The Lit Fest Newsletter
As the last couple of weeks have seen more festivals reinvent themselves as purely online events, literary programmers are the new digital content creators. We might not yet feel fully qualified for this new job. It’s definitely a challenge but advice and inspiration is out there.
Lee Randall, from Granite Noir has written a long piece on the Wigtown Festival website that offers a really good overview into what people have been up to - and includes some interesting comments from Edinburgh’s Nick Barclay about the importance of taking risks. At the moment, the majority of people are copying the format of a literary event online - so a live interview or a reading, with a Q&A afterwards that takes place at an agreed time and lasts 45-60 minutes. The event will be billed in the most straightforward manner - A live Q&A with author X - just as one might expect to find in a lit fest programme.
However, it’s clear that most successful online content doesn’t not follow this format. Last year, I saw a talk at a conference by Matt Gielen who has developed a Taxonomy of Digital Video. You can read it here, he breaks down all content on YouTube into a variety of categories and shows how what seems like a tiny innovation, such as getting someone to answer questions whilst walking round their house rather than sitting in the spare room, can make a difference. In this piece, Marketing Director Jeremy Vest, who was surely named by Martin Amis, explains the importance of video thumbnails. Our challenge is to take lessons like these and see how we can apply them to our audience (usually older) and our subject matter (literary).
With so much innovation going on we thought we would start awarding a festival of the week. Someone whom we think is doing a really good job that others could learn (or borrow) from! The first winner is…
FESTIVAL OF THE WEEK - The Listening Festival
We loved the way Cambridge Literary Festival have re-branded themselves as the Listening Festival - a simple way of broadening their audience beyond their region. The website looks really smart and shows the importance of good design when creating something that is purely digital. The festival consists of some old events, some that have been specially recorded, some recommended reading, three episodes of a new podcast, and an option to donate. They haven’t tried to reinvent the wheel, but what they have done feels properly thought through and joined-up. I think they have set a standard for others to aim for - concentrate on making everything you do as impressive as possible rather trying to create a million and one new events. Well done to Cathy Moore and her team.
Indie Bookshops News
Literary festivals are inextricably linked with independent bookshops. Selling books at festivals is a challenge. Weather, power, wi-fi, storage, staffing, stock levels and a million other things need to be taken in consideration and can be problematic - nothing is straightforward. As a festival organiser I have been lucky enough to work with Book Nook in Hove, Mr B’s in Bath and the great Cornish bookseller Ron Johns. Without them, I wouldn’t have been able to do my job. I am sure this is the same for everyone and it’s very sad to see their present difficulties. But there is some postive news…
Gayle Lazda from the London Review Bookshop, Picador commissioning editor Kishani Widyaratna and Daunt Books publisher Zeljka Marosevic, set up a Go Fund Me campaign to raise money for the Book Trade Charity that will then be distributed to indie bookshops. They had achieved their £50k target (Penguin had generously offered to match fund this amount) when at the last minute an anonymous £250k pledge came in. It was later discovered this was from Amazon (as you can imagine this raised many eyebrows). An amazing effort from Gayle and the rest of her team.
Bookshops, of course, also organise their own events (and festivals). Four of them Linghams (Heswall), Book-ish (Crickhowell), Forum Books (Corbridge) and Booka Bookshop (Oswestry) have got together to create a virtual festival on Facebook called At Home with… Porter explained, “All booksellers will be hit dramatically by the coronavirus outbreak and this is one way that we can continue to deliver our events programme whilst also combating the social isolation that many people may feel during the next weeks and months. We all know each other well and have been thinking about what we can do – working as a team we can pool our resources and skills. It is a great opportunity to do something positive in these uncertain times.” Guests include Robert Webb, Jack Monroe and John Niven. Their viewing numbers are impressively in the thousands for each event.
Big Book Weekend
As mentioned in a previous newsletter, the Big Book Weekend (May 8-11) is a virtual festival founded by authors Kit de Waal and Molly Flatt with support from BBC Arts, the online book festival site MyVLF and Arts Council England. The festival is part of BBC Arts Culture In Quarantine initiative, and promises to allow book festivals around the country to host events in events in collaboration with the main festival. They have now announced their first three events: Luke Jennings the author behind Killing Eve; Adam Kucharski associate professor at the London School Of Hygiene And Tropical Medicine and author of The Rules Of Contagion; and a 200th Anniversary Of Anne Brontë’s birth event with Adjoa Andoh, Jackie Kay and Isabel Greenberg, in conversation with Cathy Newman. The full programme and details of which festivasls are involved will be released at the end of this month.
Thank you for reading!
That’s it for this newsletter. Please follow us on twitter, add us to your press release list and feel free to get in touch if there is anything you would like us to write about: mathew@bookamp.co.uk. You can get your fellow lit festival colleagues to sign up here.