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Random House teams up with Globe for litfest

Looks like Random House of Canada has figured out how to spend some of the money it’s saving by sitting out BookExpo. The firm is planning a consumer literary fest for May 8-10 of this year, featuring such authors as Margaret MacMillan, Naomi Klein, Giller winner Elizabeth Hay, Oprah pick David Wroblewski, and, inevitably, Richard Florida. Random is ambitiously planning to charge roughly $15 admission per event and says proceeds will go to PEN Canada and Frontier College.

In a Globe and Mail story announcing the move as a “major literary festival,” publishing reporter James Adams calls the lineup “impressive.” If you read his piece without blinking, you may notice that the Globe is in fact some kind of partner in the fest, which is referred to once in passing as “the first-ever Globe and Mail Open House Festival.” (On a related note, Globe website ads promoting the paper’s new books site do so “in partnership with Random House of Canada.”)

All Open House authors mentioned in the Globe piece are associated with Random House (Hay’s publisher, McClelland & Stewart, is 25%-owned by Random), though the firm’s Scott Sellers claims “we want to do outreach in the years to come with other publishers.”