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.”
Good on Random. They stepped away from BookExpo with a purpose. and the new initiative can only be good for authors and booksellers. When a publisher chooses to talk directly to the book buyer that can only be good for authors and booksellers. BookExpo should always have been opened to the public like the car show and the home show. If Random does bring on other publishers or Random’s great idea leads to a new book trade show then the industry will be better for it. An act of enlightened thinking.
I see this working in the same way the Harbourfront Reading Series started to really work once they started selling tickets. I used to go to readings when they were free and would see maybe 20 people in the audience. Put a price tag on admission and suddenly the place was swamped.
I think the day of the trade show is over, and not just for the publishing industry. They were always expensive, wasteful, time-consuming events – and I doubt anyone could ever actually prove ROI.