Seattle Bookfest

This weekend Columbia City Cinema tried to revive the old Northwest Bookfest in a mothballed school in the Columbia City neighborhood as Seattle Bookfest. I love the idea of book festivals, and looked forward to this one when it was first announced this summer.

I’ve been to a couple of Northwest Bookfests. I enjoyed them. The primary feature for them was the large number of vendors, and occasionally a decent author doing a reading.

Cue up the new Bookfest. It seemed well attended. They had a decent showing from local small publishers and bookstores. Hopefully they got a good enough start that they can put one on next year with improvements. They’ve managed to pull of a book festival in Seattle for the first time in over five years, so they did something right.

On the other hand, Seattle Bookfest had all the drawbacks of the old Northwest Bookfest and added a few of it’s own. Finding the place took me 30 minutes once I got to Columbia City. Parking was atrocious. The signage looked like it was done by middle-schoolers. The vendor list was pretty small. Worse, most of the vendors simply set up their tables and did little else to make me interested in their books. Local authors who have lately been reading everywhere pushing the same stuff they’ve been pushing at all the local bookstores for months. The other major theme for panels was all about getting published. Never mind that the universe of readers is much bigger than the universe of unpublished authors.

This was one of the more professional signs at Seattle Bookfest

I made one circuit of the venue, checking out all the vendor tables, and then left. I bought one book., I didn’t think the event was that interesting.

So, to whoever is running Seattle Bookfest, here are my suggestions on what you can do differently:

First, plan ahead on the promotion. Announcing the festival only three months before opening hurt publicity tons. Not enough time for authors and publishers and bookstores to really get on board. The programming wasn’t announced until a couple of weeks ago. Start the promotion early, say January. Pushing the event through the Times and P-I and a couple of local bookstores isn’t enough. Their audiences are aging and dwindling. Start a blog and use it, and not just for ads and announcements. Get some authors and vendors to write posts that are near and dear to their hearts. Talk to the folks at Capitol Hill Seattle, West Seattle Blog, etc and get them excited about the event. Get flyers up around town. I know here were some out there this time, but I never saw any of them. Maybe even splurge for a billboard or two or bus advertisements. Get Columbia City businesses to put it on their marquees.

Second, improve logistics. If you use the Columbia City Event Center again, get some signs up with directions. Figure out some better options for parking. The signs at the event itself should look better than high school pep rally butcher paper signs. Consider holding the event earlier in the year. Then the asphalt play lot can be used for the event too (put up some tents/awnings). That would also put something outside instead of the empty expanse that made everything look dead. Create a program flyer to hand out at the entrance. Have a display (such as a whiteboard) up with the days programming so folks can see what’s happening without looking at small 8″x11″ sheets tacked on the door of each panel room.

Third, theme your event and make the programming exciting. Something un-bland. Make some of the panels discuss controversial topics. The most controversial topic at this Bookfest was Is Seattle hostile to literary innovation?. Mostly because, if the premise is that it is hostile, it insults the very people you are trying to get to go to the festival. (If the premise is the opposite, then it’s back-patting and boring.) There’s a whole wealth of more provocative and interesting topics. Get a local comedian (think Yoram Bauman, Seattle’s standup economist) to MC the main panel room instead of a frumpy bookseller. For author readings, get people to read who haven’t been pushing their book all over town the last few months. Have some authors read previously unpublished works, works in progress, or stuff that’s been written specifically for Bookfest. Have an exclusive work printed in the program, something that people will have to wait six months to see in print in Ye Olde Literary Quarterly. Get the Salon of Shame to do an event. Have a Poet-Off between all the poetry presses set up as vendors. Start some sort of small annual literary award to be announced/presented at the Bookfest. Whatever! Something exciting, new, that can’t be had at every book store in Seattle all year round.

Fourth, get the vendors to spruce up their tables. The Columbia City Event center has an advantage in this regard over the Seahawk stadium event center, a Magnuson Park hangar, or the Convention Center. The Columbia City Event Center has small rooms that wall off sounds! This is awesome because the 3 or 4 vendors in each room can trade off doing things that make some noise without interfering with vendors in other rooms. Scott Westerfeld’s presentation for Leviathan (not at Bookfest though) was awesome because he had a slideshow of artwork for the book. Small presses can easily do stuff like that. The Scrabble guys sorta had the right idea, but they could do better even. Have a beat the champion get a prize thing. Put up a giant refrigerator magnet-like word thingy. Anything but have people sitting behind card tables with books laid out over them, never talking to people unless they accidentally make eye contact.

All of these things can be done without a ton of money and without giant sized commitments from national publishers. Not all of my suggestions individually are great ideas. I’m mostly trying to illustrate the basic themes. I realize that this was the first time the event was held. You got the basics under your belt, now make it something special. Please. I’m dying to have a literary festival I can love.

Image Welcome to the Northwest by Daniel Spils used under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license.