Starting Tomorrow: Pilcrow Lit Fest in Chicago

If you're in Chicago the next few days and looking for a real literary feast, head over to Pilcrow Lit Fest. Yep, seems like once again Chicago is the place to be, less than a week since the Chicago Green Festival.

When? Thursday, May 22 to Sunday, May 25
Where? Several locations around the city. Check the calendar.

So what's a Pilcrow? Well, unless you are a real typographical hardcore fanatic, I think this wikipedia article does a good job explaining. About the festival, I'll let Amy Guth, author of Three Fallen Women, and the festival's organizer take the stand:


Q: Can you explain what is the Pilcrow Lit Fest all about?

A: Pilcrow Lit Fest is a four-day literary festival with particular focus on small press and independent media, taking place in Chicago over Memorial Day weekend, May 22-25th. Throughout the festival, we have scheduled parties, networking events, panel discussions on a variety of topics, readings and performances. I've never heard of a lit festival having any sort of green focus, and that is a high-priority of mine, so I have made an effort to keep it as responsible as possible, even going so far as to include a local environmental activist in the planning phases to make sure I'd thought of every way possible to green the festival up.

Q: What's the story behind the creation of this festival?

A: When I was touring around the US and Canada to promote my first novel, Three Fallen Women, I had the opportunity to speak at the Decatur Book Festival in Atlanta, the (Downtown) Omaha Lit Fest and the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival and there was a certain something about the way the festivals were executed that I knew would translate well in Chicago. There is such a wonderful and large literary community in Chicago, yet few events to really bring all of us together, so I decided to create the festival and focus it primarily in the direction of small presses, independent media and DIY sort of efforts.

Q: What's the thing you like most about the festival?

A: I would have to say that the thing I like most about the festival is the community-building aspect of it all, as writing is a rather solitary profession, and because most communication is done over email, it's wonderful to meet people face to face, share ideas and discuss common issues, concerns and goals. I'm probably most pleased by the fact that as we've planned and arranged aspects and events of the festival, we've worked with an eye towards keeping the festival as eco-friendly as possible, and made a point to operate with repurposed items, borrowed items, and have used as few resources as possible in the festival's execution.

Q: Is it only for authors or also for aspiring authors who haven't published yet?

A: Pilcrow Lit Fest is for absolutely anyone. Our participating authors, writers and publishers are all in varying stages of their own careers, and all from very diverse backgrounds. I made a point to keep as may events free and low-cost as possible, so events wouldn't be cost-prohibitive to anyone. I also intentionally didn't have any "headliner" guests, so that every participant and attendee feels equally welcome at Pilcrow.

Q: Besides authors, is it also for your average Chicago book lover?

A: Absolutely. The panel discussion are, as I mentioned, free and open to the public. I tried to create a mix of panel topics that are useful not only to published authors and seasoned publishers but also to not-yet published authors, and enthusiastic readers.

Q: Can you name please some of the authors who will participate, or some of the main attractions?

A: I've put much focus on not having a headliner, so that no authors feel more or less valuable to the festival than another. All the participating authors, publishers and designers are listed on the Pilcrow Lit Fest website so everyone to read about, including available links to their websites or online projects.

During the course of the weekend, however, we have a lot of exciting events. Thursday night, Jami Attenberg and Katie Schwartz read at the Fixx Readings Series, which I host each month. Friday night, right before our official opening night reception, we have a special edition of The Dollar Store Show--- a performance event where pre-selected authors are given an item purchased at a dollar store in advance and must write a comedic piece about the object and read it before the crowd. Saturday, after a day of panel discussions, we are hosting a benefit party to raise much-needed funds for New Orleans Public Library branches damaged and destroyed during Hurricane Katrina. For that event, I've asked authors to disassemble a copy of their own book then reassemble it into a piece of art for auction. I'm very excited for that event. I've rebuilt my own first novel, Three Fallen Women for the occasion, and the artwork being created is really sounding incredible. Other authors have donated other items for auction, too. Nick Hornby donated a handwritten list yanked from his notebook, that he wrote as he brainstormed songs to use for his book Songbook. I'm very excited about that. I'm also very excited to be linked up with Eco-Libris for the event. As I've been explaining the system to authors and publishers, they're all terribly excited to know more, so I'm really thrilled to be able to introduce them all to the work done by Eco-Libris. A note from Eco-Libris:

Amy indeed introducing Eco-Libris to all festival goers, and encouraging participating authors to balance out the paper in their books. In addition to that, Eco-Libris stickers will be available in the New Orleans Public Library fundraiser event during the festival, and we will donate an extra tree for every sticker auctioned.

Eylon @ Eco-Libris
Plant a Tree for Every Book you Read!

Book Tours and Beyond: An Interview with Kevin Smokler

The connection between the web and books is as old (or as young) as the web. Actually it predates it. I remember surfing local dial-up bulleting board systems (BBS) back in the 80's, when one of the main attractions was the availability on-line of eclectic and obscure text files of books and articles you could not get anywhere else. Of course today you can get anything on Amazon, and that is only one way the web transformed the world of books.

Kevin Smokler is the co-founder of BookTour.com (http://www.booktour.com) a San-Francisco based literary 2.0 start-up that wants to change the world of books in yet another way. By becoming the web's largest 100% free directory of author events, it hopes to use the social enabling aspects of the web to facilitate better interaction between authors and readers.

In a nutshell, authors can sign up to the website and list their up-coming events. Readers can then easily keep tabs on which authors are in town, or where their favorite authors are touring at the moment.

Smokler is also an author, a speaker, a prolific blogger, and a one man think tank about the future of publishing.

So what is a book tour anyway?

A book tour is a promotional jumping from place to place for authors with a book newly published. Usually it involves doing readings at bookstores and related venues as well as media appearances on radio, newspapers, TV and such. That is if the nation cares about your book which sometimes they don't.

Same really as when musicians go on tour to promote an album. Except a lot fewer groupies.

The acts of writing and reading are mostly done private on their own. There is no inherent element of performance like in a music concert. Why then is a meeting of the author and the reader desirable?

The realities of publishing today are such that authors that don't promote themselves do so at their peril. There simply aren't enough resources to go around for everyone to receive a Da Vinci Codian marketing budget. From the reader's point of view, we now live in a culture that values transparency, instead of secrecy, when discussing the creative process, be it DVD commentaries, Inside the Actor's Studio or Project Runway. It's an information-rich world. When you read a good book, you want to know more, not less, about who birthed it.

How did the idea for BookTour.com come about? How did the team gather?

Chris Anderson, our CEO went on tour in 2006 to promote his first book "THE LONG TAIL" which sold brilliantly. Still he remained convinced that the glorious experience he was having on book tour was the exception rather than the rule. Put simpler, he'd heard too many stories of authors being flown, at great expense to their publishers to say, a Barnes & Noble in Fort Lee, NJ to give a reading to a clutch of empty chairs. He also knew that there were countless cases of a favorite author coming to town but the appearance not mentioned by local media outlets, namely because the author spoke at say, a church rather than a Borders. The asymmetry of interested readers and touring authors not able to locate one another was the first spark of the idea.

Chris approached me in November of 2006 after reading about the Virtual Book Tour, a project I used to head up that matched up authors promoting a book and blogs that might be interested in that book. Our CTO Adam Goldstein came to us that spring through Paul Graham's Y Combinator program for young entrepreneurs.

To promote your own book you conducted a “virtual book tour”, while on BookTour.com you promote the old school version. What's the advantages of each? Looking at your BookTour.com itinerary you now travel quite a bit. What kind of tour do you prefer personally?

I'm one of those rare authors who constantly feels as though they're in the wrong profession because I love to talk in front of a crowd. So if your own enthusiasm for your projects is contagious, I recommend you get out there and infect others. That assumes of course your lifestyle allows for it. If you write better than you talk, play to your strengths and tour virtually. But a virtual tour involves leaning on long standing relationships developed over years of having an on-line presence. And most others don't have that either.

Upshot: Author should assume that promotion of their books is their responsibility and should begin building networks, both on-line and off, sooner rather than later.

What's the feedback BookTour.com gets from authors, readers and bookstores?

I would 95% has been positive, glad-this-is-here, why-has-no-one-done-this-yet sort of feedback. Which we're very grateful for. The concerns expressed thus far have been mostly around it being too labor extensive to add events to our database (a fair point we're very close to fixing) and that we can't use our database to preference those in the book world who need the attention (small presses, mid-list authors, independent bookstores if that's ). Much as we'd like to, our first commitments are to fairness for everyone who uses our service and integrity of the information that is our cells and molecules.


Who is using BookTour.com most so far? Readers, authors or bookstores? Is there a specific genre that is more popular?

Visitors tend towards readers and interested audience members. Sign-ups lean toward authors, which makes sense. Bookstores are one of our primary sources of event data.

Recently once again articles or comments from the like of Steve Jobs, talk about the decline in readership. This is an analysis you opposed in the collection of essays “Bookmark Now” which you edited in 2005. Do you think it is more of the same, or is there something new at play here?

I'm inclined to believe that cultural calls for alarm are best dealt with at head and tail instead of belly. Let's say that reading is in decline. Well, then its the job of the people who make things we read to change how they do business instead of complaining. Basic principal of capitalism. The tail: if we think reading is inherently valuable as a society, do we provide an environment in families and households where it can thrive? Or do we accept as given that everyone should work 60 hours a week, commute an hour in each direction and be suspect of any entertainment that isn't loud and diversionary? Put simply, when we say culture is "in decline" we should begin with those who stand to benefit most from the panic and those who raised it in the first place. One of those is almost always ourselves.

In the case Mr. Jobs comments, he was citing the NEA's follow up to its 2004 Reading at Risk study in response to a question of whether Apple would release an e-reader to compete with Amazon's Kindle. His remarks have largely been dismissed as MacWorld-related bluster which is where I stand. Timothy Egan in the New York Times did the best dissection I've seen so far which cites that even though one-quarter of American didn't read a book last year, 27 percent read 15 or more books. We're comfortable enough with that number to build our business around putting in touch with the authors they love.

What's planned for BookTour.com? Any new features coming up?

Oh yes indeed. Keep your ear to the ground. We've got a big announcement coming up!

And so we shall! Check out BookTour.com online at http://www.booktour.com

Eylon Israely

eylon_A&T_ ecolibris.net

Eco-Libris: Plant a Tree for Every Book you Read!