Literary Festivals: Classroom, Amusement Park or Sandpit?

Alice Grundy is Managing Editor of Giramondo, an independent university-based Australian literary publisher of award-winning poetry, fiction and non-fiction. She also is an editor of the literary journal Seizure. Alice has previously worked in think tanks and trade publishing – first at Allen & Unwin and then at Murdoch Books. On Wednesday 24 July, Alice Grundy joined Michael Sexton SC and addressed The Sydney Institute in a discussion on literary festivals.  

LITERARY FESTIVALS: CLASSROOM, AMUSEMENT PARK OR SANDPIT?

                                                                        ALICE GRUNDY

2013 is proving to be a boom time for literary festivals. By my count, there are over 20 major festivals focusing on books and writing, taking place from January to December.

In the last twelve months, I have participated in or attended the Emerging Writers’ Festival, the Melbourne Writers’ Festival, the National Young Writers’ Festival and the Sydney Writers Festival. I’ve corresponded with the organisers of the Adelaide, Perth and Brisbane writers’ festivals, as well as numerous smaller festivals such as Bendigo and Mildura. The Walkley Foundation in partnership with the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance will be running the Storyology festival at the beginning of August and I’ll be running two workshops there.

As editor of the literary journal Seizure, a biannual magazine and website which publishes flash fiction and produces podcasts, I chaired a panel at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year. My day job, is as Managing Editor of Giramondo and so I also attended sessions in the role of publicist. And, as an avid reader, I went to around 10 sessions to hear writers and critics speak about their work.

These festivals breathe life into small-town, off-peak tourist periods, make Walsh Bay hum with punters and furnish the ABC with a year’s worth of author interviews. But the questions I ask myself, as I wander the docks, sit on discussion panels and attend talks, is what does the proliferation of writers’ festivals mean for Australia’s intellectual landscape and is this a bubble close to bursting?

In a post GFC world, charitable organisations and private donors have less money to donate and publishers are dealing with shrinking margins. Couple that with the fact that the Australia Council has the same money or less to spread around a greater number of festivals and it seems that funding for festivals is under strain from every angle.

Who are all these festivals for? Audiences pay for tickets, speakers appear on panels and run workshops, publishers try to get their authors in sessions and a veritable phalanx of volunteers staff each one. I can’t help but wonder what each of these stakeholders is expecting from these festivals and whether they are satisfied.

There’s a lovely chummy feeling at writers’ festivals, the sense that one is surrounded by like-minded people who also value the smell of books and long conversations about the relative merits of free-indirect style in Flaubert and Austen, but this very sense of operating in an echo-chamber, a place where people who agree on politics and the environment and how to raise children, is one of the inherent tensions in the literary festival schema. The general homogeneity of the audience and the sense of “preaching to the choir” is perhaps one of literary festivals’ greatest strengths and biggest shortcomings.

Contemporary Australian publishing

The first stakeholder position I’d like to consider is that of the publisher. As it is so often said, it’s a tough time in publishing, not just in Australia – but around the world. In Australia, sales aren’t just down on two years ago, they’re down on six and seven years ago while the costs associated with book production – wages, freight, electricity, have generally increased. Despite Australia’s generally tech savvy population, we’re still nowhere near the setup in the UK where major publishers such as Hachette reported that in the last financial year, 25 per cent of their sales came from ebooks.

It’s impossible to talk about the current state of publishing and its challenges without mentioning piracy. If a book has been published by a trade publisher, it’s almost guaranteed that a pirated version will exist. Piracy sites do respond to requests to remove the content but you can be sure that if the file was on one site, there will be plenty more with the same content available for free. Time and resource consuming, there is no real way to combat piracy other than to make purchasing easy and seem as though it’s good value. Most people who pirate would not consider themselves thieves and wouldn’t mind paying a fair price for a product. The difficulty is pricing products competitively and still managing to make a profit. Book publishers, on the whole, have not fully resolved the question of pricing in the digital space. Publishers are still trying to develop strategies and manage the balance between their presence online and, as the kids say, IRL (in real life).

In an attempt to manage this quandary, and deal with a big publishing bogey-man, Amazon, the big companies are getting bigger. In recent weeks, the Random House /Penguin merger has been globally approved – two of the English-speaking world’s largest publishing houses are becoming one. And, in what is perhaps a sign of increasingly business-minded behaviour to come and a divergence from the gentlemanly, cottage-industry style practices of publishing houses, Penguin Random House has invoked a clause in Vikram Seth’s contract and requested the repayment of a $1.7 million advance since he failed to submit his manuscript for the sequel to A Suitable Boy on time. It is very rare for publishers to recall advances from authors, even in the case of a breach of contract. Similarly, publishers tend to pay legal bills relating to a book despite the standard clause in contracts which states that authors are liable for all the content in their books.

Although book stalls at writers’ festivals seem crammed with punters and appear to be doing a roaring trade, the top selling books usually only clock up a few hundred copies – so in terms of sales this is not nearly enough to cover the cost of staffing a writer with a publicist and the accommodation and entertaining costs associated with making a visiting author happy.

In part, this is because punters may have already bought the writer’s book, but it may also be that after a session, a punter won’t feel the need to follow up with a purchase. Andre Dao, the 2013 editor of The Emerging Writer, a collection of essays released each year that accompanies the Emerging Writers’ Festival, has said that literary festivals are an important avenue for book sales but this is only the case for niche, small-scale publishers. For the trade publishers, such as HarperCollins, Pan Macmillan and Allen & Unwin, festivals tend to be more of a PR exercise than a major sales event.

Writers’ festivals are an opportunity to increase a writers’ profile, to please them by putting them in front of a room filled with eager listeners and to get some interest from the mainstream media but there’s an inherent tension in the publisher’s desire to gain exposure with a view to turning it into sales and a program director’s vision of showcasing the best content.

What are they for?

Turning now to the question of what an audience attendee can expect from a festival, I wanted to talk about one of the big names – for literary types – at this year’s festival.

One of the key international guests at the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year was James Wood, literary critic for the New Yorker, author of several books of criticism and one novel and one of the most respected literary critics at work today.

He appeared in three sessions – two of which were panel discussions and one of which was an “in conversation” with Sydney Morning Herald Literary Editor, Susan Wyndham. Wood was engaging, self-effacing and articulate in the two events I saw, even indulging Wyndham’s request for a “finger-drumming” performance as Wood had previously made a YouTube video of his table-top percussive pursuits. Although the audience seemed absorbed with this performance, it did make me again question why it is that people attend these sessions at festivals around Australia.

Tickets to these events cost roughly the same amount as a movie ticket and last around a third of the time. What is it that audiences expect in return for their money? One academic I know posted a prolonged commentary on their Facebook page, lamenting the fact that panels and “in conversations” at literary festivals are exclusively operating at one level of depth – or shallowness as the case may be. That although someone like James Wood is a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard, he – for whatever reason – was speaking in generalities, lightly and conversationally in each event rather than entering into details, specifics and the nitty gritty of his work. I cite his position at Harvard to add ballast to the point that aside from his work as a critic, he is clearly well placed to talk about the nature of criticism, the ways in which it operates and to consider, in a detailed way, what effects criticism has on the literary playing field.

Perhaps, if festivals are going to the trouble of bringing out high-profile intellectuals, they could include at least one session that matches their capacity. I wonder if literary festivals would benefit from having different streams for different audiences. For the most part, events would remain on a general, some might say populist, level but in the same way that there are sessions dedicated to school children, perhaps there could be sessions dedicated to specialists in a given field, whether it be with a philosopher, a scientist, a journalist, or indeed, the mayor of London. For those who haven’t had time to look at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival program yet, you can see Boris Johnson giving the opening lecture or, for the stately price of $98, hear him in conversation with Annabel Crabbe before joining them for post-event canapés.

Ultimately, the conclusion that I can draw from this is that the role of literary festivals tends toward the popular and the accessible, in order to reach the broadest market, to successfully increase the ticket sales and attendees each year and be able to triumphantly proclaim that… numbers are up.

SWF and the politics of the audience

To turn the focus back onto the audience, I’d like to consider one of the headline events of the most recent Sydney festival that was entitled “Is Rhetoric Dead in the Age of the Soundbite”. On the panel were James Button, former speechwriter for Kevin Rudd, The Hon Malcolm Turnbull, journalist Annabel Crabbe, Neil James from the Plain English Foundation and it was chaired by Michael Fullilove, executive director of the Lowy Institute.

At lunchtime on a Sunday, the Sydney Theatre was full. Another sold-out session. The demographic was primarily over 50, mostly white and at $20 per ticket, they had something in the way of disposable income.

With a panel of four speakers, there will always be a limit to the kind of nuance and dialogue that one can expect, but what really surprised me was that when Malcolm Turnbull started speaking about refugees, members of the audience began to boo and hiss. Unperturbed, Turnbull continued with his point but the crowd eventually became so loud that Annabel Crabbe turned to the audience and asked them to be quiet so he could finish what he was trying to say.

Gerard Henderson has made the point, on multiple occasions, that the Sydney Writers’ Festival is partially tax-payer funded and that commentators and writers on the conservative side of politics tend to be under-represented – but if even Malcolm Turnbull can be booed, then it’s not hard to imagine what sort of response a less small-l liberal would elicit.

What disappointed me about that session was the audience’s inability to listen to an alternative viewpoint. In the echo-chamber of their social circles, is it the case that they do not hear those views expressed and the airing of them is so repellent that they feel compelled to shout over the top of the speaker?

I had hoped that the session “Is Rhetoric Dead in the Age of the Soundbite” would lead to a relatively sophisticated discussion on the state of the media and the role in which politicians and media both exploit the “gotcha” moments and are trapped in a spiral of platitudes and weasel words in attempts to avoid faux pas. What eventuated was a series of brief comments, some of which were interrupted by the audience, limiting the potential for serious debate.Whether or not they agreed with Turnbull’s comments was irrelevant, rather the fact that an invited guest was booed and hissed for expressing a view indicates some rather small-mindedness among the audience.

The Emerging Writers’ Festival and “the writer”

On the topic of audience but shifting to a somewhat different demographic, I’d like to turn now to the Emerging Writers’ Festival. Whereas the festivals in major cities come from a position of collecting writers so that readers can enjoy them, the EWF has been created to cater to a market of the growing number of people who want to be writers themselves.

The Emerging Writers’ Festival, celebrated its 10^th anniversary this year. As their website states, they “exist in order to promote the interests of emerging writers – to improve their opportunities for professional development as well as their engagement with the broader public”.

Earlier this year, I attended a City of Sydney council consultation session about their cultural policy. Rachel Healy, executive manager of culture, spoke briefly at the beginning of the session to outline some of their intended outcomes. She said that passive audiences, or audiences who consume culture, have mostly remained static in number for the past decade. Active audiences, or audiences which create content, have undergone double-digit growth in the same period. The Emerging Writers’ Festival seems to respond well to that growing market offering sessions for writers discussing how to improve their digital profiles, how to stay healthy and keep up an exercise regime and “Meditation and Creativity”. In a world where publishing your work online is relatively easy and inexpensive, the other question is whether or not self-publishing is respectable was a hot topic.

The fact that many writers are more interested in their own work than in reading work by others was highlighted for me in the final weekend of the Emerging Writers Festival when I was briefly staffing the literary magazines’ bookstore. A young man struck up a conversation with me about Seizure; I described our ambit and the ideas which underpin the publication. He looked through the magazine slowly and carefully before jotting down the website and saying, yes, I think I’ll send you something. He then replaced the magazine on the shelf. The current editor of Meanjin, one of Australia’s oldest literary journals, Zora Sanders, has been quoted as saying if everyone who submitted to Meanjin had a subscription, they would never need funding again.

While the EWF schedules workshop sessions covering topics such as Creative Non-Fiction and poetry, the primary focus of the festival does not appear to be on sessions specifically geared to developing one’s writing, but on developing oneself as a writer.

I appeared on a panel entitled “The Pitch”. This was something of a misnomer as no pitches were made and it was not a session on how to pitch – the purpose of the panel was to discuss the publishing process for each of the publishers who had sent a representative. When it came to question time, the audience was craving specifics. The panel was asked, “What is a reasonable advance?”- to which the answer of course is how long is a piece of string. “Do I really have to have a twitter account?” and “Do I need to finish my book before I send it in?” Having paid for entry, it felt as though the audience was keen to get a golden ticket, to hear a secret or to find out about a shortcut for how their work could be published. After the panel, publishers were surrounded by eager writers, keen to get their manuscripts seen outside the mires of the slush pile.

Part of the continued success of this festival is this new(ish) version of “the writer”. The romantic notion of a person, alone in a garret with their pens and their most intelligent thoughts for company, is being mistaken for a job. These aspirants seem gravely disappointed when they find out how much work it takes to get noticed, or that there is such a thing as good writing and bad. Then it comes as an even greater disappointment when they find out that it isn’t just about writing, it is about meeting people, connecting with others and finding some sort of audience appeal before you can even begin to earn a dollar.

EWF is clearly servicing a market of keen individuals, eager to arm themselves with as much information as possible in order to increase their chances of getting published and paid. Their desire is only natural and forward thinking. That said, in a world where publishing is ever more competitive and a flooded market, there is only so much assistance such a festival can provide.

Storyology and the economy of literary festivals

After considering the publishers and the writers, what of the other stakeholders, the presenters?

A relative newcomer on the scene of literary festivals is Storyology, which will be taking place in August this year. Over four days, this festival, created and run by The Walkley Foundation and the Media and Entertainment Arts Alliance, will feature sessions from international guests such as the editor of Buzz Feed.

It’s necessary to these festivals’ existence to garner funding from government, often at multiple levels, and from corporate sponsors. Part of Storyology’s model is the request that speakers donate their time for free as well as sourcing corporate support and funding from the Copyright Agency for example. In charging admission as well, their stated aim is to break even.

Even with festivals that pay for participation, the amount of time consumed in preparation for an event might mean that they come out with an effective deficit for their effort. There is a non-economic element to the transaction to do with the connection to audience, exposure, and the chance to plug your latest work.

One reason that writers and speakers will still support these festivals and give their time, is perhaps because it is rapidly becoming one of their only ways to connect with an audience – no matter who they are.

One of the ironies of the internet and the freedom it has brought with it, is that while people can now write whatever they want and publish whatever they want, we are now trapped in the new bonds of obscurity. One of the buzz-words in publishing now is “discoverability”. It’s one thing to write an earth-shattering novel and sell it through Amazon but getting to a point where your intended audience can discover your work is a different, and crucial, next step.

Also, at a time when the review pages are shrinking and the amount of space dedicated to book criticism is diminishing, literary festivals furnish writers with an opportunity to engage in some more detailed responses to their works.

Conclusion

It seems that people have taken the maxim, “everyone has a book in them” seriously and the number of wannabe writers has exploded, the mushroom cloud can be seen from space. This is good news for literary festivals since they attract many people who would like to become writers.

The proliferation of writers’ festivals seems to be servicing this cohort of people, eager to hear about, discuss and consider the role of writing, books and ideas and their ability to draw large crowds, and get them to part with their money. What remains to be seen is how long new festivals will continue to sprout up and whether the major festivals can maintain their pattern of year on year growth. And as cultural policies change and the pot of money available to writers festivals needs to spread across more incarnations of the same events and the population interested in the kinds of festivals on offer aren’t growing at the same pace as the festivals.

It’s platitudinous to say that there is no way for literary festivals to perfectly satisfy each of the stakeholders involved since the interests of publishers, writers, audiences and festival organisers can never neatly align. That said, Australia has one of the higher per capita book buying rates in the Western world. We have an industry of independent booksellers which is the envy of the US and the UK and, for the time being, literary festivals continue to draw record crowds, despite their increasing abundance.