the buy buttons for both books and download them there. They’re sold at a very reasonable price and you can also find the podcast subscription buttons there and the Crime Cafe merchandise, so check it out. And now, it’s my great pleasure to bring on translator and crime fiction publisher, from France (living in France at any rate) Anne Trager. Hi Anne! It’s so great to have you on. Thanks for being here. Anne: Hi Debbi! I am thrilled to be here. Thanks so much for having me. Debbi: Well, I am very happy to have you. Let’s talk about Le French Book. Le French Book, is that correct? Anne: That’s correct, that’s correct. Debbi: Le French Book. Tell us about how you went to translating for others to founding a publishing company. Anne: Well, so it happened in 2012. I was working…I had been living in France for a really, really long time. I moved over here in 1985 just because I was obsessed with France and so I ended up in France and then I just stayed and I worked as a translator for a really long time. I worked in publishing in France and I worked in international communications for international companies here, well, in Paris at the time when I was living in Paris. And one morning, I just woke up and I said, you know I’ve got to do something here. I am reading these fantastic French writers in French. I love mysteries and thrillers and they just weren’t being translated into English. Now some were, but very, very few. I mean at the time there were only … like three percent of the books published in the United States were translations and that’s all languages together. So, imagine the tiny, tiny percentage of French books that were actually getting into English. This is still the case, actually. I mean we can only do much, but we do what we can, right? And it was really frustrating because I’d read these authors and I couldn’t talk to them to my friend and I couldn’t share them with the people I wanted to share them with, you know? And I said, actually I can do this. I have a foot in the U.S. because I’m American and that’s where I grew up and that’s my culture and I have a foot in France because that’s where I’m living and I speak French and I translate and I know about publishing. So, there you go. That’s how we started Le French Book. Debbi: That’s fantastic! How many titles do you publish a year? Anne: Well, it’s really variable. I mean I wish we could do more. So far we’ve published about 30 titles and it goes up and down, and we’ve had years where we’ve published more and years when we’ve published fewer, you know depending on any number of factors including the fact that translation takes a really long time and you know you need to spend time translating books. Debbi: Yes. I was going to ask who your favorite crime fiction authors, French or otherwise are? Anne: Oh, you know, that’s a really, really hard question. I mean we have published 30 titles. That’s not 30 different authors because we have some series, but I have a bunch of authors and in our…you know we publish a bunch of different authors and I’m very involved in each one of those books. And you really, really have to love a book to want to translate it because it requires actually getting into an author’s head, you know. Understanding who they are, where they’re coming from, what they’re trying to get across; getting into the story and building a br...