The National Book Festival begins next week, but you need to start planning now. Due to the pandemic, this year’s festival is all virtual, which means it’s truly national — appropriate for its 20th anniversary! More than 120 authors and illustrators will appear in pre-recorded and live presentations.
On Friday morning, Sept. 25, the festival kicks off with programs for children and young people featuring Jon Scieszka, Jason Reynolds, Gene Luen Yang and more. Additional interactive presentations will continue Saturday and Sunday. (Homeschooling? This festival will provide a treasure trove of material.)
But it’s not just for kids. Adults will enjoy seeing Madeleine Albright, Dan Brown, Sandra Cisneros, Jared Diamond, Rita Dove, John Grisham, Joy Harjo, Walter Isaacson, Marlon James, Colson Whitehead, Amy Tan and dozens more bestselling authors (full list). Although the events are free, I strongly recommend you register for the festival here. Once you do that, you can build your own personal schedule on the website, which is the best way to keep track of all this literary bounty over three full days (full schedule). Also, you need to be registered to participate in any of the live Q&As with authors.
Once again, Washington’s Politics and Prose is the official bookseller for the National Book Festival. But co-owner Bradley Graham tells me, “That means something entirely different this year.” There's always been an art to calculating how much merchandise to take to a festival that draws 200,000 visitors who buy close to 20,000 books. This time, though, with a vast national audience, all bets are off. “We have a fair amount of experience with online events, but nothing akin to what the festival is going to be putting on in a very concentrated way,” Graham tells me. “We have absolutely no idea how many Web orders the festival is going to generate this year.” Let's surprise him on the upside. You can start ordering now here.
Please pass this information on to your patrons. Let's make participation in this event truly national. Post the link on your websites, encourage your community to attend. This is a way you can offer programming, by linking to all of these giant book festivals that are now accessible from anywhere.
You may think it is "cheating" or "easy" [things I have heard people say about doing this] to simply offer a link to a program someone else is organizing, but you are wrong. Your job to to provide information to the community. Alerting them to a huge book festival that they can attend from anywhere, is a HUGE service to them. Trust me, if you are the one providing the link to them, in their minds, you put on that program. Why would you give up that good PR? Without you, they do not attend, meaning you did put on that program for them.
This is simply another example of why using resources to provide RA is so important and yet, we often don't do it because we think everything has to spring from our own brains and/or be meticulously planned and executed by us for it to "count." Stop overworking and start looking like the superstar that all of you are by providing your community with links, information, and programming wherever you can find it.
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