Easton Book Festival, Out of My Hands

Publishers Weekly journalist Judith Rosen interviewed me this week. She was curious about the way I describe Easton Book Festival, in my new book, You’re Telling My Kids They Can’t Read This Book?

I explained that since Easton Book Festival has a community-development mission, our focus is on celebrating all the writing that’s happening in Easton and the Lehigh Valley.

She already knew this: I’d explained it in the book. Her curiosity was more surprise: that’s not the way most book festivals work.

I repeated that in the case of Easton Book Festival, our mission is community development.

Well…what I didn’t tell her is that back in 2018 when I was first pitching the idea of launching a book festival in Easton, I didn’t expect we would end up the way we ended up, with a focus on community development. I thought we’d be a regular book festival, where authors who’ve been published by big national companies read and sign their books because they’re on national book tours. Big-name, bestselling writers provide most of the excitement. Readers wait in long lines to get autographs and buy tons of books. That’s how I assumed Easton Book Festival would be.

But in the summer of 2019, when we provided a link on our website for people to let us know they wanted to participate, I was shocked that seventy-five local authors—most of them self-published—submitted proposals. Meanwhile, although I’d submitted two-hundred requests to publicity departments of national publishers for Easton Book Festival to be a stop on their authors’ tours, not a single publicist had responded!

That’s why we changed focus. The world declared its intention; our festival was shaped by reality. We organizers never “decided” to run a festival unusual in its extreme focus on local authors. No, the local authors claimed us, while the big publishers ignored and effectively rejected us.

It’s humbling when your “I Want to Do This” crashes into the world’s “This Is What’s Needed”. But seven years later, I’m an advocate for book festivals that celebrate local authors and are created by them. (Meanwhile, I’ve gone from being a bookseller who wrote one book to a self-published author who’s written six.)

I no longer understand the appeal of operating a festival that relies on national tours of authors published by multi-national corporations.

Did I learn an important lesson? Or am I accepting the inevitable and making the best of it? I don’t know. What I do know is that my opinion about this question isn’t important.

It’s out of my hands. And I’m glad to feel Easton Book Festival is useful.