Every element of the publishing process is wired to sell more books, but sometimes book events don’t deliver sales in the way we’d expect them to. With this in mind, I propose a renewed approach to how we put on book events that will work to remedy this.
I’ll start by telling you a personal story. I grew up surrounded by literary obsession and I’ve seen where its single mindedness can lead. My father has made it his life's work to read and write about the literature and life of Thomas Hardy. By day a rural GP, my father spends his spare time organising conferences, attending memorial services, giving lectures, guiding walks, campaigning and writing books: all about Thomas Hardy. From reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles behind us in the queue at theme parks, to giving my son a Selected Poems of Thomas Hardy well before his first birthday, to the 6ft oil painting of Thomas Hardy that bore down on me as I watched "Top of the Pops" in our lounge, Hardy has been ever-present in our family life.
To me my father represents the literary community we operate in, that engaged comfortable publishing bubble. A world in which we are so focused on our authors, so passionate about the books we work on, on the industry that we rightly treasure, yet often I wonder if this is at the cost of a broader perspective.