Festivals or: keeping self-published authors in their place by Dan Holloway

It’s spring and that means we’re entering the fabulous fun of festival season. It might be a Glastonbury-free summer but the literary world will be steaming full ahead through Hay and beyond. It’s the time when the public get to meet their heroes, and get to find new heroes. When they’re introduced to the whole smorgasbord of literary everythingness to take their pick for what to read in the year ahead.

(the musician Jessie Grace at Not the Oxford Literary Festival)

So as writers this is a doubly exciting time. It’s where we get to meet our public and to embrace the wonderful people who don’t yet know us and swaddle them in our fabulousness. Aren’t you bursting with anticipation?

What’s that? You’re not going to a festival? You haven’t been asked?

The sad fact is that if you’re a self-published writer or a spoken word poet festivals don’t want to know. It doesn’t matter what you’ve written, how brilliant it is, how many people love your work, what reviewers or anyone else think. If you don’t have a publisher you may as well not exist.

Festivals may be proliferating, but big festivals in particular are increasingly looking the same. They’re more and more like Formula 1 or tennis – the same people flying into hotels, giving the same talk and moving on. That was one reason I started Not the Oxford Literary Festival, which this year celebrated its third outing bigger and better than ever – celebrating local authors, self-publishers, politically engaged writing and spoken – the things that the city’s other festival wouldn’t look at.

(Emily Harrison, author of Typewriter on the Bed)

We had two utterly amazing nights. The first, a celebration of spoken word, featured close to 20 of the finest poets and short prose writers, many of them internationally acclaimed and prizewinning in their field, from Oxford, Manchester, Brighton, Bristol, London and Southampton. The second night focussed on the alternative side of the publishing world – from fellow Electric Author Dennis Hamley and the guerrilla press Philistine to those writers who use their words not to seek profit but to seek to change the world like Davy Mac, author of The Homeless Oratorio, and Danny Chivers, who just a week before had been convicted of aggravated trespass with intent for reading a poem during last year’s occupation of Fortnum and Mason. And we ended up by attaching poems sent form across the world to benches and railings across Oxford. With crowds spilling onto the streets both nights and the most incredible atmosphere, this was not just one of those introspective acts of holding back the tide, it was a demonstration of the appetite for fabulousness.

(Paul Askew reads one of his heartbreaking, surrealist poems)

And one of our speakers was Orna Ross, the brain behind the Alliance of Independent Authors, an organisation that seeks to act as a mouthpiece for interests of self-publishers. It will be launching officially at London Book Fair this Wednesday. And I have the honour of sitting on the launch panel alongside fellow Electric Author John Logan. It would be lovely to see people – we’re in the Old Press Room at 11am.

And to show this isn’t just a piece of random eclecticism, the AIA’s first campaign is one dear to my heart – getting self-published authors a higher profile at festivals – I think we can all say amen to that!

(Penny Goring signs copies of her critically acclaimed debut The Zoom Zoom)

And on the subject of not being at festivals but edging in at the fringe, this coming weekend I will be running the fringe for Chipping Norton Literary Festival. As well as me and open mic, there will be 7 of the country’s very best poets – including Claire Trevien who has just come back from an international tour and five major slam winners – it will be an incredible night, and FREE, and I really hope to see lots of you there. It was lovely to be invited to provide the fringe, and the organisers have been fabulous, but I have to admit to a touch of frustration – the festival is filled with writers many of whom are international names but many of whom are, in their field, considerably lesser lights than Claire or Anna McCrory, whose expenses will be met, accommodation provided, and who will be lavished in the green room. At times like this I know how a lot of our Olympians in the less popular sports feel when the lottery money is doled out, and to some extent it’s up to us to show how great the show we can put on is, and how much audiences will love it – but we do that on a regular basis (our last three New Libertines shows played to full houses and fabulous receptions in Stoke Newington, Oxford, and Manchester), and at some point festivals need to acknowledge they can’t pretend we don’t exist.

Which brings me to a final point of hope. There are festivals with exciting programmes on the rise, and I am very lucky to be putting a show on at one of them, Stoke Newington, for a second year in a row on June 3rd. The headline act for the whole festival is John Cooper Clarke – now *that* is a festival doing it right!