Former Hachette chief Arnaud Nourry builds a Paris collective of independent publishers
Arnaud Nourry, who led Hachette Livre and Lagardère Publishing until 2021, is now running a Paris group of independent publishing houses that he founded in 2024. The group, Les Nouveaux Éditeurs (LNE), is a collective of nine houses. He set out how it works in a Publishing Perspectives question-and-answer interview published on 28 October 2026.
Nourry spent more than 30 years at Hachette, one of the largest publishing groups in the world, before leaving. He said he had a three-year non-compete clause, a contract term that bars a former employee from working for a rival, and that he spent two years thinking about what to do next before launching LNE.
The structure borrows from film and television. Nourry told the interviewer he modelled the group on audiovisual production companies such as Mediawan and Federation Studios. Each publishing house is a small editorial team of three to five people, which can include apprentices and interns. Its founders put in 25% of the capital. The group supplies the other 75%, covering financing, publicity, distribution, marketing, production and sales.
Behind the houses sits a shared-services team of about ten people who handle marketing, sales, press and book fairs. The whole operation employs about forty people, including part-timers, and 25 to 30 of them are editors. For production, LNE works with the Paris house Gallimard. Publicity is handled with Flammarion, and distribution, which means getting books from the warehouse into shops, with UD.
The most unusual feature is the promise on editorial independence. According to the interview, the bylaws of every LNE imprint say the group cannot order a publisher to publish a book, and cannot forbid one. A further clause, which the group calls a conscience clause, lets a publisher leave with their house and authors if LNE interferes with editorial decisions. In that case the publisher can sell their 25% stake and is free of any non-compete restriction.
LNE is not new to the book trade's attention. In June 2024, Simon & Schuster announced a partnership with the group, under which the New York publisher, led by Jonathan Karp, received a first-look arrangement. A first-look deal gives one publisher the chance to see a project before rivals do. A 2025 trade report said the collective would have eight publishers.
Nourry is LNE's chairman and chief executive. Ugo Nourry is listed on the company's website as a shareholder and chief operating officer, and Ronald Blunden as a shareholder and chief information officer. The group's own website lists Artemis as its second shareholder.
Nourry said the group wants to become a significant player in French publishing while setting itself apart from traditional houses. The collective's model is a test of whether a shared back office can free editors to do the work of choosing and shaping books. For readers, the question is whether that choice survives the commercial pressure of selling them.
