Literary festivals

Pitching for them, speaker fees, how to prepare and what to expect on the day

This is a photos of us doing an event at Cheltenham Literary Festival in 2023

Literary festivals happen all year round but a lot of them take place over the summer. Some of these festivals are big, well known ones like Hay and Edinburgh, others are smaller and newer like St Austell Festival of Children’s Literature here in Cornwall.

In this post we’re going to explore how authors/illustrators get booked to speak at festivals, how much they will get as a fee for attending, the preparation involved before the event as well as what happens on the big day itself.

If you’re interested in writing/illustrating children’s books, we highly recommend going to see authors and illustrator’s events (even if you don’t have children yourself).

There are four reasons for this:

• Market research. What kind of books are being published right now? What conversations are people having around children’s books?

• Event research. What happens at an event? How long are they? What is the format?

• Community. Previous Children’s Laureate Joseph Coelho talked about this when we interviewed him. If you want to be a part of an industry, you need to put yourself out there and join it - so go and get involved.

• Inspiration. We’ve always found literary festivals incredibly inspiring whether we’re attending them as punters or doing events ourselves.

Pitching for literary festivals

Have you ever looked at the programme for a literary festival and wondered about the selection of speakers? Here we’ll explain how authors/illustrators get asked to do events.

In general publishers will send pitches direct to festivals for books that are publishing that year.

So, ahead of the publication of Naomi’s next book, The Hug Button this July, she’s already been asked by her publisher’s PR/Marketing team to write a short summary detailing what her event for it would entail. This has then been sent out along with information about her book to festival organisers.

This does mean that festivals receive a lot of pitches! Some festivals might have a specific focus for each year but in most cases they’ll be looking to create a programme that showcases books across a range of genres, with events for different age groups which features diverse authors/illustrators and a mix of big names and debuts.

If you want to know more about this, on Friday this week we’ll be sharing an interview with Heather from Reading Rocks who is one of the organisers for the St Austell Festival of Children’s Literature and during our chat we asked her how they choose their line up…