We consider the Saint-Venant system for shallow water flows with nonflat bottom. In past years, efficient well-balanced methods have been proposed in order to well resolve solutions close to steady states at rest. Here we describe a strategy based on a local subsonic steady state reconstruction that allows one to derive a subsonic-well-balanced scheme, preserving exactly all the subsonic steady states. It generalizes the now well-known hydrostatic solver, and like the latter it preserves the nonnegativity of the water height and satisfies a semidiscrete entropy inequality. An application to the Euler-Poisson system is proposed.