Uneven Debut for BOOKED!

Posted 11 June, 2007 in Book News |

The inaugural BOOKED! literary festival, programmed to coincide with this year’s Book Expo Canada conference and trade show and the inaugural Luminato arts festival, has come and gone, and Quillblog reports that it met with decidedly mixed results.

The flagship event with Stephen King last Friday, billed as the horrormeister’s first public appearance in Canada, drew good numbers, as did the event featuring popular children’s author Kenneth Oppel. Attendance for the closing event topped out at only sixty people, despite the presence of bestselling author James Patterson.

Sixty people would have been a windfall at some of the other events, however. Gil Adamson and Clare Clark drew only fourteen people to their Harbourfront reading, and Friday’s children’s event was cancelled. Perhaps the biggest debacle of all, however, was Saturday’s children’s event at the CBC Atrium. A grand total of six children appeared to hear Ruth Ohi, Heather Collins, Bill Richardson, Linda Granfield, and Evan Solomon read. Had Kevin Sylvester not cancelled there would have been as many readers as there were children in the audience.

So what went wrong? It could be argued that the timing was off: with Luminato wrapping up on June 10 after ten days, the NXNE music festival just finished, and Hot Docs within recent memory, Torontonians might simply have been overwhelmed by the recent spate of festivals. It certainly didn’t help that the advertising for BOOKED! was fairly scarce, and what little there was seemed targeted towards the King and Patterson events, which were going to be the biggest draws anyway.

BEC’s managing director, Scott Temple, quoted in Quillblog, appears to recognize that they overextended themselves with this year’s event, programming too many events and not providing solid promotion, but he also appears to have learned an unfortunate lesson from this. Although there will be a BOOKED! 2008, it will be geared more toward brand-name authors who can be depended upon to be bigger draws. The downside, of course, is that once again, the midlist authors who most need the exposure get shut out.

Perhaps this was inevitable. Harbourfront’s International Festival of Authors in October, by far the biggest and most important literary festival in Toronto each year, was not always the juggernaut that it is today, and it may take a few years for BOOKED! to find its legs. Until then, though, it appears that we will have to content ourselves with more appearances by bestselling mainstream authors and hope that the event’s cachet increases to the point where smaller names will be able to command an audience.

Here’s an idea — Why not program some of the lesser-known authors alongside the heavy hitters, like opening acts for a rock concert? Of course the same phenomenon would occur: people who are only interested in the headliner will arrive late, but perhaps a few curious readers could be encouraged to come out to support the underdogs. Also, when you’ve got a lineup that includes Christopher Hitchens and Naomi Klein, who can be assured to get into at least one or two public scraps, why on earth would you not put them onstage together? Civility will only get you so far if your intent is to put asses in seats.

1 comment to “Uneven Debut for BOOKED!”

patricia, June 11th, 2007 at 8:40 pm:

• “Why not program some of the lesser-known authors alongside the heavy hitters, like opening acts for a rock concert?”

  Excellent idea. I’d be more than willing to be the opening act for say, Robert Munsch.

  And I don’t see why there can’t be some sort book blogger panel, dammit. We’re here, and we ain’t going away. Deal with it.

  I know all this Book Expo stuff is hold hat with you, Steven, but I had an amazing weekend, in spite of BEC’s flaws. Hope you enjoyed yourself, too. Saw that great photo of you on Q&Q looking dapper and professional!

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